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Each year the sponsors of the Turing Test -- the 62-year-old evaluation of a machine's ability to fake “humanness” -- confer the title of “the Most Human Computer” on the artificial being most successful at persuading the human judges conversing with it that it is a real person. Another prize, perhaps just as compelling, is given to “the Most Human Human.” 

In an SFI Community Lecture February 29 in Santa Fe, author Brian Christian shared his experiences as a “confederate” in the 2009 test and discusses the profound ways computers are reshaping our ideas about what it means to be genuinely human.

Watch his presentation (78 minutes)

Brian Christian is the author of The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Wired, and The Wall Street Journal.

Los Alamos National Bank generously sponsors the 2012 Community Lecture series.

Read the Santa Fe New Mexican article (February 27, 2012)

SFI’s community lectures offer a window into the Institute’s research to understand the common patterns in physical, computational, biological, and social complex systems that underlie the most profound issues facing science and society today. This year’s lecture series -- free and open to the public -- focuses on human individual and social behavior. By transcending disciplines, breaking academic molds, and drawing together an international network of unorthodox creative thinkers, SFI seeks to transform science and society.

Support SFI here