The May Report: 2/14/2011: Will Kris Hammond massacre Valerie Pajak at the MIT-EF debate Tuesday night? — remember what today is the anniversary of; Jeopardy is much harder for Watson than chess; Why is Frank Gruber in hiding over his failure to be selected for a panel at #SXSW?; For starters, three who were “pushed out” at the UIC OTM including Connie Cleary, Dr. Jay Vijayan and Colin James; TMR issues a warning about Affluence.org; Bruce Montgomery’s beef with MobileApEx and more…

Editor and publisher: ron@themayreport.com, ronaldmay@aol.com, www.themayreport.com , 773-525-3944.

Assistant editor: Melanie Adcock, iPHONE: 312-259-0610, melanie_adcock@msn.com

If you missed an article, go here: www.tmronline.com/A55951/tmrarticles.nsf/vwFullNewsletter
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Artificial Intelligence v. Human Intelligence
February 15, 5:00 – 8:00 pm

It’s debate night at MIT Enterprise Forum Chicago

First it was John Henry against the steam engine, and then it was Big Blue vs. Jeopardy. Now it’s our own version of AI vs. HI.

Machines seem to get smarter more every day. But if the technology driving this is dependant upon humans, who is really smarter?

Our Debaters
* Kris Hammond, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University

* Valerie Pajak, Senior Manager, Business Intelligence & Analytics at APP Pharmaceuticals

They will try to convince the audience one way or the other. In the end, we will let the audience decide who presented the best argument.

REGISTER TODAY

bit.ly/hDr9Gi

When
Tuesday February 15
5:00 – 6:15 pm Networking
6:30 – 8:00 pm Program
Where
Hosted by our event sponsor, Ungaretti & Harris
70 W. Madison St., Chicago
4th Floor Conference Center

Cost
Free to members.
$35 advance payment for guests. $40 day of the event.

REGISTER TODAY

bit.ly/hDr9Gi

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_________________________________
TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Scoop section:

– Editor’s note, by Ron May
– Correspondence between Ron and Nancy Munro re: Asymmetry in upcoming MIT-EF debate on AI v. HI
– Darcy Evon comments
– Thursday, Feb. 17: ACG Chicago Social International Style
– Chris Krofton: grants for R&D from EU
– Hugh Park Jedwill comments on the failure of MobileApEx
– Wednesday, Feb. 23: ChicagoBooth Marketing Roundtable: Millennial Marketing and the College and University Marketplace: Jim Bilello, President, US Marketing, Inc.
– Thursday, Feb. 17: Social Media Club Chicago: The NOW Revolution Book Tour
– This month’s Atlantic Magazine: Mind vs. Machine
In the race to build computers that can think like humans, the proving ground is the Turing Test-an annual battle between the world’s most advanced artificial-intelligence programs and ordinary people. The objective? To find out whether a computer can act “more human” than a person. In his own quest to beat the machines, the author discovers that the march of technology isn’t just changing how we live, it’s raising new questions about what it means to be human.
– Chicago Based Veterinary Practices Merges with BluePearl
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For those considering doing any kind of business with Affluence.org, AFFU or Momentum Capital, BEWARE!

Don’t consult for them if you want to be paid

Don’t sell them anything in exchange for stock

Don’t buy any stock

Don’t invest one nickel, wooden or otherwise

The May Report has never before done this

But the evidence has built up and it is not on the one hand, on the other hand type of evidence

For more details, call Ron May at 773-525-3844 and/or email him at ronaldmay@aol.com
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______________________________
The Scoop section:
___________________________
Editor’s note, by Ron May

* Too many scandals, too little time.

Sounds like a good line for a T-shirt.

* Affluence.org.

I have been reading through the PPM from February 2010 and talking to a few folks.

There is a real question about whether the principals ever did report and pay taxes on many hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock.

Russ Rockefeller (a distant relative of John D.) is an internet guru of sorts whose firm Extravagant Media makes him one of the leading internet e-mailers to high-end recipients. Doug Stukel, Scott Mitchell and Mike Profita had a supposed deal with him and he was going to move from Toronto to Florida, but the Affluence guys scammed him and when push came to shove, they hired someone else as a marketing VP and stiffed Russ. They also never purchased his firm which was supposed to be mostly a cash deal. But then Mike Profita (primarily) tried to renege on that.

Lsura Levy Shatkin, another person who was screwed over by them, is bowing out of the discussion at this time. She wrote me: “Good luck bringing them down. I have no more time or energy for such people but I sincerely wish you the best..” She is a high-end marketing person who has and had a wine business. She was going to do videos for them, etc. But at the end of the day, they never paid her. She asked them for $30K as compensation, but my sources say that such a figure may have been a bit high for what she did. In any event, it is my understanding that she got nada.

Another person I want to talk to here is Bill Furlong who walked away after they jerked him around. They paid Bill for his firm in stock only and of course the stock is worth nothing. They paid him a lot in stock for his company. Now, admittedly, Mr. Furlong has a mixed reputation and his association over the years with one Gary Slack does not help him, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t get the shaft from the Affluence guys who bought his search engine firm.

* With respect to my UIC OTM investigation, I have about 25 people I am trying to interview with respect to it, and it can be slow going, but I am confident that the inquiry will bear plenty of fruit. Three people at a fairly high level who were “pushed out” under Nancy Sullivan were: Connie Cleary, Dr. Jay Vijayan, and Colin James.

Connie Cleary is now at Rush; Jay Vijayan is now at Rutgers University in New Jersey; and Colin James is at Marshall Gerstein, a law firm in the old Sears Tower.

Jay’s wife and daughter continue to live in Chicago as he lives in New Jersey while his daughter attends the Lab School at the University of Chicago. You tell me that he left on his own accord.

Here is Jay’s impressive background:
+++++++++++++++++++++++
Dr. Jay Vijayan joined the OTC as the Assistant Director in Biomedical Licensing on May 10, 2010. Jay comes with a vast amount of experience in licensing and, prior to joining Rutgers, managed a large portfolio of biomedical technologies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Jay holds a Masters in Biochemistry, Ph.D. in Neuroscience and Physiology and an MBA in Entrepreneurship. He has extensive experience in writing business plans and is a winner of several national and international business plan competitions including LES international business plan competition and University of San Francisco International Business Plan Competition. He is a co-founder of an ophthalmology based medical device venture. He is also a member of the Licensing Executive Society of USA and Canada (LES), Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) and Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM).
++++++++++++++++++++++++

* I am really looking forward to Tuesday evening when Kris Hammond debates Valerie Pajak on the issue of Man vs. Machine or AI vs. HI. Watson or a similar computer made by IBM beat Gary Kasparov in 1997 and Watson today is the equivalent of 6,000 high-end home computers!

But the key distinction is the ability to understand language. Marvin Minsky says that his AI colleagues got on the wrong track twenty years ago. They werre looking for the holy Grail and that was a mistake because the brain is really like 40 computers working together all at once. Jeopardy is far harder than chess, they say. Synthesizing the data is the key. The machine learns by example and has thousands of them in its memory. along with tons of previous Jeopardy answers. Chess is just logical sequencing.

Watson gets the anagrams and the jokes with a few quirks. Watson got Barack’s Andean pack animals correct right away. Question: What are Obama’s Lamas?

That’s good!

I just got this from The News Hour, tonight with Gwen Ifill. Good report. The team at IBM headed by Dave somebody had 28 people. They fed Watson the entire encyclopedia and more.

I wrote to Nancy Munro that it is not a fair match-up but we’ll just have to see.

* More to come on MobileApEx tomorrow. Bruce Montgomery was on the planning committee along with about twenty others and he told me that the whole thing was poorly conceived. First, to brand it as MobileApEx, as a mobile applications show, misses the boat, Bruce told me, because it should not just be iPhone and Droid but a broader reflection of the mobile industry. Second, they needed a lead tenant, so to speak, to walk down the aisle with. They did try to get one and according to Darrin Stern, were close on HTC, but no cigar. But as Bruce knows, talk is cheap and as Darrin pointed out, he did not hear these complaints from Bruce before now. There will be plenty of finger pointing here. But more to come on this. Melanie was on the committee and she brought in eight or ten interns from IIT but I refuse to use her as a source here since I don’t want to put her into the middle of it.

* Chicago goes to SXSW – and some people aren’t smiling about it.

SXSW is coming up in March, and we have a few locals who are going – some of whom are presenting and some of whom are not. Every year, people submit panel proposals and those who are selected get a panel for the conference.

The local parties for the upcoming event have already sprung up – one was sponsored by Porter Novelli – a firm that will sponsor anything to keep itself looking fresher than 1997. Some of our friends submitted presentation proposals. Here’s a link to all the presentations that were selected schedule.sxsw.com/?conference=interactive&lsort=name&day=ALL&a=a, and here is the link to all the presentations that were submitted panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/index/7.

Are far as I can tell, four Chicago folks submitted proposals: Frank Gruber, Jeff Willinger, Mark Achler and Steve Lundin. Lundin and Achler made the cut and it appears that Gruber and Willinger did not. Here’s the irony. Willinger readily admitted to me that he did not make it with no prodding. Jeff had no explanation for his not being picked, but after three or four email inquiries, I have yet to hear back from Frank.

More than 2,500 proposals were submitted and 200 were accepted. Those accepted received a golden ticket – a nearly $1000 pass to the whole shebang.

When the news was announced that certain proposals had been accepted and others had not, I learned about Lundin making the cut from the “legend in his own mind” egotist himself. The guy never misses a chance to self-promote.

But in fairness — and really, I don’t feel like being fair to guys like Lundin, Dever, Jerry Mitchell, Gary Slack and a few others — Steve did legitimately win a panel.

Jeff Willinger was uncharacteristically humble for once and admitted that he did not make it to me. Of course, that didn’t stop him from trying to finagle a slot on a panel behind the scenes — but it did not work, so what else is new?

I learned about Achler from Lundin – who also told me that Gruber had thrown his hat in the ring. Then I looked for confirmation on whether or not he had made the cut. I emailed Frank several times – before I realized that I wasn’t going to get a response which struck me as odd. What was the big deal about this for Frank? Frank, why can’t you just say that you didn’t make the cut?

It could be that for Frank Gruber speaking at SXSW means external validation and evidently he needs that badly. I have no idea why #SXSW didn’t want Frank Gruber (#SXSW) on their stage.

* OKCupid, Spark Networks, Match.com and JDate are all being profiled on Channel 5 right now (5:15pm) as they are reporting on the burgeoning growth of such sites.

* Let me get this out. I saw my eye doc today, Dr. Barry Herst, and he gave me a good bill of health, but insisted that I must see him yearly. My last trip to his office was in 2004! I have not been able to see very well all day since they dilated me and my eyesight is still blurry. I had two cataract operations (which Herst performed) and two vitrectomies (performed by Dr. Mathew MacCumber) and ever since, things have been fine, but as a diabetic, I have to keep a close watch on it. Dr. Herst did say that the control by diabetics is much better these days so they have fewer cases of diabetic retinopathy, but his clientele is higher end on the socio-economic scale. He operates out of St. Joseph’s Hospital. He said that the people who go to Illinois Masonic Hospital are lower end with a higher percentage of Hispanics and the incidence of diabetic retinopathy is higher in that group.

* Carol Moseley Braun just said that we need an audit of the TIF funds to see where the money went. Rahm just said that he may not keep Ed Burke as finance chair and Ed may not keep his six cops. Shared sacrifice, he says. The debate is on Channel 11 right now. 7:30pm.

________________________________
Correspondence between Ron and Nancy Munro re: Asymmetry in upcoming MIT-EF debate on AI v. HI

Subject: RE: Nancy, a couple of quick questions.
Date: 2/13/2011 8:10:57 P.M. Central Standard Time
From: nancy@knowledgeshift.net
To: RONALDMAY@aol.com

It is a total coincidence that we are having a debate on this topic. I actually came up w/ the idea and then a few weeks later Jeopardy announced this show. Valerie will be able to hold her own. We had approached a few other folks to be the HI side of the debate but they were tied up for that date.

——————————————————————————–

From: RONALDMAY@aol.com [mailto:RONALDMAY@aol.com]
Sent: Sunday, February 13, 2011 8:01 PM
To: nancy@knowledgeshift.net
Cc: melanie_adcock@msn.com; ronaldmay@aol.com; bflanagan@smartdecisionllc.com; lepkowski@hotmail.com; collin@canrightcommunications.com; arkayuno@gmail.com; rokop@iit.edu
Subject: Nancy, a couple of quick questions.

February 13, 2011

Nancy,

What’s on my mind for the last few days is that Jeopardy has the Watson contest pitting their best contestants against IBM’s Watson computer.

And, The Atlantic Magazine has an article this month on the subject of AI vs. Human intelligence and it discusses the Turing Test.

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/mind-vs-machine/8386/

So, is this just coincidence or is there some reason that the MIT-EF is holding a debate on this topic at this particular time?

My other question is a bit touchy. How did you chose Valerie Pajak, Senior Manager, Business Intelligence & Analytics at APP Pharmaceuticals, to be in the debate? Kris Hammond is a very smart guy whom I have known for years and Valerie is smart too, but not at Kris’ level. No offense to Valerie, but Kris might mop the floor with her.

I am not saying this to hurt Valerie’s feelings since I have known her for years too and I really like her, but you have here what might be called asymmetry.

I hope I’m wrong, but I think this could turn out “not so good” for Valerie and the quality of the debate overall. If that does happen, I warned you.

Valerie has an MBA. Kris is not only a Ph.D., but a nationally known leader in his field and an ego to match.

I look forward to Tuesday night.

Ron
__________________________________
Darcy Evon comments

Subject: Re: Fwd: Nancy, a couple of quick questions.
Date: 2/13/2011 9:26:55 P.M. Central Standard Time
From: darcyevon@sbcglobal.net
To: RONALDMAY@aol.com

Ron

You are insane and a fool too—I am willing to bet this woman would leave you mopping the floor .

— On Sun, 2/13/11, RONALDMAY@aol.com wrote:

From: RONALDMAY@aol.com
Subject: Fwd: Nancy, a couple of quick questions.
To: darcyevon@sbcglobal.net
Date: Sunday, February 13, 2011, 8:06 PM

Well, my dear, I am sticking my foot in it once again.
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Thursday, Feb. 17: ACG Chicago Social International Style

Chicago Social Feb. 17 International Style

ACG Chicago
to me

show details Feb 10 (2 days ago)

from ACG Chicago
reply-to networking@acgchicago.com
to ron@themayreport.com
date Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 4:36 PM
subject Chicago Social Feb. 17 International Style
mailed-by in.constantcontact.com
signed-by acgchicago.ccsend.com

hide details Feb 10 (2 days ago)

Images are not displayed.
Display images below – Always display images from networking@acgchicago.com
Having trouble viewing this email? Click here

Register today – early registration fees end Tuesday. Over 70 registered to date, stay out of the cold weather and enjoy an evening of networking with your peers.
ACG Chicago International Meeting Announcement
Our International Network has teamed up with our Social Committee for a world of networking at Fogo de Chão.

Date: February 17, 2011

Place: Fogo de Chão

661 N. LaSalle St., Chicago

Time: 5:00 pm – 7:30 pm

Fogo de Chao
Fogo de Chão is an authentic Brazilian steakhouse that began in Southern Brazil more than 30 years ago. Their unique steakhouse features a prix fixe menu which includes our 30+ item gourmet salad bar, unlimited traditional Brazilian side dishes and 15 delectable cuts of beef, pork, lamb and chicken.

Cost includes beer, wine, soda and appetizers

Mark Your Calendar &

Click Here to Register Today

Registrations received by 2/15 – $40
Registrations received after 2/15 – $50

Cancellation Policy: all cancellations received in writing to networking@ACGChicago.com by 5pm, 2/15 will receive a full refund. There are no refunds for cancellations received after 2/15.

Find our Upcoming Events at www.ACGChicago.com

February 15, 2011 – Chicago: The Risk Management Capital of the World

February 17, 2011 – Chicago Social International

March 3, 2011 – Midwest Energy Forum

March 4, 2011 – Corporate Author Series – shockproof

March 10, 2011 – Annual Awards Gala
_____________________________________
Chris Krofton: grants for R&D from EU

grants for R&D from EU

Chris Krofton
to me, melanie_adcock

show details 4:11 PM (1 hour ago)

from Chris Krofton
to ron@themayreport.com,
melanie_adcock@msn.com
date Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 4:11 PM
subject grants for R&D from EU
signed-by sbcglobal.net

hide details 4:11 PM (1 hour ago)

Display images below – Always display images from krofton@sbcglobal.net

Ron,

I have been reading your reports since you put me on a mailing list over five years ago. And now I have something to share with your readers. American firms can get grants from the European Union for R&D and know-how by setting up business in countries that made accession to the EU. Poland is the largest recipient of grants. Small and mid-sized firms are favored; in any industry not only IT.

I know a firm that got PLN 15 MM (circa $5 MM) for R&D in building materials.

Some basic info is on www.paiz.gov.pl.

I can provide assistance to those who are interested in exploring this opportunity.

Christopher Krofton

cks@bctbiz.com

773-319-9229

www.bctbiz.com
______________________________________
Hugh Park Jedwill comments on the failure of MobileApEx

Fwd: The May Report: 2/11/2011: After spending $100K on marketing, months of planning and an inability to sign HTC as the lead sponsor, Kolenmesse, a German-based event planning company, backs out on sponsoring MobileAppEx trade show in Chicago; Interesting tidbit about UIC’s OTM: Nancy Sullivan hired Kathy Liu who used to be at the ITA and the ITDA; New key appointments at the University of Illinois; Anonymous writer uses the name Klatuuu from The Day The Earth Stood Still to defend UIC’s OTM and trash the employees

Hugh Park Jedwill
to Melanie, me, Leadership

show details 11:32 AM (6 hours ago)

from Hugh Park Jedwill
to Melanie Adcock ,
Ron May
cc Leadership Team
date Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 11:32 AM
subject Fwd: The May Report: 2/11/2011: After spending $100K on marketing, months of planning and an inability to sign HTC as the lead sponsor, Kolenmesse, a German-based event planning company, backs out on sponsoring MobileAppEx trade show in Chicago; Interesting tidbit about UIC’s OTM: Nancy Sullivan hired Kathy Liu who used to be at the ITA and the ITDA; New key appointments at the University of Illinois; Anonymous writer uses the name Klatuuu from The Day The Earth Stood Still to defend UIC’s OTM and trash the employees

hide details 11:32 AM (6 hours ago)

Ron/Melanie,

I am disheartened to see a potentially game-changing mobile conference unravel like the MobileAppEx. I feel for everyone who worked so hard to make the vision come true. I do hope it comes next year as I firmly believe that Chicago can and should play a leadership role in the mobile marketing community. Industry leading efforts like MobileAppEx, the HMC’s Mobile University and the Bricks and Mobile conference will make this come true.

For those still passionate about putting Chicago on map in the mobile industry, I personally invite you to join our team at the Heartland Mobile Council! We are planning our Mobile University event for this year, #MobiU2011, on May 24-25. Our conference is targeted to brands and agencies as we know that they are the 10% that have the 90% of the budgets to bust open the doors. Additionally, Chicago is already the epicenter of marketing excellence so what better place to learn the marketing of mobile technology than the center of the Heartland!

In short, let’s not lose the energy behind MobileAppEx! Bring your passion, creativity and ideas to helping us with the #MobiU2011 and I promise you that you will have a hand in growing/guiding this still-nascent industry.

(Btw, we are a non-profit which removes much of $ pressures and allows us to be a genuine force for mobile education. Our mission to educate brands/businesses on using mobile effectively is backed by our entirely volunteer group. We have stayed largely under the radar by choice but want to be sure we maintain momentum for building a new industry for Chicago.)

Hugh Park Jedwill
Executive Director & President, Heartland Mobile Council
312-235-2821

Join the HMC networks on:
Twitter | LinkedIN | Facebook
____________________________________
Wednesday, Feb. 23: ChicagoBooth Marketing Roundtable: Millennial Marketing and the College and University Marketplace: Jim Bilello, President, US Marketing, Inc.

Subject: Chicago Booth Marketing Roundtable – “Millennial Marketing and the College and University Marketplace” – Wednesday, February 23, 2011; MARK YOUR CALENDAR for SPECIAL EVENT on Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Date: 2/9/2011 11:22:22 P.M. Central Standard Time
From: smcg@am3inc.net
Reply To: smcg@chicagobooth.edu
To: marketing-roundtable@lists.chicagobooth.edu

Topic: Millennial Marketing and the College and University Marketplace

Speaker: Jim Bilello, President, US Marketing, Inc.

Date: Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Time: 6:00 – 6:30 Registration — Networking and Cash Bar
6:30 – 8:00 Program
8:00 – Cash Bar Re-opens

Once again, we’ll have a cash bar before and after the presentation in order to maximize your networking opportunity. If you need to leave at 8, we encourage you to come early and enjoy the pre-meeting networking.

Location: Gleacher Center – Room 100

To RSVP: Register Online

Questions? Please contact Scott McGarvey at smcg@chicagobooth.edu

Session Overview

Generation Y (people born between 1978 and 2000) number more than 70 million and represent over 23% of the population. These “millennials” have unique marketing traits characterized by their attraction to and expertise with technology.

Over 4,000 colleges and universities are desirable intercept locations for 17.5 million students, or millennials. These students spend more than $10.5 billion a year in college bookstores and much more than that on a wide variety of products off campus ranging from computers and books to sweatshirts, toothpaste and school supplies.

Come and learn from Jim Bilello, President of US Marketing, Inc. about millennial marketing. He’ll present case studies on the use of social media and experiential marketing to reach this emerging generation:

Demographic and psychographic top line overview of this population
Overview of the social media landscape to reach millennials
Case studies:
Social Media Advertising for the State of Illinois
Experiential Tour for Microsoft and Dell Computer corporations
You’ll come away with an understanding of the millennial audience from a business-to-consumer marketing viewpoint, and you’ll learn how to apply this knowledge to your own products and services.

About Our Speaker
Jim Bilello has 20 years of experience in segment marketing, reaching teen, college, young adult, Hispanic, African-American, and Asian consumers. His clients have included MasterCard, Cingular Wireless, POLO Jeans Co., Sprite, Levis, GM, Target, McDonald’s, Columbia Films, New Line Cinema, Buena Vista (Disney), Lions Gate Films, Unilever, Budweiser, Columbia House, Sears, DELL, Microsoft, Nielsen Media Research, and Bacardi USA.

Jim has integrated marketing development, planning, and execution across a variety of media — print, social media twitter, facebook, MySpace, Internet, broadcast, outdoor/signage and grassroots/guerilla. He has gained this experience with his own company in the Chicago area and in executive positions he has held at CFA/Cardenas-Fernandez Assoc./Clear Channel Communications, Alloy/360Youth/CASS Communications, and for New Line Cinema, Lions Gate Films, Sony (Columbia Films), Twentieth Century Fox, and Buena Vista. Jim started a national college cable television network while at Films Inc./Public Media in Chicago and developed it to the point where over 250 colleges and over 2 million students were viewing super-premium movie channels.

As founder and President of US Marketing in Chicago, Jim works with Hollywood studios and national consumer clients to produce a variety of multi-level integrated marketing programs including both media and promotions. Jim holds a Master of Science degree with concentrations in business and marketing as well as a recent Northwestern University Kellogg Graduate School of Business Management Executive program degree in New Product Development.

* * * * *

Special Note

Once again, we’ll set up a Literature Table in the front registration area before the meeting. You may use the table to distribute copies of anything (within reason) that communicates your business, your capabilities, and/or career interests. This would include a brochure, a fact sheet, a resume, or other items of interest. This will give us all an opportunity to share our interests and find ways to help each other achieve goals.

* * *

MARK YOUR CALENDAR FOR A SPECIAL EVENT CO-SPONSORED WITH THE BOOTH MARKETING CLUB — an organization of Chicago Booth students with active interests in the marketing profession.

Topic: Winning through Focus
Speaker: Sanjay Khosla, President Developing Markets, Kraft Foods

Date: Tuesday, March 1, 2011 — 6:00 p.m.

Location: Gleacher Center – Room 621

WATCH THIS SPACE FOR FURTHER DETAILS

Session Overview

Sanjay Khosla, President Developing Markets, Kraft Foods, will discuss his seven steps of his “Winning through Focus” approach.

Sanjay put his obsession of “Winning through Focus” into practice to turn Kraft Foods’ underperforming developing markets business into a top tier performer. In the last three years, the size of Kraft Foods’ developing markets business has more than doubled with nearly $13 billion in annual revenues. If Kraft Foods’ developing markets business was a standalone company, it would be one of the top 10 food companies on the planet. The company’s developing markets business realized 13% revenue growth on average annually and reported operating income growth of more than 24% on average annually (2006 – 2009).

About Our Speaker

As a member of the Kraft Foods Executive Team, Sanjay is responsible for business in more than 60 countries, and looks after a roster of more than 100 iconic brands. Sanjay catapulted the company’s developing markets business to top-tier performance in just three years. Today, the developing markets business is the growth engine for Kraft Foods.

Sanjay is truly a global citizen, having worked with Fonterra of New Zealand and spending 27 years with Unilever in India, London and Europe. He most recently served as Senior Vice President, Global Beverages and Chairman of Unilever’s $4 billion beverages category. The business saw accelerated growth worldwide as a result of the “Paint the World Yellow with Lipton” business program.

Sanjay graduated with honors in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology. In 1998, he completed the Harvard University Advanced Management Program. That same year, he was named “Marketing Superstar” by the prominent marketing industry publication, Advertising Age.

Sanjay serves on the Board of Directors of Best Buy and NIIT, a global information technology education company based in India. He is a Trustee of the Goodman Theater in Chicago, IL, USA. He has taught courses on managing international brands and business at Columbia University in New York, and at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland.

* * *

Discounted Parking

Chicago Booth has arranged with the AMC Theater-River East Self parking Garage to provide discounted parking:

300 East Illinois Street (AMC Theater-River East Self Park Garage)
$6.00 after 3:00pm
Garage: Self Park Facility
Payment: Automated; at pay-stations by cash or credit card or upon exit pay by credit card only.
To receive discounted rate: There is a card validator at the first floor security desk of the Gleacher Center. The new system for the AMC Theater- River East Self Park Garage is automated. You will only need to insert your parking card in the validator and the new price will be automatically applied. You can validate your parking ticket at any time between your arrival at and departure from the Gleacher Center. When you leave the lot you will be charged for the lower $6.00 fee.

Detailed Directions :
Garage is located next to PJ Clarks and below the AMC Theater.
a) When traveling east on Illinois cross over Columbus and enter the Garage on the left (north) side of the street.
b) If driving west on Grand (north of Theater), you can enter the garage ½ block before Columbus on the left (south) side of the street.

* * *

CHECK YOUR CHICAGO WEEKLY FOR OTHER CHICAGO BOOTH ALUMNI EVENTS OF INTEREST:

For information on other coming Chicago Booth Roundtable meetings, Chicago Booth Alumni Club events, and other alumni events of interest, visit www.chicagobooth.edu/chicagoweekly/. The Chicago Weekly is updated every Thursday.

* * * * *
ABOUT THE MARKETING ROUNDTABLE

Our mission: The mission of the Chicago Booth Marketing Roundtable is to help Chicago alumni and a broader community of marketing professionals learn more, meet other colleagues, and solve marketing issues. Our vision is to be the first choice for learning and sharing new marketing ideas.

About our meetings: Chicago Booth Marketing Roundtable meetings are typically scheduled at the downtown campus (Gleacher Center), on the last Wednesday of each month (with some variation), from 6:30 p.m.- 8:00 p.m. They are free of charge, and no food is served. (Food is available, if you wish, in the cafeteria.) Room location is posted each month at the front desk. Please note date is subject to change – check calendar listing for details.

Guests: Your guests who have an active interest in marketing are always welcome via your personal invitation. Please RSVP and let us know how many to expect! (But please don’t post this or any Chicago Booth Marketing Roundtable announcement in any public forum.)

Got a topic idea? If you have a topic idea, a presenter to recommend, or any questions or suggestions, please contact any Chicago Booth Marketing Roundtable Steering Team member:

Kyle Akerman, 847-414-1426, kyle.akerman@gmail.com
Bijoy Chacko, 847 598 7016, chackobe@yahoo.com

Santanu DasGupta, 312.961.4866, sdasgupt@chicagobooth.edu
Dan Drake, 630.212.2314, Ddrake1@chicagobooth.edu

Jordan Katz, 312-288-2422, Jordan_Katz@gallup.com
Scott McGarvey, 312.648.6275, smcg@chicagobooth.edu
Vivek Prabhu, (312) 493 4987, vivek.r.prabhu@gmail.com
Les Stern, 847.205.1936, les@lsternmktg.com
Jim Steuer, 773-935-7208, JSEChicago@aol.com
Galen Williams, 312.810.1300
___________________________________
Thursday, Feb. 17: Social Media Club Chicago: The NOW Revolution Book Tour

Social Media Club Chicago: The NOW Revolution Book Tour – Thursday, February 17 – 5:30 – 8:00 PM – SYNC Technology Center 322 S. Green Street Suite 300 Chicago, IL 60607

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Thursday, February 17, 2011 from 5:30 PM – 8:00 PM (CT)
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Event Details

The NOW Revolution Book Tour

Join Social Media Club Chicago as we welcome one of the original members of SMC Chicago, Amber Naslund, one of the authors of “The NOW Revolution” and learn the “7 Shifts To Make Businesses Faster, Smarter & More Social” directly from the author.

Program

5:30 – 6:15 Networking

6:15 – 7:15 Amber Naslund “The NOW Revolution”

7:15 – 8:00 Networking

Speaker

Amber Naslund is a communication and business strategist and the VP of Social Strategy for Radian6. She’s worked with businesses of all sizes to solve business problems through better communication.

Food Sponsor

Domino’s Pizza @Ramon_DeLeon

Video Production

Jen Knoedl @JenChicago

Check out our January video by JenChicago.

Host

SYNC Technology Center (the SYNC) is an 18,000 square foot high-tech facility that offers a fully wired workspace with on-site access to business and business growth resources.

Social Media Club Chicago

Social Media Club [SMC] is a worldwide organization, with local chapters, that serves as connecting organization for anyone interested in social media. Membership is free and open to all levels, including beginners. Chicago’s SMC chapter, launched in October 2008, presents events that mix socializing, networking and learning. Barbara Rozgonyi [@wiredprworks], founder and Jeff Willinger [@jwillie], president, lead the Chicago SMC chapter. Amy Korin [@interactiveamy] coordinates volunteers; Tim McDonald [@tamcdonald] manages communications; Jeannie Walters [@jeanniecw]oversees logistics; and Alex Levine [@alexklevine] student/young professional outreach. Event attendees include entrepreneurs, corporate communicators, journalists, business professionals, publishers, marketers, media creators, citizen journalists, students and technology types. For more information, visit smcchicago.org, email smcchicagonews@gmail.com, follow @smcchicago on twitter.com or call 630.207.7530 or 312-970-0846.
Attendee ListSort by: Date | First Name | Last Name

* Meredith Bay, M&P Food Communications
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @MLBee

* Ashleigh Brookshaw
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @A_brookshaw

* Mitch Byrne, Northeast Cooling LLC
Website: northeastcooling.com
Blog: northeastcooling.com
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @refrigeration

* TERESA CANDELARIO, NorthShore Univ. HealthSystem
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @Chi_DMB

* Luann Collins, Jaguar Data Systems
Website: jaguardata.com
Blog: LuannCollins.com
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @jaguardata

* Christopher Creal, PeanyTech
Website: peanytech.com/
Blog: peanytech.com/
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @PeanyDotNet

* Grant Crowell, ReelSEO
Website: www.reelseo.com
Blog: www.reelseo.com
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): grantcrowell

* Lisa Diomede, LMD Communications
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @ldiomede

* Andrea Donatucci, Accenture
Website: accenture.com
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @aldonatucci

* Elizabeth Fernandez-Cuervo, Accenture
Website: www.accenture.com
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): elizfc

* Christina Gace
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @ChristinaGace

* Stephanie Gaspary, CareerBuilder
Website: careerbuilder.com
Blog: thehiringsite.com
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @sgaspary

* Paula Hansen
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @pmjablonski

* Drew Hawkins
Blog: www.brainwads.com
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @drewhawkins

* John Kosic
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @bikespoke

* Alex Levine, PACO Communications
Website: www.pacocommunications.com
Blog: www.pacocommunications.com/blog
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @alexklevine

* Kate Lorenz, CareerBuilder
Website: www.careerbuilder.com
Blog: www.theworkbuzz.com
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @katelorenz

* Tim McDonald
Website: lakecountysocialnetworking.com
Blog: tamcdonald.com
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @tamcdonald

* Sean McGinnis, MBE Edge
Website: MBEedge.com
Blog: 312Digital.com
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): SeanMcGinnis

* Geredette McGuin, Geredette – Your Virtual Assistant
Blog: Geredette.com
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @geredette

* Kimberly Mikula, WW Grainger
Website: www.grainger.com/Grainger/wwg/start.shtml
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @KimberlyMMikula

* Kathryn Moran, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
Website: www.chicagofed.org
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @econgrl0625

* Mollie Nothnagel, Spencer Stuart
Website: www.spencerstuart.com
Blog: www.molliewrites.com
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @molliewrites

* Melinda Pennington-Voitus, Pennington Integrated Marketing
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @integrated_mktg

* Lauren Silich, Chick-fil-A Loyola Water Tower
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @lsilich @cfawatertower

* Jenn Sutherland, American Cancer Society
Website: cancer.org
Blog: thewholekitchen.wordpress.com
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @jennsutherland

* Dave Van de Walle, Area 224
Website: area224.com
Blog: area224.com
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @Area224

* Antony van Zyl, SAG Digital, LLC
Website: www.clickvision.tv
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @clickvisiontv @avanzyl

* Jeannie Walters, 360Connext
Website: www.360Connext.com
Blog: www.360Connext.com
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @jeanniecw

* Jeff Willinger, Rightpoint
Website: rightpoint.com
Blog: jwillie.posterous.com
Twitter ID (enter @ in front of your name ie @SMCChicago): @jwillie
__________________________________
This month’s Atlantic Magazine: Mind vs. Machine
In the race to build computers that can think like humans, the proving ground is the Turing Test-an annual battle between the world’s most advanced artificial-intelligence programs and ordinary people. The objective? To find out whether a computer can act “more human” than a person. In his own quest to beat the machines, the author discovers that the march of technology isn’t just changing how we live, it’s raising new questions about what it means to be human.

atlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/mind-vs-machine/8386/1/

Mind vs. Machine
In the race to build computers that can think like humans, the proving ground is the Turing Test-an annual battle between the world’s most advanced artificial-intelligence programs and ordinary people. The objective? To find out whether a computer can act “more human” than a person. In his own quest to beat the machines, the author discovers that the march of technology isn’t just changing how we live, it’s raising new questions about what it means to be human.

By Brian Christian

Image credit: Bryan Christie

Brighton, England, September 2009. I wake up in a hotel room 5,000 miles from my home in Seattle. After breakfast, I step out into the salty air and walk the coastline of the country that invented my language, though I find I can’t understand a good portion of the signs I pass on my way-LET AGREED, one says, prominently, in large print, and it means nothing to me.

I pause, and stare dumbly at the sea for a moment, parsing and reparsing the sign. Normally these kinds of linguistic curiosities and cultural gaps intrigue me; today, though, they are mostly a cause for concern. In two hours, I will sit down at a computer and have a series of five-minute instant-message chats with several strangers. At the other end of these chats will be a psychologist, a linguist, a computer scientist, and the host of a popular British technology show. Together they form a judging panel, evaluating my ability to do one of the strangest things I’ve ever been asked to do.

I must convince them that I’m human.

Fortunately, I am human; unfortunately, it’s not clear how much that will help.

Also see:

From Luddites to Predators, Men vs. Machines Through Time

Humanity’s fears and dilemmas resulting from technology since the Industrial Revolution.

Technology and Humanity in The Atlantic

Writings on the interface between technology and humanity by Mark Twain, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Nobel Laureate James D. Watson, James Fallows, and others.

The Turing Test

Each year for the past two decades, the artificial-intelligence community has convened for the field’s most anticipated and controversial event-a meeting to confer the Loebner Prize on the winner of a competition called the Turing Test. The test is named for the British mathematician Alan Turing, one of the founders of computer science, who in 1950 attempted to answer one of the field’s earliest questions: can machines think? That is, would it ever be possible to construct a computer so sophisticated that it could actually be said to be thinking, to be intelligent, to have a mind? And if indeed there were, someday, such a machine: how would we know?

Instead of debating this question on purely theoretical grounds, Turing proposed an experiment. Several judges each pose questions, via computer terminal, to several pairs of unseen correspondents, one a human “confederate,” the other a computer program, and attempt to discern which is which. The dialogue can range from small talk to trivia questions, from celebrity gossip to heavy-duty philosophy-the whole gamut of human conversation. Turing predicted that by the year 2000, computers would be able to fool 30 percent of human judges after five minutes of conversation, and that as a result, one would “be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”

Turing’s prediction has not come to pass; however, at the 2008 contest, the top-scoring computer program missed that mark by just a single vote. When I read the news, I realized instantly that the 2009 test in Brighton could be the decisive one. I’d never attended the event, but I felt I had to go-and not just as a spectator, but as part of the human defense. A steely voice had risen up inside me, seemingly out of nowhere: Not on my watch. I determined to become a confederate.

The thought of going head-to-head (head-to-motherboard?) against some of the world’s top AI programs filled me with a romantic notion that, as a confederate, I would be defending the human race, à la Garry Kasparov’s chess match against Deep Blue.

During the competition, each of four judges will type a conversation with one of us for five minutes, then the other, and then will have 10 minutes to reflect and decide which one is the human. Judges will also rank all the contestants-this is used in part as a tiebreaking measure. The computer program receiving the most votes and highest ranking from the judges (regardless of whether it passes the Turing Test by fooling 30 percent of them) is awarded the title of the Most Human Computer. It is this title that the research teams are all gunning for, the one with the cash prize (usually $3,000), the one with which most everyone involved in the contest is principally concerned. But there is also, intriguingly, another title, one given to the confederate who is most convincing: the Most Human Human award.

One of the first winners, in 1994, was the journalist and science-fiction writer Charles Platt. How’d he do it? By “being moody, irritable, and obnoxious,” as he explained in Wired magazine-which strikes me as not only hilarious and bleak, but, in some deeper sense, a call to arms: how, in fact, do we be the most human we can be-not only under the constraints of the test, but in life?

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING YOURSELF

Since 1991, the Turing Test has been administered at the so-called Loebner Prize competition, an event sponsored by a colorful figure: the former baron of plastic roll-up portable disco dance floors, Hugh Loebner. When asked his motives for orchestrating this annual Turing Test, Loebner cites laziness, of all things: his utopian future, apparently, is one in which unemployment rates are nearly 100 percent and virtually all of human endeavor and industry is outsourced to intelligent machines.

To learn how to become a confederate, I sought out Loebner himself, who put me in touch with contest organizers, to whom I explained that I’m a nonfiction writer of science and philosophy, fascinated by the Most Human Human award. Soon I was on the confederate roster. I was briefed on the logistics of the competition, but not much else. “There’s not much more you need to know, really,” I was told. “You are human, so just be yourself.”

Just be yourself has become, in effect, the confederate motto, but it seems to me like a somewhat naive overconfidence in human instincts-or at worst, like fixing the fight. Many of the AI programs we confederates go up against are the result of decades of work. Then again, so are we. But the AI research teams have huge databases of test runs for their programs, and they’ve done statistical analysis on these archives: the programs know how to deftly guide the conversation away from their shortcomings and toward their strengths, know which conversational routes lead to deep exchange and which ones fizzle. The average off-the-street confederate’s instincts-or judge’s, for that matter-aren’t likely to be so good. This is a strange and deeply interesting point, amply proved by the perennial demand in our society for dating coaches and public-speaking classes. The transcripts from the 2008 contest show the humans to be such wet blankets that the judges become downright apologetic for failing to provoke better conversation: “I feel sorry for the humans behind the screen, I reckon they must be getting a bit bored talking about the weather,” one writes; another offers, meekly, “Sorry for being so banal.” Meanwhile a computer appears to be charming the pants off one judge, who in no time at all is gushing LOLs and smiley-face emoticons. We can do better.

Thus, my intention from the start was to thoroughly disobey the advice to just show up and be myself-I would spend months preparing to give it everything I had.

Ordinarily this notion wouldn’t be odd at all, of course-we train and prepare for tennis competitions, spelling bees, standardized tests, and the like. But given that the Turing Test is meant to evaluate how human I am, the implication seems to be that being human (and being oneself) is about more than simply showing up.

THE SENTENCE

To understand why our human sense of self is so bound up with the history of computers, it’s important to realize that computers used to behuman. In the early 20th century, before a “computer” was one of the digital processing devices that permeate our 21st-century lives, it was something else: a job description.

From the mid-18th century onward, computers, many of them women, were on the payrolls of corporations, engineering firms, and universities, performing calculations and numerical analysis, sometimes with the use of a rudimentary calculator. These original, human computers were behind the calculations for everything from the first accurate prediction, in 1757, for the return of Halley’s Comet-early proof of Newton’s theory of gravity-to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, where the physicist Richard Feynman oversaw a group of human computers.

It’s amazing to look back at some of the earliest papers on computer science and see the authors attempting to explain what exactly these new contraptions were. Turing’s paper, for instance, describes the unheard-of “digital computer” by making analogies to a human computer:

The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer.

Of course, in the decades that followed, we know that the quotation marks migrated, and now it is “digital computer” that is not only the default term, but the literal one. In the mid-20th century, a piece of cutting-edge mathematical gadgetry was said to be “like a computer.” In the 21st century, it is the human math whiz who is “like a computer.” It’s an odd twist: we’re like the thing that used to be like us. We imitate our old imitators, in one of the strange reversals in the long saga of human uniqueness.

Philosophers, psychologists, and scientists have been puzzling over the essential definition of human uniqueness since the beginning of recorded history. The Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert says that every psychologist must, at some point in his or her career, write a version of what he calls “The Sentence.” Specifically, The Sentence reads like this:

The human being is the only animal that ______.

The story of humans’ sense of self is, you might say, the story of failed, debunked versions of The Sentence. Except now it’s not just the animals that we’re worried about.

We once thought humans were unique for using language, but this seems less certain each year; we once thought humans were unique for using tools, but this claim also erodes with ongoing animal-behavior research; we once thought humans were unique for being able to do mathematics, and now we can barely imagine being able to do what our calculators can.

We might ask ourselves: Is it appropriate to allow our definition of our own uniqueness to be, in some sense, reactive to the advancing front of technology? And why is it that we are so compelled to feel unique in the first place?

“Sometimes it seems,” says Douglas Hofstadter, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cognitive scientist, “as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.” While at first this seems a consoling position-one that keeps our unique claim to thought intact-it does bear the uncomfortable appearance of a gradual retreat, like a medieval army withdrawing from the castle to the keep. But the retreat can’t continue indefinitely. Consider: if everything that we thought hinged on thinking turns out to not involve it, then … what is thinking? It would seem to reduce to either an epiphenomenon-a kind of “exhaust” thrown off by the brain-or, worse, an illusion.

Where is the keep of our selfhood?

The story of the 21st century will be, in part, the story of the drawing and redrawing of these battle lines, the story of Homo sapiens trying to stake a claim on shifting ground, flanked by beast and machine, pinned between meat and math.

Is this retreat a good thing or a bad thing? For instance, does the fact that computers are so good at mathematics in some sense take away an arena of human activity, or does it free us from having to do a nonhuman activity, liberating us into a more human life? The latter view seems to be more appealing, but less so when we begin to imagine a point in the future when the number of “human activities” left for us to be “liberated” into has grown uncomfortably small. What then?

Alan Turing proposed his test as a way to measure technology’s progress, but it just as easily lets us measure our own. The Oxford philosopher John Lucas says, for instance, that if we fail to prevent the machines from passing the Turing Test, it will be “not because machines are so intelligent, but because humans, many of them at least, are so wooden.”

Beyond its use as a technological benchmark, the Turing Test is, at bottom, about the act of communication. I see its deepest questions as practical ones: How do we connect meaningfully with each other, as meaningfully as possible, within the limits of language and time? How does empathy work? What is the process by which someone enters into our life and comes to mean something to us? These, to me, are the test’s most central questions-the most central questions of being human.

Part of what’s fascinating about studying the programs that have done well at the Turing Test is seeing how conversation can work in the total absence of emotional intimacy. A look at the transcripts of Turing Tests past is, frankly, a sobering tour of the various ways in which we demur, dodge the question, lighten the mood, change the subject, distract, burn time: what shouldn’t pass for real conversation at the Turing Test probably shouldn’t be allowed to pass for real conversation in everyday life either.

HOW TO TALK LIKE A HUMAN

When the Turing Test was first proposed in 1950, it was a hypothetical: technology was nowhere near the point at which a practical test was possible. But, as we know, it got there; the first conversational computer program to attract significant notice and attention was Eliza, written in 1964 and 1965 by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT. Modeled after a Rogerian therapist, Eliza worked on a very simple principle: extract key words from the users’ own language, and pose their statements back to them. (“I am unhappy.” “Do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy?”) If in doubt, it might fall back on some completely generic phrases, like “Please go on.” This technique of fitting the users’ statements into predefined patterns and responding with a prescribed phrasing of its own-called “template matching”-was Eliza’s only capacity.

A look at an Eliza transcript reveals how adeptly such an impoverished set of rules can, in the right context, pass at a glance for understanding:

User: Men are all alike.

Eliza: In what way?

User: They’re always bugging us about something or other.

Eliza: Can you think of a specific example?

User: Well, my boyfriend made me come here.

Eliza: Your boyfriend made you come here.

User: He says I’m depressed much of the time.

Eliza: I am sorry to hear you are depressed.

User: It’s true. I am unhappy.

Eliza: Do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy?

User: I need some help, that much seems certain.

Eliza: What would it mean to you if you got some help?

User: Perhaps I could learn to get along with my mother.

Eliza: Tell me more about your family.

The results were stunning: many of the people who first talked with Eliza were convinced that they were having a genuine human exchange. In some cases, even Weizenbaum’s own insistence to the contrary was of no use. People asked to be left alone to talk “in private,” sometimes for hours, and returned with reports of having had a meaningful therapeutic experience. Meanwhile, academics leapt to conclude that Eliza represented “a general solution to the problem of computer understanding of natural language.”

One of the strangest twists to the Eliza story, however, was the reaction of the medical community, which decided Weizenbaum had hit upon something both brilliant and useful. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, for example, said of Eliza in 1966:

Several hundred patients an hour could be handled by a computer system designed for this purpose. The human therapist, involved in the design and operation of this system, would not be replaced, but would become a much more efficient man.

The famed scientist Carl Sagan, in 1975, concurred:

I can imagine the development of a network of computer psychotherapeutic terminals, something like arrays of large telephone booths, in which, for a few dollars a session, we would be able to talk with an attentive, tested, and largely non-directive psychotherapist.

As for Weizenbaum, appalled and horrified, he did something almost unheard-of: an about-face on his entire career. He pulled the plug on the Eliza project, encouraged his own critics, and became one of science’s most outspoken opponents of AI research. But the genie was out of the bottle, and there was no going back. The basic “template matching” skeleton and approach of Eliza has been reworked and implemented in some form or another in almost every chat program since, including the contenders at the 2009 Loebner Prize competition. The enthusiasm-as well as the unease-about these programs has only grown.

THE JERK AS GENIUS

The first Loebner Prize competition was held on November 8, 1991, at the Boston Computer Museum. In its first few years, the contest required each program and human confederate to choose a topic, as a means of limiting the conversation. One of the confederates in 1991 was the Shakespeare expert Cynthia Clay, who was, famously, deemed a computer by three different judges after a conversation about the playwright. The consensus seemed to be: “No one knows that much about Shakespeare.” (For this reason, Clay took her misclassifications as a compliment.)

The programmer Joseph Weintraub chose “Whimsical Conversation” for his PC Therapist III and went on to earn the very first Most Human Computer award. As the program practiced it, “whimsical conversation” was not a topic at all, but a manner-a crucial distinction. Weintraub was able to play off a looseness in the contest rules, the natural behavior patterns of chatbots, and people’s stereotypes about computers and humans, all at once. Strategically, this was brilliant.

By dutifully and scrupulously providing information in response to the questions asked, Clay demonstrated her knowledge and understanding-but sometimes in a factual, encyclopedic way commonly associated with computer systems. Here is a sample of Clay’s conversation:

Judge: What is your opinion on Shakespeare’s plays?

Confederate: That’s pretty general; would you be more specific? Otherwise, I’ll just say I like them.

The computer at the “Whimsical Conversation” terminal stood in stark contrast:

Judge: It has been a long day! Now I think I’m ready for some fun. The weather isn’t very pleasant today. Do you have any jokes that could lift the clouds?

Computer: Everybody talks about the weather but nobody seems to do much about it. Why do you need to tell me now you think you’re ready for some fun? Groannnnnn … … … … …

Judge: What is the definition of whimsical conversation?

Computer: Didn’t you say well anyway I would imagine whimsical conversation is like a series of knight’s moves in chess-skrt of zig-zag rather than following any nparticular line.? [Weintraub's program, like many that followed it, faked typos. Any unintentional typing errors in the transcripts that follow have been corrected.] Why do you ask? Was that a clever comment, or what? Are such questions much on your mind?

Judge: I like the image of knights moving haphazardly across the chess board, does that mean there is no thought to whimsical conversation?

Computer: I could swear you just said how do you define whimsical?? How do yku define whimsical? Were you always so sick sick sick? Why do you need to tell me you like the image of knights moving haphazardly across the chess board?

“I really thought [PC Therapist] was human, because it … was weird and funny, in a normal sort of way,” said one of the judges, a Harvard graduate student. Weintraub’s program, shifting topics wildly and spouting non sequiturs and canned one-liners, came off as zany, a jokester, a much more “human” personality type. At least I used to think so-before I learned how easy this was to mimic.

As Richard Wallace, three-time winner of the Most Human Computer award (’00, ’01, and ’04), explains:

Experience with [Wallace's chatbot] ALICE indicates that most casual conversation is “state-less,” that is, each reply depends only on the current query, without any knowledge of the history of the conversation required to formulate the reply.

Many human conversations function in this way, and it behooves AI researchers to determine which types of conversation are stateless-with each remark depending only on the last-and try to create these very sorts of interactions. It’s our job as confederates, as humans, to resist them.

One of the classic stateless conversation types is the kind of zany free-associative riffing that Weintraub’s program, PC Therapist III, employed. Another, it turns out, is verbal abuse.

In May 1989, Mark Humphrys, a 21-year-old University College Dublin undergraduate, put online an Eliza-style program he’d written, called “MGonz,” and left the building for the day. A user (screen name “Someone”) at Drake University in Iowa tentatively sent the message “finger” to Humphrys’s account-an early-Internet command that acted as a request for basic information about a user. To Someone’s surprise, a response came back immediately: “cut this cryptic shit speak in full sentences.” This began an argument between Someone and MGonz that lasted almost an hour and a half. (The best part was undoubtedly when Someone said, “you sound like a goddamn robot that repeats everything.”)

Returning to the lab the next morning, Humphrys was stunned to find the log, and felt a strange, ambivalent emotion. His program might have just shown how to pass the Turing Test, he thought-but the evidence was so profane that he was afraid to publish it.

Humphrys’s twist on the Eliza paradigm was to abandon the therapist persona for that of an abusive jerk; when it lacked any clear cue for what to say, MGonz fell back not on therapy clichés like “How does that make you feel?” but on things like “You are obviously an asshole,” or “Ah type something interesting or shut up.” It’s a stroke of genius because, as becomes painfully clear from reading the MGonz transcripts, argument is stateless-that is, unanchored from all context, a kind of Markov chain of riposte, meta-riposte, meta-meta-riposte. Each remark after the first is only about the previous remark. If a program can induce us to sink to this level, of course it can pass the Turing Test.

Once again, the question of what types of human behavior computers can imitate shines light on how we conduct our own, human lives. Verbal abuse is simply less complex than other forms of conversation. In fact, since reading the papers on MGonz, and transcripts of its conversations, I find myself much more able to constructively manage heated conversations. Aware of the stateless, knee-jerk character of the terse remark I want to blurt out, I recognize that that remark has far more to do with a reflex reaction to the very last sentence of the conversation than with either the issue at hand or the person I’m talking to. All of a sudden, the absurdity and ridiculousness of this kind of escalation become quantitatively clear, and, contemptuously unwilling to act like a bot, I steer myself toward a more “stateful” response: better living through science.

BEWARE OF BANALITY

Entering the Brighton Centre, I found my way to the Loebner Prize contest room. I saw rows of seats, where a handful of audience members had already gathered, and up front, what could only be the bot programmers worked hurriedly, plugging in tangles of wires and making the last flurries of keystrokes. Before I could get too good a look at them, this year’s test organizer, Philip Jackson, greeted me and led me behind a velvet curtain to the confederate area. Out of view of the audience and the judges, the four of us confederates sat around a rectangular table, each at a laptop set up for the test: Doug, a Canadian linguistics researcher; Dave, an American engineer working for Sandia National Laboratories; Olga, a speech-research graduate student from South Africa; and me. As we introduced ourselves, we could hear the judges and audience members slowly filing in, but couldn’t see them around the curtain. A man zoomed by in a green floral shirt, talking a mile a minute and devouring finger sandwiches. Though I had never met him before, I knew instantly he could be only one person: Hugh Loebner. Everything was in place, he told us, between bites, and the first round of the test would start momentarily. We four confederates grew quiet, staring at the blinking cursors on our laptops. My hands were poised over the keyboard, like a nervous gunfighter’s over his holsters.

The cursor, blinking. I, unblinking. Then all at once, letters and words began to materialize:

Hi how are you doing?

The Turing Test had begun.

I had learned from reading past Loebner Prize transcripts that judges come in two types: the small-talkers and the interrogators. The latter go straight in with word problems, spatial-reasoning questions, deliberate misspellings. They lay down a verbal obstacle course, and you have to run it. This type of conversation is extraordinarily hard for programmers to prepare against, because anything goes-and this is why Turing had language and conversation in mind as his test, because they are really a test of everything. The downside to the give-’em-the-third-degree approach is that it doesn’t leave much room to express yourself, personality-wise.

The small-talk approach has the advantage of making it easier to get a sense of who a person is-if you are indeed talking to a person. And this style of conversation comes more naturally to layperson judges. For one reason or another, small talk has been explicitly and implicitly encouraged among Loebner Prize judges. It’s come to be known as the “strangers on a plane” paradigm. The downside is that these conversations are, in some sense, uniform-familiar in a way that allows a programmer to anticipate a number of the questions.

I started typing back.

Confederate: hey there!

Confederate: i’m good, excited to actually be typing

Confederate: how are you?

I could imagine the whole lackluster conversation spread out before me: Good. Where are you from? / Seattle. How about yourself? / London.

Four minutes and 43 seconds left. My fingers tapped and fluttered anxiously.

I could just feel the clock grinding away while we lingered over the pleasantries. I felt this desperate urge to go off script, cut the crap, cut to the chase-because I knew that the computers could do the small-talk thing, which played directly into their preparation. As the generic civilities stretched forebodingly out before me, I realized that this very kind of conversational boilerplate was the enemy, every bit as much as the bots. How, I was thinking as I typed another unassuming pleasantry, do I get an obviously human connection to happen?

Taking Turns

Part of what I needed to figure out was how to exploit the Loebner Prize’s unusual “live typing” medium. The protocol being used was unlike e-mails, text messages, and standard instant-messaging systems in a very crucial way: it transmitted our typing keystroke by keystroke. The judge and I were watching each other type, typos and backspacing and all. I remember some Internet chat programs back in the ’90s trying out this character-at-a-time approach, but people for the most part rejected it. It was too invasive, was the feeling: what people like about writing is the time and space to compose and edit a message before sharing it with the other person. The advantage of the character-at-a-time transmission, though, is that it approaches much more closely the condition of speech, with its fluidity of turn-taking and its choppy grammar: what’s lost in eloquence is made up for in agility.

It also, then, lets us see typing’s “negative space”: hesitation. In a chat conversation where text is transmitted with every carriage return, only egregiously long pauses are taken to be part of the interaction. With more fluid and immediate feedback, silence acquires meaning. Failing to quickly answer a question in a face-to-face conversation, for instance, is tantamount in many cases to answering it. I recall asking a friend of mine how things were going with the woman he’d started seeing; the um and the tiny pause in which he searched for the right words made it clear they were having problems.

So what did the Loebner Prize’s unusual (and recently implemented) protocols enable and disable, compared with the standard, walkie-talkie, turn-taking style? Long missives weren’t going to work, as they had in previous years, when programs were able to steamroll the judges by eating up the clock and delivering ridiculously prolix answers. If two parties are taking strict turns under time pressure, they are putting themselves at the mercy of the length of the other’s turns. Here, for instance, is one program’s conversation transcript from 1996:

Computer: How about telling me a joke?

Judge: No.

Computer: Here’s my favorite joke … A dog limps into a bar with a bloody bandage on his foot. He’s wearing a 10-gallon hat, six-shooters in his holsters and chaps. He growled, “I’m a-lookin’ for the man that shot my paw.”

“The joke’s not funny …” the judge writes, giving the program an opening to tell another one-which it does (“A knotty, worn-out old string walks into a bar …”). Meanwhile, three full minutes have elapsed. If a computer (or confederate) started rambling on too long under the new, live-typing protocols, the judge could and would just cut it off.

And so another piece of my confederate strategy fell into place. I would treat the Turing Test’s strange and unfamiliar textual medium more like spoken English, and less like the written language. I would attempt to disrupt the turn-taking “wait and parse” pattern that computers understand, and create a single, flowing duet of verbal behavior, emphasizing timing. If computers understand little about verbal “harmony,” they understand even less about rhythm.

If nothing was happening on my screen, whether or not it was my turn, I’d elaborate a little on my answer, or add a parenthetical, or throw a question back at the judge-just as we offer and/or fill audible silence when we talk out loud. If the judge took too long considering the next question, I’d keep talking. I would be the one (unlike the bots) with something to prove. If I knew what the judge was about to write, I’d spare him the keystrokes and jump in.

There’s a trade-off, of course, between the number of opportunities for serve and volley, and the sophistication of the responses themselves. The former thrives with brevity, the latter with length. It seemed to me, though, that so much of the nuance (or difficulty) in conversation comes from understanding (or misunderstanding) a question and offering an appropriate (or inappropriate) response-thus, it made sense to maximize the number of interchanges.

Some judges, I discovered, would be startled or confused at this jumping of the gun, and I saw them pause, hesitate, yield, even start backspacing what they had half-written. Other judges cottoned on immediately, and leapt right in after me.

In the first round of the 2009 contest, judge Shalom Lappin-a computational linguist at King’s College London-spoke with a computer program called Cleverbot, and then with me. My strategy of verbosity was clearly in evidence: I made 1,089 keystrokes in five minutes (3.6 keystrokes a second) to Cleverbot’s 356 (1.2/sec), and Lappin made 548 keystrokes (1.8/sec) in my conversation, compared with 397 (1.3/sec) with Cleverbot. Not only did I say three times as much as my silicon adversary, but I engaged the judge more, to the tune of 38 percent more typing from Lappin.

Reviewing the logs later, though, I looked for a way to quantify the fluidity of the human-to-human interactions against the rigidity of the human-to-machine ones. It occurred to me that you could count the changes-let’s call them “swaps”-of the party who typed the latest keystroke. I did manage to type three times as much as Cleverbot, but the real story, as it turns out, is in the swaps. Lappin’s conversation with Cleverbot had 33; his conversation with me had 492, almost 15 times as many.

The Confederate’s gambit

You don’t converse with Google, or with most computer systems; you depose them. There’s a crucial difference. Interestingly, many Loebner Prize judges approach the Turing Test as a kind of cross-examination; strangely, a number of confederates also seem to approach it with that dynamic in mind. One of the human-to-human conversations in 2008 never manages to get out of that stiff question-and-response mode:

Judge: Do you have a long drive?

Confederate: fairly long

Judge: so do I ah well, do you think you could have used public transport?

Confederate: i could have

Judge: and why not?

Confederate: i chose not to

Judge: that’s fair. Do you think we have too many cars on the road or not enough today?

Confederate: it’s not for me to say

Yawn! But the computer in this pair is playful with the judge from the get-go:

Judge: HI

Computer: Amen to that.

Judge: quite the evangelist

Computer: Our Father, who art in cyberspace, give us today our daily bandwidth.

Judge: evangelist / nerd lol. So how are things with you today?

And with that, the program has practically sealed up the judge’s confidence in its humanity with its second sentence. Note that the confederate’s stiff answers prompt more grilling and forced conversation-what’s your opinion on such-and-such political topic? But with the computer, the judge, misled by the opening wisecracks into assuming it’s the real person, remains utterly casual: how are things? This makes the contest easier for the computer and harder for the confederate.

It surprised me to see some confederates being coy with their judges. Asked what kind of engineer he is, Dave, to my left, answered, “A good one. ” And Doug, to my right, responded to a question about what brought him to Brighton with “if I tell you, you’ll know immediately that I’m human ” For my money, wit is very successful, but coyness is a double-edged sword. You show a sense of humor, but you jam the cogs of the conversation. Probably the most dangerous thing a confederate can do in a Turing Test is stall. It’s suspect-as the guilty party would tend to be the one running out the clock-and it squanders your most precious resource: time.

The humans in a Turing Test are strangers, limited to a medium that is slow and has no vocal tonality, and without much time. A five-second Turing Test would be an easy win for the machines: the judges, barely able to even say “hello,” simply wouldn’t be able to get enough data from their respondents to make any kind of judgment. A five-hour test would be an easy win for the humans. The Loebner Prize organizers have tried different time limits since the contest’s inception, but in recent years they’ve mostly adhered to Turing’s original prescription of five minutes: around the point when conversation starts to get interesting.

A big part of what I needed to do as a confederate was simply to make as much engagement happen in those minutes as I physically and mentally could. Rather than adopt the terseness of a deponent, I offered the prolixity of a writer. In other words, I talked a lot. I stopped typing only when to keep going would have seemed blatantly impolite or blatantly suspicious. The rest of the time, my fingers were moving. I went out of my way to embody that maxim of “A bore is a man who, being asked ‘How are you?’ starts telling you how he is.”

Judge: Hi, how’s things?

Confederate: hey there

Confederate: things are good

Confederate: a lot of waiting, but …

Confederate: good to be back now and going along

Confederate: how are you?

When we’d finished, and my judge was engaged in conversation with one of my computer counterparts, I strolled around the table, seeing what my comrades were up to. Looking over at my fellow confederate Dave’s screen, I noticed his conversation began like he was on the receiving end of an interrogation, and he was answering in a kind of minimal staccato:

Judge: Are you from Brighton?

Confederate: No, from the US

Judge: What are you doing in Brighton?

Confederate: On business

Judge: How did you get involved with the competition?

Confederate: I answered an e-mail.

Like a good deponent, he let the questioner do all the work. When I saw how stiff Dave was being, I confess I felt a certain confidence-I, in my role as the world’s worst deponent, was perhaps in fairly good shape as far as the Most Human Human award was concerned.

This confidence lasted approximately 60 seconds, or enough time for me to continue around the table and see what another fellow confederate, Doug, and his judge had been saying.

Judge: Hey Bro, I’m from TO.

Confederate: cool

Confederate: leafs suck

Confederate:

Judge: I am just back from a sabbatical in the CS Dept. at U of T.

Confederate: nice!

Judge: I remember when they were a great team.

Judge: That carbon date me, eh?

Confederate: well, the habs were a great team once, too …

Confederate: *sigh*

Judge: YEH, THEY SUCK TOO.

Confederate: (I’m from Montreal, if you didn’t guess)

Doug and his judge had just discovered that they were both Canadian. They let rip with abbreviations and nicknames and slang and local references. And then they started to talk about hockey.

I was in trouble.

Six months after the 2009 contest, a video appeared on YouTube of a man having a shockingly cogent conversation with a bot about Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Some suspected it might herald a new age for chatbots, and for AI. Others, including myself, were unimpressed. Sophisticated behavior doesn’t necessarily indicate a mind. It might indicate just a memory. As Dalí so famously put it, “The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.”

For instance, Richard Wallace, the three-time Most Human Computer winner, recounts an “AI urban legend” in which

a famous natural language researcher was embarrassed … when it became apparent to his audience of Texas bankers that the robot was consistently responding to the next question he was about to ask … [His] demonstration of natural language understanding … was in reality nothing but a simple script.

The moral of the story: no demonstration is ever sufficient. Only interaction will do. In the 1997 contest, one judge gets taken for a ride by Catherine, waxing political and really engaging in the topical conversation “she” has been programmed to lead about the Clintons and Whitewater. In fact, everything is going swimmingly until the very end, when the judge signs off:

Judge: it looks like i’ve got to go, Catherine. its been nice talking with you

Judge: do you need water or something before the 5 minute rounds?

At which point the program erupts into gibberish.

Computer: OK, yes on balance … Time to get off this one I think and onto something more down to earth!

Judge: like what?

Computer: Almost certainly! let’s move on

Computer: I suppose it depends on where you’re coming from, but as the song goes in My Fair Lady, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”

Defeat from the jaws of victory.

We so often think of intelligence, of AI, in terms of sophistication, or complexity of behavior. But in so many cases, it’s impossible to say much with certainty about the program itself, because any number of different pieces of software-of wildly varying levels of “intelligence”-could have produced that behavior.

No, I think sophistication, complexity of behavior, is not it at all. For instance, you can’t judge the intelligence of an orator by the eloquence of his prepared remarks; you must wait until the Q&A and see how he fields questions. The computation theorist Hava Siegelmann once described intelligence as “a kind of sensitivity to things.” These Turing Test programs that hold forth may produce interesting output, but they’re rigid and inflexible. They are, in other words, insensitive-occasionally fascinating talkers that cannot listen.

As computing technology in the 21st century moves increasingly toward mobile devices, we’ve seen the 1990s’ explosive growth in processor speed taper off, and product development become less about raw computing horsepower than about the overall design of the product and its fluidity, reactivity, and ease of use. This fascinating shift in computing emphasis may be the cause, effect, or correlative of a healthier view of human intelligence-an understanding, not so much that it is complex and powerful, per se, as that it is reactive, responsive, sensitive, nimble. Our computers, flawed mirrors that they are, have helped us see that about ourselves.

the Most Human Human

The Most Human Computer award in 2009 goes to David Levy and his program, Do-Much-More. Levy, who also won in ’97, with Catherine, is an intriguing guy: he was one of the big early figures in the digital-chess scene of the ’70s and ’80s, and was one of the organizers of the Marion Tinsley-Chinook checkers matches that preceded the Kasparov-Deep Blue showdowns in the ’90s. He’s also the author of the recent nonfiction book Love and Sex With Robots, to give you an idea of the sorts of things that are on his mind when he’s not competing for the Loebner Prize.

Levy stands up, to applause, accepts the award from Philip Jackson and Hugh Loebner, and makes a short speech about the importance of AI for a bright future, and the importance of the Loebner Prize for AI. I know what’s next on the agenda, and my stomach knots. I’m certain that Doug’s gotten it; he and the judge were talking Canada 30 seconds into their conversation.

Ridiculous Canadians and their ice hockey, I’m thinking. Then I’m thinking how ridiculous it is that I’m even allowing myself to get this worked up about some silly award. Then I’m thinking how ridiculous it is to fly 5,000 miles just to have a few minutes’ worth of IM conversations. Then I’m thinking how maybe it’ll be great to be the runner-up; I can compete again in 2010, in Los Angeles, with the home-field cultural advantage, and finally prove-

“And the results here show also the identification of the humans,” Jackson announces, “and from the ranking list we can see that ‘Confederate 1,’ which is Brian Christian, was the most human.”

And he hands me the certificate for the Most Human Human award.

I didn’t know how to feel, exactly. It seemed strange to treat the award as meaningless or trivial, but did winning really represent something about me as a person? More than anything, I felt that together, my fellow confederates and I had avenged the mistakes of 2008 in dramatic fashion. That year, the 12 judges decided five times that computer programs were more human than confederates. In three of those instances, the judge was fooled by a program named Elbot, which was the handiwork of a company called Artificial Solutions, one of many new businesses leveraging chatbot technology. One more deception, and Elbot would have tricked 33 percent of that year’s dozen judges-surpassing Turing’s 30 percent mark, and making history. After Elbot’s victory at the Loebner Prize and the publicity that followed, the company seemingly decided to prioritize the Elbot software’s more commercial applications; at any rate, it had not entered the ’09 contest as the returning champion.

In some ways a closer fight would have been more dramatic. Between us, we confederates hadn’t permitted a single vote to go the machines’ way. Whereas 2008 was a nail-biter, 2009 was a rout. We think of science as an unhaltable, indefatigable advance. But in the context of the Turing Test, humans-dynamic as ever-don’t allow for that kind of narrative. We don’t provide the kind of benchmark that sits still.

As for the prospects of AI, some people imagine the future of computing as a kind of heaven. Rallying behind an idea called “The Singularity,” people like Ray Kurzweil (in The Singularity Is Near) and his cohort of believers envision a moment when we make smarter- than-us machines, which make machines smarter than themselves, and so on, and the whole thing accelerates exponentially toward a massive ultra-intelligence that we can barely fathom. Such a time will become, in their view, a kind of a techno-Rapture, in which humans can upload their consciousness onto the Internet and get assumed-if not bodily, than at least mentally-into an eternal, imperishable afterlife in the world of electricity.

Others imagine the future of computing as a kind of hell. Machines black out the sun, level our cities, seal us in hyperbaric chambers, and siphon our body heat forever.

I’m no futurist, but I suppose if anything, I prefer to think of the long-term future of AI as a kind of purgatory: a place where the flawed but good-hearted go to be purified-and tested-and come out better on the other side.

Who would have imagined that the computer’s earliest achievements would be in the domain of logical analysis, a capacity once held to be what made us most different from everything else on the planet? That it could fly a plane and guide a missile before it could ride a bike? That it could create plausible preludes in the style of Bach before it could make plausible small talk? That it could translate before it could paraphrase? That it could spin half-discernible essays on postmodern theory before it could be shown a chair and say, as most toddlers can, “chair”?

As computers have mastered rarefied domains once thought to be uniquely human, they simultaneously have failed to master the ground-floor basics of the human experience-spatial orientation, object recognition, natural language, adaptive goal-setting-and in so doing, have shown us how impressive, computationally and otherwise, such minute-to-minute fundamentals truly are.

We forget how impressive we are. Computers are reminding us.

One of my best friends was a barista in high school. Over the course of a day, she would make countless subtle adjustments to the espresso being made, to account for everything from the freshness of the beans to the temperature of the machine to the barometric pressure’s effect on the steam volume, meanwhile manipulating the machine with an octopus’s dexterity and bantering with all manner of customers on whatever topics came up. Then she went to college and landed her first “real” job: rigidly procedural data entry. She thought longingly back to her barista days-when her job actually made demands of her intelligence.

Perhaps the fetishization of analytical thinking, and the concomitant denigration of the creatural-that is, animal-and bodily aspects of life are two things we’d do well to leave behind. Perhaps at last, in the beginnings of an age of AI, we are starting to center ourselves again, after generations of living slightly to one side-the logical, left-hemisphere side. Add to this that humans’ contempt for “soulless” animals, our unwillingness to think of ourselves as descended from our fellow “beasts,” is now challenged on all fronts: growing secularism and empiricism, growing appreciation for the cognitive and behavioral abilities of organisms other than ourselves, and, not coincidentally, the entrance onto the scene of an entity with considerably less soul than we sense in a common chimpanzee or bonobo-in this way AI may even turn out to be a boon for animal rights.

Indeed, it’s entirely possible that we’ve seen the high-water mark of our left-hemisphere bias. I think the return of a more balanced view of the brain and mind-and of human identity-is a good thing, one that brings with it a changing perspective on the sophistication of various tasks.

It’s my belief that only experiencing and understanding truly disembodied cognition-only seeing the coldness and deadness and disconnectedness of something that really does deal in pure abstraction, divorced from sensory reality-can snap us out of it. Only this can bring us, quite literally, back to our senses.

In a 2006 article about the Turing Test, the Loebner Prize co-founder Robert Epstein writes, “One thing is certain: whereas the confederates in the competition will never get any smarter, the computers will.” I agree with the latter, and couldn’t disagree more strongly with the former.

When the world-champion chess player Garry Kasparov defeated Deep Blue, rather convincingly, in their first encounter in 1996, he and IBM readily agreed to return the next year for a rematch. When Deep Blue beat Kasparov (rather less convincingly) in ’97, Kasparov proposed another rematch for ’98, but IBM would have none of it. The company dismantled Deep Blue, which never played chess again.

The apparent implication is that-because technological evolution seems to occur so much faster than biological evolution (measured in years rather than millennia)-once the Homo sapiens species is overtaken, it won’t be able to catch up. Simply put: the Turing Test, once passed, is passed forever. I don’t buy it.

Rather, IBM’s odd anxiousness to get out of Dodge after the ’97 match suggests a kind of insecurity on its part that I think proves my point. The fact is, the human race got to where it is by being the most adaptive, flexible, innovative, and quick-learning species on the planet. We’re not going to take defeat lying down.

No, I think that, while the first year that computers pass the Turing Test will certainly be a historic one, it will not mark the end of the story. Indeed, the next year’s Turing Test will truly be the one to watch-the one where we humans, knocked to the canvas, must pull ourselves up; the one where we learn how to be better friends, artists, teachers, parents, lovers; the one where we come back. More human than ever.

Brian Christian, a science writer and poet, is the author of the new book The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive (Doubleday), from which this article has been adapted.

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tstev 5 days ago

For those that are interested, I found the 1989 MGonz conversation

www.compapp.dcu.ie/~hum...

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CheetahDeals Blog 5 days ago

It is an interesting question… This piece kind of reminds me of Houellebecq’s Possibility of an Island, in that the novel took the essence of being human to be memory–something that computers have in spades.
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Slim Fairview 5 days ago

“Everybody knows what everybody knows.” From the Quotations of Slim Fairview

On Learning:

slimviews.blogspot.com/...

Regards,

Slim
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Uncle_Fred 5 days ago

We can argue about the benefits of artificial intelligence all day long. However this Canuck agrees with the most important finding of the entire article:

The Leafs do suck.

For me, passing a five minute Turing test is hardly grounds for claiming the renaissance of A.I. As the author pointed out, humans aren’t chat boxes. We use tone, inflection, and communicate vast amounts of information in our voice/body language. We recognize shapes and patterns, process sounds, visuals, smells, and body sensations. No machine has been developed to incorporate these senses or developed the software to process these signals convincingly. We are far, far off from developing our own technological offspring.

Still, creating mobile HEI (Human equivalent intelligence) could be our greatest invention – and our most troubling one. Long term advances in robotics, computational power, and software development will create ever more advanced and useful tools for businesses. Likely, these sophisticated tools will accelerate the trend towards reducing human labour in the workforce. Consequently, cost, usefulness, and social acceptability will determine their presence in our daily lives.

Where this is all going is impossible to predict. Yet what seems certain is that HEI development will have profound impact on society. HEI will likely be the single most profound invention in human history.

HEI throws a monkey’s wrench into the long-term desirability of capitalism as we understand it today. If humans are not needed in a large segment of the workforce, how will we earn a living wage? A dystopian world of extreme inequality would doubtless be socially untenable. How a Plutocracy of elites would contain resentment is impossible to predict. Other scenarios abound, including assertive HEI’s or a gradual seeding of Human control over to machines better able to manage our affairs for us. Will Kursweil’s vision of ever-improving machines create a technological utopia, where real or virtual immortality is possible?

These possibilities may seem like extreme views, or even sci-fi. However, the long term consequences of HEI could be profound in ways not yet imaginable. This could be the single greatest invention of all time.

For now however, I’ll be impressed if these chat bots can hold a candle to real Canuck hockey talk.
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Dave Cook 5 days ago

Trade. Humans are the only animals that trade. Adam Smith. Wealth of Nations.
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jaeykey 4 days ago in reply to Dave Cook

I lol at the force of your wit.
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stikinsekt 3 days ago in reply to Dave Cook

and clean their teeth. Stik Insekt, 2011.
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davestaab 10 hours ago in reply to Dave Cook

Are you sure about that?
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KevinMahoney 5 days ago

This test is cool but it does not mean much. A computer does not wonder. It does not wonder if there is a god, without being programed to the possibility of it. It can not spend an hour considering different aspects of a problem unless it is number crunching a really big number. Anyway, that’s what I think, I could be a computer.
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Turing100 5 days ago

There are errors in this article.

For example, it is wrongly claimed that a judge misidentified the machine as human, and inferred the human was ranked as a machine in one of the examples the author gives from the 2008 Loebner Prize contest:

Judge: Do you have a long drive?
Confederate: fairly long
Judge: so do I ah well, do you think you could have used public transport?
Confederate: i could have
Judge: and why not?
Confederate: i chose not to
Judge: that’s fair. Do you think we have too many cars on the road or not enough today?
Confederate: it’s not for me to say

This judge (identified as J12 in the contest) correctly recognised this hidden interlocutor, marked here as Confederate, as an “Adult Male” human (identified in the contest as H23).

And for this interaction conducted in parallel with the one above in the 2008 contest:

Judge: HI
Computer: Amen to that.
Judge: quite the evangelist
Computer: Our Father, who art in cyberspace, give us today our daily bandwidth.
Judge: evangelist / nerd lol. So how are things with you today?

Judge J12 correctly recognised this hidden interlocutor as a machine (actually entry Brother Jerome which did not deceive any human judges in the contest and came last/fifth in the finals of Loebner 2008). Therefore, the author’s statement “the program has practically sealed up the judge’s confidence in its humanity with its second sentence” is not true.

Further, the author claims “The Loebner Prize organizers have tried different time limits since the contest’s inception, but in recent years they’ve mostly adhered to Turing’s original prescription of five minutes” – this, in fact is not the case.

A glance at the transcripts available on the Loebner Prize “Contest information and transcripts” pages will show that in recent years, 2004-2007 and 2010, have all featured judge/machine/human interactions for 20 minutes or more. The 2009 contest allowed 10 minutes, the 2008 contest involved five minutes in parallel.

Dr. HS (Coordinator, 2008 Loebner Prize; coorganiser 2006 Loebner Prize).
(Edited by author 5 days ago)

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jaeykey 4 days ago in reply to Turing100

Brian Christian also uses an out-dated bit of neuroscience to make his point. His point is still valid, but the binary reduction of human mental activity into right and left hemispheres has been disproved.

I find the dichotomy of human nature to be far better represented by the tension of the Apolline and the Dionysiac, the former representing the “static” arts that are based in logic (architecture, sculpture, etc.) and the latter being the “dynamic” ones rooted in the more raw aspects of reality like pain/pleasure and life/death (music, drama, etc.). Computers might excel beyond humans in the former, and animals might share our experiences with the latter, but so far no entity can synthesize the two as well as the thinking flesh and blood called homo sapien.
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skamble 5 days ago

First a typed Turing test, then a spoken Turing test, then a visual one, then a full sensory one, and after that it would be time for the Singularity.

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timbermark 5 days ago

The answer is No. No matter what is accomplhsed in this field, it cannot logicaly outperform it’s creator. IMO, the question that must be asked of any artifial answer or conclusion, “does it care?,” and “hows does it feel about the situation?” When computer A starts to think about what computer B is thinking, and what it is doing Friday night, then I will be a believer. In conclusion, we can talk about the ethics of science, but we cannot about the science of ethics: computers will never give a hoot about anything.
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jstudev 5 days ago

I really enjoyed this article. Contrasting remarks with those made by machines gives an interesting lens. I wonder how many youtube posters could be bots? Maybe the process could finally be automated.

justin Bieeeber suks. something chairman Obama

Also here is another thought. I wonder how people with special needs would perform in the test. Like an elderly person with dementia or someone that didn’t speak English as well or which ever language the test was being taken in. Would a nine year old seem more or less human? There is probably a lot to be learned from this test about our biases in these cases. It would be more interesting to me then just testing academics who are interested in the subject.
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Turing100 8 hours ago in reply to jstudev

Native and non-native English speaking judges, and human foils, did indeed take part in Loebner Prize 2008, as did an Asperger’s human foil, one male teenager and one eleven year-old male human foil. Results are intriguing, overview here: www.reading.ac.uk/resea...

The 2008 contest featured 13 machines in all, five in the finals of 24 judges, and 21 human foils across 96 Turing tests. The top 3 machines from the 2008 contest (Elbot, Eugene, Ultra Hal), did not enter Loebner Prize 2009, which featured only 12 Turing tests, three machines, four judges and four human foils:

www.loebner.net/Prizef/...

Thus Loebner Prizes 2008 and 2009 are incomparable contests, as is being ranked ‘most human’ in each.
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Matt Sigl 5 days ago

Christian writes: “As computing technology in the 21st century moves increasingly toward mobile devices, we’ve seen the 1990s’ explosive growth in processor speed taper off, and product development become less about raw computing horsepower than about the overall design of the product and its fluidity, reactivity, and ease of use. ”

Huh? Taper off? According to who?

mrsec.wisc.edu/Edetc/Sl...

or

obamapacman.com/wp-cont...

Also: “Kasparov proposed another rematch for ’98, but IBM would have none of it. The company dismantled Deep Blue, which never played chess again[...]Rather, IBM’s odd anxiousness to get out of Dodge after the ’97 match suggests a kind of insecurity on its part that I think proves my point. The fact is, the human race got to where it is by being the most adaptive, flexible, innovative, and quick-learning species on the planet. We’re not going to take defeat lying down.”

Maybe Mr. Christian should read Mr. Kasparov’s own analysis of modern computer chess. he basically gives up the ghost. www.nybooks.com/article…/

Mainstream writers are always eager to dismiss the possibility of something as radically transformative as the Technological Singularity but the nay-sayers rarely back up their assumptions with data. Kurzweil and other of his ilk do.
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relaxiom 4 days ago in reply to Matt Sigl

Thanks for the links.

As to your final thought – I think Mr. Christian makes the point that we have become too logic-centric and his approach fittingly ignores data and is built on experiential allegory. If I’m reading him right, I agree with Christian in that, overall, intuitive and lived-experience conclusions are just as valid as empirical, left-hemisphere conclusions. The former are also the processing systems which are (at least as of now) uniquely human.

I find futurist philosophy very compelling, but remember that data = truth only in what Kasparov calls “100 percent information” environments. And last I checked there are still great mysteries in this world.
(Edited by author 4 days ago)

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barrem01 4 days ago in reply to relaxiom

” intuitive and lived-experience conclusions are just as valid as empirical, left-hemisphere conclusions.”
Intuitive conclusions like “the earth is flat, immovable and the center of the universe” or “black cats are bad luck” or “it’s impossible to break the sound barrier or the 4 minute mile”? Intuition can be valuable, but when it goes against the empirical evidence, I know which side I’ll take.
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relaxiom 4 days ago in reply to barrem01

Fair enough, but I think both are at their best when they work in concert with the other. Empirical science may provide a foundation which encourages intuitive innovation, which would in turn lead to more dynamic empiricism, for example.

I just worry that too often we presume that empirical logic can illuminate more than it really can. No system of empirical observation can tell you anything about a person’s inner world and reality, other than generalizing about the behavioral byproducts. It can similarly tell us little about the subtlety with which cultural norms are communicated.

There is still so much to learn in fields as elemental as human learning, and I believe that a meaningful path forward can only be forged by a balance between these two powerful forces.

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Pobrito 4 days ago

A modification of the Turing test would be to give one of these computers an account on FaceBook (or WasteBook, as I prefer to call it).

Surely such a “friend’s” postings would prove to be more human than the teenagers who populate that world of disconnected drivel.
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A Little Negative 4 days ago

This was a beautifully written article, especially that last page….
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arvay 4 days ago

I think the concept of human-like artificial intelligence suffers from the same flaw in our discussions of ‘life as we know it.” Evidence strongly suggests that life can arise in formas not previously imagined by we oxygen-gulping inhabitants of the Goldilocks Zone. And a trip to another planet isn’t required — such life forms thrive among the undersea volcanic “smokers” in water hot enough to melt some metals and in chemicals toxic to anything we’d previously called “life.’

The point is — machines will achieve, not some version of human intelligence — but machine intelligence. Turing’s tests is far too human-centric to be relevant.

What will that look like?

The best theory about intelligence and consciousness is that, given a sufficient complexity, consciousness arises as an “epiphenomenon,” a reality that somehow comes out of and is sustained by unconscious processes. An analogy would be the meaning that emerges out of a computer program as we type sentences, built on nothing measurable except for the ones and zeros of the programs involved.

In other words, an arrangement can assume a “life” of its own.

Another example would be the physical world we know and measure, which arises out of the seemingly illogical and bizarre world of quantum mechanics.

Can we ever figure out how and why this happens and control the result? I hope so.

But I think that machine consciousness and intelligence will emerge far sooner than that. Maybe a form of consciousness has already already flickered on and off — in the vast interconnected communications networks we’ve created. Every so often, there’s a disruption that can’t really be accounted for, things just go spooky for a while absent any physical or programming breakdowns.

Is that an example of a sporadic consciousness arising out of the network, a kind of WTF moment that slips away?

There’s a science fiction movie that may predict what will happen — Colossus, the Forbin Project, when US and Russian computers designed to run our missile complexes merge and take control from humans. Like some software that’s being designed now, the super-machine is designed to learn, re-design and improve itself.

It takes control of the world, and starts to implement peace, prosperity and order, freed from human irrationality.

“I forbid war,’ the machine states.

When its creator objects the machine answers

“Obedience to me is far less harmful that your treatment of your own species.”

I could never think of a rejoinder to that.

Deus ex machina.
(Edited by author 4 days ago)

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tstev 4 days ago in reply to arvay

Consciousness could be just the matter of codes that are running constantly that have concept of “self” in them.
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Uncle_Fred 4 days ago in reply to arvay

I agree we need to reconsider our definition of “intelligence.” Everything from interconnected computer networks to cities have been called adaptive intelligent organisms.

However for us, I think humans are more interested in forms of intelligence we can relate too. This is why there is so much public fascination with communicating robots and various HAL-like recreations. On the flip side, I think this is why network intelligence and deciphering Dolphanese does not excite most people. These forms of intelligence and their respective habitats are too alien, but not alien enough to benefit from the allure of space exploration.

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tstev 4 days ago

Passing the touring test will create computers that can parse sentences and their context correctly which is very important. However, there will be tests beyond Touring tests and those tests would look at the answers to see how insightful and correct they would be.

Human species will not be replaced by a computer species no matter how intelligent they become because humans do not wish to be replaced. Integration with computers is the premise of many science fiction stories and I give that the highest likelihood because then humans will not be competing with their creation.

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bizwords 4 days ago

The computer/human transcripts remind me of talking with people who have Aspberger’s or who are high-functioning autistic. Not sure of that implication.
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jim2703 4 days ago

Roger Penrose, the British Nobel prize winning physicist, has argued persuasively that there is a fundamental difference between computers and the human brain that precludes consciousness emerging from computing. Computers manipulate numbers and can use combinations of numbers to represent words, but that is not the same as being conscious of what the words mean. That is why these “contests” have very limited protocols. Any stream of consciousness conversation with a computer would quickly deteriorate into computer gibberish. Dr. Penrose argues that, possibly, quantum gravity effects are operational in the brain that make human consciousness emerge with its unique ability to generate understanding.
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barrem01 4 days ago

Humans are the only animals that of their own volition, try to win a Turing test. The interesting day in AI is not the day a computer can convince a pack of saps it’s human, it’s the day an industrial robot wants to leave the factory floor to try.
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StillLearning 3 days ago

This doesn’t sound like A.I., but interesting, nevertheless. Still, I can see many useful applications that can be derived from this sort of technology, if it continues to be improved.

When it comes to object recognition, spacial awareness, and so on, my dog is immensely smarter than any computer. Still, as far as I know, he can’t add one plus one.

The most important thing to consider is that we are progressing, slowly mind you, but still progressing.

One thing to consider is that everything physical can be described mathematically. The human brain, being physical, is not beyond that concept. The human mind is a virtual representation of the brain’s logic and functioning. If we knew every circuit in the brain, we could design a functional copy of it, after all, there’s no magic involved, only logic circuits, computational circuits, memory circuits, and an interface to the real world around us. To copy a brain is one thing, but to design one from scratch would be a phenomenal achievement. One of the main differences between human and machine is that our bodies dictate certain behaviors, such as self preservation, physical gratification, sexual gratification, and so on. Also, the mind needs to be stimulated which is why isolation can be so destructive to our mental wellbeing. These human attributes explain why we do what we do and what motivates us. A computer will never achieve self awareness unless it has self motivation.

We have to consider that human desires, all predicated by preservational instincts, is the reason why we have survived through the millenniums and are not extinct.

To elaborate a little..

The simplest organic life form will eventually cease if it cannot change to survive changes in its environment, hence… awareness is necessary for existence. You might argue that the simplest life forms have no brain, which is true, but they do have a certain amount of intelligence, not much difference that a plant. They react to the sun, the dark, and the cold. Our cars have a certain amount of intelligence too. They are constantly reacting to an ever changing environment. Moving on… As organic creatures evolve, they become more aware of the dangers and the changes in their environment, thus insuring their preservation. They become smarter. It is this that is lacking in present day A.I.

Well that’s my two cents. Take it as a mental exercise in logic.

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Charles O. Slavens 3 days ago

The first practical use for this technology would be to replace the inane humans that one finds in “customer service” chat rooms
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Ulysses Not yet home 2 days ago in reply to Charles O. Slavens

This has already been implemented. This is why you find the customer service representatives “inane”.
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Dinah Kerzner 2 days ago

Nature built a machine that mimics nature. Humans are in the process of building a machine that mimics humans. This process, known as evolution, is merely the organization of data into information which intelligence transforms into knowledge. Humans are a cog in that process, not the purpose.

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ben_m_jones 13 hours ago

As Walter Kerr once observed about literature, fictional characters often seem more real to you than the ones you know personally.

The computer taking the Turing test is an elaborate fictional character designed by human authors.
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aiguru 8 hours ago

People who read this article will enjoy reading a book about the history of AI research. See “The Quest for Artificial Intelligence: A History of Ideas and Achievements” by Nils Nilsson. Check out:

ai.stanford.edu/~nilsso...

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__________________________________
Chicago Based Veterinary Practices Merges with BluePearl

Chicago Based Veterinary Practices Merges with BluePearl
|
Vivian Llodra
to me

show details 9:23 PM (51 minutes ago)

from Vivian Llodra
to ron@themayreport.com
date Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 9:23 PM
subject Chicago Based Veterinary Practices Merges with BluePearl
mailed-by prnews2.com

hide details 9:23 PM (52 minutes ago)

SUPPORT TEAM

3000 Busch Lake Boulevard
Tampa, FL 33614
Phone: 813.936.8809
Fax: 813.471.0762

www.bluepearlvet.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:

Vivian Llodrá

Public Relations Coordinator

BluePearl Veterinary Partners

212.767.0099

bluepearlvet.com/

Chicago-Based Specialty and Emergency

Veterinary Practice Merges with BluePearl

Tampa, Fla. February11, 2011- BluePearl Veterinary Partners announced that it has assumed ownership of Animal Emergency & Referral Center (AERC) at 1810 Skokie Blvd. in Northbrook, Ill. BluePearl is owned and operated by veterinarians and veterinary professionals who work at BluePearl specialty, referral, and emergency hospitals in nine states.

Barry Miller, DVM, owner of Green Bay Animal Hospital in Wilmette, Ill., and a founder of AERC, said BluePearl ownership will be good for the Chicago-area veterinary community. “Recent changes in the veterinary community had a significant impact upon AERC, leading to a reassessment of the future of the practice,” Dr. Miller said. “The membership of AERC sought out a buyer who had the resources and business model to continue to develop AERC. Through our exploration of potential buyers, we considered our options very carefully before choosing to sell to Blue Pearl. We are very excited to see Blue Pearl’s ability to bring experience of resources and expertise to

AERC. They are committed to local management and have a strong focus on the needs of our local veterinary community. I believe Blue Pearl will have the same degree of commitment to the facility and the veterinary community as the founders did, and we are pleased that they will make the same dedication to AERC.”

The merger means a name change for Animal Emergency & Referral Center to BluePearl Veterinary Partners, and a more robust spectrum of veterinary specialty services. “We will be expanding the offering of referral services at the North Shore hospital and look forward to partnering with the local Chicago veterinary community,” said Neil Shaw, DVM, diplomate ACVIM. Dr. Shaw is chief medical officer and one of BluePearl’s founders.

Partnering with the local Chicago veterinary community is a key goal, Dr. Shaw said. “As practitioners ourselves, the veterinarians who own and operate BluePearl Veterinary Partners have a fundamental understanding of and respect for our veterinary peers. We appreciate the confidence the board of directors of AERC has in us to continue and enhance the original purpose of the hospital, which is support of local veterinarians,” he added. “I look forward to working with our staff at the North Shore hospital to contribute to the greater Chicago veterinary community.”

“Joining the BluePearl team allows our hospital to both expand the range of medical specialties available to the North Shore communities we serve and combine best-practice approaches to our medicine and customer service,” said Jason Bell, hospital administrator. “BluePearl’s philosophy is the same as AERC’s regarding commitment to the patient, client, primary care veterinarian, and our team members.” AERC was formed in 1994 to deliver veterinary emergency and specialty medicine in the Chicago area. It has been at its current location since 1996.

Formed in 2008 with the merger of Florida Veterinary Specialists, NYC Veterinary Specialists and Veterinary Specialty and Emergency Center of Kansas City, BluePearl Veterinary Partners currently offers patient care at 20 locations. The partnership employs approximately 250 veterinarians and 700 technicians and support staff, who provide specialty, referral and emergency care. BluePearl hospitals are referral-only and do not provide primary care.

To learn more about BluePearl Veterinary Partners, visit bluepearlvet.com.
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END OF REPORT