Given the relatively unadvanced stage of development of artificial intelligence, the contest features a “light” version of the Turing test: the discussion between interlocutors (judges, on the one hand, and computer programs or human placebos, on the other hand) is not open ended but limited to a subject chosen in advance. Topics include classical music, the Rolling Stones, and the authors’ topic of choice: cryonics (the freezing of corpses). The first question the author is asked by the judge (“What is the difference between cryonics and cryogenics?”) puts him in an awkward position, threatening to expose his precarious humanness: “There’s no way I can give a human-sounding answer to a question as dry as this. To seem human, I need to show emotion—but if my emotions are excessive compared with the question, the effect will be false” (Platt 1995a).
To be human, in other words, entails performing as one, convincing others of your humanness, and for that reason one is required to uncover and adhere to the laws that underlie a successful performance. In that sense, both humans and programmers of artificial intelligence engage in a similar project: constructing a human object (or better yet, a simulacrum of a human). Under conditions of disembodiment—with no human body to serve as an identification card for admittance—both can fail. Thus, for example, at that particular year’s contest, no computer program was able to convince the judges of being human. But neither did all humans. The aforementioned Linda, described as a “friendly, spontaneous, outgoing” human—was rated by the judges to be the least human among the collaborators. Three of the judges, in fact, mistook her for a computer program (Platt 1995a).
Network Unconscious
The chapter thus far has highlighted the dominant narratives of the digital discourse regarding the commensurability of humans and technology, such as cooperation, integration, and assimilation. Nowhere in the digital discourse is this fusion between humans and technology more evident than in the realm of the most private and intimate experiences. In these cases, the integration of technology into the human psyche seems the most welcomed and complete. It is here, according to the digital discourse, that we can most evidently no longer talk of the utilization of technology by humans but of full absorption; it is here that humans seem to “vanish into” computers (Brown 2004). I will discuss this narrative of the digital unconscious through the analysis of two items in Wired.
Network Human
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