Anti-Turing tests

One of the least-expected things the Internet has taught me is to ignore Spambots. It's pretty easy to spot the offering for male enhancements or the like. The filtering software is getting better at pulling weeds, but still some gets through. Sadly, Spam has spread to every form of online messaging such as Twitter.

While weeding spambots from my Twitter account I noticed something disturbing: The amount of humanity in a Twitter update could be very low. Some humans can act like spambots and often do so. I don't want to their posts cluttering my Twitter feed any more than I want to see offers for male enhancement.

What I've been thinking through is a sort of Anti-Turing test to judge how human my interlocutor is. If you weren't trained as a Computer Scientist, the British Cryptologic-Mathematician, Alan Turing, proposed a test for machine intelligence. Instead of figuring out how to program IQ tests and administer them to machines, he suggested putting a person in the room with a teletype and the other end of the teletype would either be another person or a computer. He suggested that when the computer could be programmed to be indistinguishable from the person, that would constitute a human level of machine intelligence.

(It's interesting that intelligence is an aspect of a Turing test, but I'll come back to that.)

Consider this conversation:
"Hello"
"Buy my book"
"How are you doing today?"
"Buy my book"
"Did you know a meteor is about to destroy the planet and we'll all die?"
"Buy my book"

There's zero humanity in the responses, but suppose you added some social fluff. The minimum necessary to not seem rude. There'd be some humanity there, but not much. So consider the following conversation:
"Hello"
"Hello. Nice to hear from you. Did you know I've got a book out?"
"How are you doing today?"
"I'm feeling a chill--I should get a sweater and curl up with a good book."
"Did you know a meteor is about to destroy the planet and we'll all die?"
"No. That sounds horrible. Do you want to buy my book so you won't think about the meteor?"

That sounded pretty much like a human, but a cheesy one.

I used an exhortation to buy my book as a dehumanizing element in these example, but it applies equally well to other exhortations: Trusting Jesus, Electing Whigs, Ending Childhood Hunger, or Ending Childhood Obesity. Humanity is can be seen in concern for a larger cause, but the cause often demands human sacrifice.

This is why when you advertise that you're an activist, there's a risk I'll mistake you for a spambot, or worse a zombie whose soul has been sucked away by The Cause.

This goes for name-calling. If you dislike some public figure, you don't need human-level intelligence to call him a poopy-head. That's why Rush Limbaugh apologized for calling an activist a slut. Maybe this woman's demand for birth-control did not indicate fornication or otherwise betoken sexual promiscuously, but he had no knowledge of her sex-life. His rhetoric was mere name-calling and I disapprove.

I think a much more damning indictment of the woman would be to call her an activist.

As mentioned above the Turing test was devised as an intelligence test. Humanity is a broader concept than mere intelligence. Jeremy Brett played Sherlock Holmes as an inhumanly brilliant intelligence. The way he and other players have depicted Holmes' extreme intelligence was to act rudely and insensitively. (Anyone in grade school should know that this isn't smart.) In movies, this rudeness is a mere device to convey to the audience that here's a smart guy. It is like talking very fast and using big words like the Architect in the second Matrix movie. (Did he say anything? No, but he sounded smart.)

In real life, this rudeness is often low social skills. I trained as a mathematician and I was in class with a lot of smart guys with low social skills. I make wider allowances in such cases.

This brings us to people with undeniable humanity who are nonetheless unpleasant? Intelligence makes a person see things more quickly and grow impatient with someone who more slowly comes to that point--or grow enraged by someone who seems obtuse about missing the point. Combine this with low social skills, and someone can come off as a jerk.

I don't want to be a jerk, but I don't want to listen to jerks. I don't watch House because I can't believe anyone would be stupid enough to voluntarily associate with him. When Jean-Paul Sartre said "Hell is other people" he must have been a jerk and was forced to work with jerks.

Humanity has other negative aspects in addition to being a jerk, the Internet has taught me the concept of a troll. The troll wants nothing more than to see people lose their cool. This is evil and I won't voluntarily associate with evil.

In sum, I have three principles of associating with Internet entities:

• Manifest your humanity
• Don't be unpleasant
• Don't be evil.