The Future of Expressions

While in my FYS, Alan Turing’s Turing Test has been brought up a few times. I always thought that it was an interesting, and frightening, assessment of the advancement of technology, but I felt that I was a little bit disconnected from it and that I wasn’t completely sure that I was getting the gist of what the test entailed.

“Mind vs. Machine” by Brian Christian helped to clear up any of my confusion. 

Christian was a confederate in the 2009 Turing Test and won the “Most Human Human” award, which he was pleased about, to say the least. 

Christian describes his experiences with the Turing Test in great detail and includes numerous transcripts of “conversations” (if you can call them that) between confederates, computers, and judges. After reading the article, I was even more intrigued with the Turing Test and what it could mean for the future of technology. 

But Christian brought up an interesting point, one which I had not previously considered. 

Before the age of the digital computers that we eat, sleep and breathe with today, computers were human workers who completed calculations for different corporations, most of the time using nothing more than a simple calculator. As digital computers began to develop, people began comparing the machines to the humans, saying that the machines were similar to their human counterparts. But, as time went on, and computers became even more and more advanced, the terms were switched. Nowadays, if someone is very good with numbers or memorizable facts, it is often said that they are similar to the machine, the exact opposite of what was said in years past. Christian writes, “[i]t’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.”

I must admit, this notion surprised me a little bit. I suppose that because of the time period that I have grown up in and currently live in, I never really considered what (or in this case, who) computers were before the age of digital computers. It is odd for me to think that a comparison which I have used to describe someone was once used in the opposite way to describe the machine that I am typing this blog post on. 

I think that the point made by Christian is an interesting comment on the extent to which  technology has changed the world that we live in today and has even affected the expressions that we now use. It’s strange to think about the expressions that we could be using years from now and how they will relate (or go against) expressions that we use today.