The Most Human Human (37 page)

My friend Devon does computer-generated imagery (CGI) for animated feature films. The world of CGI movies is a funny place; it takes its cues from reality, yet its aim is not necessarily realism. (Though, he notes, “your range of what’s believable is wider than reality.”)

Being a computer graphics person brings with it, as most jobs do, a certain way of looking at and of noticing the world. My own poetry background, for instance, gives me an urge to read things against the grain of the author’s intended meaning. I read a newspaper headline the other day that said, “UK Minister’s Charm Offensive.” This to me was hilarious. Of course they meant “offensive” as a noun, as in the tactical deployment of charm for diplomacy purposes, but I kept reading it as an adjective, as though the minister’s creepy unctuousness had really crossed the line this time. My friends in the police force and the military can’t enter a room without sussing out its entrances and exits; for the one in the fire department, it’s alarms and extinguishers.

But Devon: What does a computer graphics guy look for?

“Sharp edges—if you’re looking at, like, anything, any sort of man-made object, if it has sharp edges, like a building, or a table: if all the edges are really sharp, then that’s a pretty good sign. If you look in the corners of a lit room—if the corners aren’t appropriately dark, or too dark … Just like complexity of surfaces and irregularities—any type of irregularity, you know. That’s all totally—if it’s computer generated—it’s really hard to do. You look for the quantity of irregularities and regularities, even textures, and things like that. But that’s all pretty basic stuff. At another level, you have to
start thinking about, like, light bouncing off things, you know, like if you have, for instance, a red wall next to a white wall, how much of the red gets onto the white, and that’s the sort of thing that can sort of throw you off.”

Of course, as he’s saying this to me on the phone, I’m looking around the room, and I’m noticing, as if for the first time, the weird ways that light and shadow seem to bunch up in the corners and along the edges—authentically, I
guess
—I look out the window at the sky—and how many times have you looked at a sky and said, “If this were in a movie, I would criticize the special effects”?

Devon’s most recent assignment had been to work on rocket-launcher contrails, a problem that proved trickier than he’d originally thought; he stayed late many long evenings trying to get its waviness and dispersion just
so
. He finally nailed it, and the studio was pleased: it went into the film. But all that scrutiny came with a price. Now, when he goes outside and looks at airplane contrails, he’s
suspicious
. “When I was working on those smoke trail things—when I was out hiking or something, watching the planes go by, and trying to analyze how the shape changed over time … You almost, like, question reality at times—like, you’re looking at something, like smoke or something, and you think, that’s too regular, the smoke shouldn’t look so regular …”

That’s what I keep feeling, now, when I read an email or pick up the phone. Even with my own parents—I found myself waiting, like the phonagnosic Steve Royster, for the moment they said something incontrovertibly, inimitably “them.”

Reflection and refraction are difficult to simulate on a computer. So is water distortion. So-called “caustics,” the way that a glass of wine refocuses its light into a red point on your table, are particularly hard to render.

Reflection and refraction are also fairly computationally nasty because they have the habit of multiplying off of each other. You put two mirrors in front of each other, and the images multiply to infinity in no time flat. Light travels roughly 200,000 miles per second: that’s a lot of ping-pong, and way beyond the point where most rendering algorithms tap out. Usually a programmer will specify the maximum acceptable number of reflections or refractions and cap it there, after which point a kind of software deus ex machina sends the light directly back to the eye: no more bouncing.

Getting off the phone with Devon, I go to my kitchen and fling open the glassware cabinet. I am more mesmerized by the hall of mirrors within than I have ever been before. My eyeball bulging at
the side of a wineglass, I watch real life, real physics, real light
perform
.

A glassware cabinet is a computational nightmare.

So, Devon explains, is a deciduous forest. And nude bodies are more of a computational nightmare than clothed ones: all those tiny hairs, irregular curvatures, semi-translucencies of veins under slightly mottled skin.

I love these moments when the theory, the models, the approximations, as good as they are, aren’t good enough. You simply must watch.
Ah, so
this
is how nature does it
. This
is what it looks like
. I think it’s important to know these things, to know what can’t be simulated, can’t be made up, can’t be imagined—and to seek it.

Devon, in his life out of the studio, now pays a kind of religious attention to the natural world. It helps him do a better job in his animation projects, I’m sure, but one suspects the means and ends are actually the other way around.

“It’s nice to know at least that there are quite a few things that, at least with computer graphics, and what I do, that I’m like, I mean,
Wow
. You know, I wrote some
thing
, and I have people waiting, you know, ten hours for a
frame
, and it doesn’t even look realistic, it doesn’t even look quite right! And I’m like,
Damn
—that’s, one, quite far from reality, and, two, it’s stretching, like,
x
number of dollars’ worth of computing at it and barely even making it. So.”

Devon laughs.

“It feels … It definitely feels good at the end of the day that I can open my eyes and look at something that’s, like, many orders of magnitude more complex.”

And to be able to know
where
to look for it—

And how to recognize it.

It was Isaac Newton who famously said (though it was actually a common expression at the time), “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” I want to say, more neurologically, that if I’ve been able to conduct a good signal to my axon terminal, I owe it to the people at my dendrites. (Though it goes without saying, of course, that any noise or error in the signal is my own.)

I’m indebted to a number of conversations with friends and colleagues, which sparked or contributed many of the specific ideas in the text. I recall, in particular, such conversations with Richard Kenney, David Shields, Tom Griffiths, Sarah Greenleaf, Graff Haley, François Briand, Greg Jensen, Joe Swain, Megan Groth, Matt Richards, Emily Pudalov, Hillary Dixler, Brittany Dennison, Lee Gilman, Jessica Day, Sameer Shariff, Lindsey Baggette, Alex Walton, Eric Eagle, James Rutherford, Stefanie Simons, Ashley Meyer, Don Creedon, and Devon Penney.

Thanks to the researchers and experts of their respective crafts who graciously volunteered their time to speak at length in person (or the closest technological equivalent): Eugene Charniak, Melissa Prober, Michael Martinez, Stuart Shieber, Dave Ackley, David Sheff, Kevin Warwick, Hava Siegelmann, Bernard Reginster, Hugh Loebner, Philip Jackson, Shalom Lappin, Alan Garnham, John Carroll, Rollo Carpenter, Mohan Embar, Simon Laven, and Erwin van Lun.

Thanks, too, to those with whom I corresponded by email, who
offered thoughts and/or pointed me toward important research: Daniel Dennett, Noam Chomsky, Simon Liversedge, Hazel Blythe, Dan Mirman, Jenny Saffran, Larry Grobel, Daniel Swingley, Lina Zhou, Roberto Caminiti, Daniel Gilbert, and Matt Mahoney.

Thanks to the University of Washington Libraries and the Seattle Public Library; I am in your debt, quite literally.

Thanks to Graff Haley, Matt Richards, Catherine Imbriglio, Sarah Greenleaf, Randy Christian, Betsy Christian, and, with special appreciation, Greg Jensen, all of whom read and offered feedback on an earlier draft.

Thanks to Sven Birkerts and Bill Pierce at
AGNI
, for publishing an earlier version of “High Surprisal” (as “High Compression: Information, Intimacy, and the Entropy of Life”) in their pages, for their sharp editorial eyes and their support.

Thanks to my agent, Janet Silver at Zachary Shuster Harmsworth, for believing in the project from day one, and for her support, wisdom, and enthusiasm throughout.

Thanks to my editors, Bill Thomas and Melissa Danaczko, and the rest of the Doubleday team, for their expert eyes, and for all of the faith and hard work of bringing the book into the world.

Thanks to invaluable fellowships at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Ripton, Vermont; at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York; and at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. A reverence for good work fills them with a kind of airborne sacredness like very few places I know.

Thanks to the baristas of Capitol Hill and Wallingford for the liquid jumper cables of many Seattle mornings.

Thanks to a hamster-sitting residency at the Osborn/Coleman household, where good work was done.

Thanks to Michael Langan for a very fine portrait.

Thanks to Philip Jackson, for allowing me to be a part of the 2009 Loebner Prize competition, and to my fellow confederates, Dave Marks, Doug Peters, and Olga Martirosian, with whom I was proud to represent humanity.

Thanks to my parents, Randy Christian and Betsy Christian, for the unconditional everything along the way.

Thanks to the inestimable Sarah Greenleaf, whose clarity of mind cut many a Gordian knot, and whose courage and compassion have shaped both the text and its author.

Thanks to everyone who has taught me, by words or by example, what it means to be human.

1
David Foster Wallace, in interview with David Lipsky, in
Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself
(New York: Broadway Books, 2010).

2
Richard Wilbur, “The Beautiful Changes,”
The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems
(New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947).

3
Robert Pirsig,
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
(New York: Morrow, 1974).

4
Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on the ‘Education to Innovate’ Campaign,” press release, The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, November 23, 2009.

1
See, e.g., Neil J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner, “Biography of Claude Elwood Shannon,” in
Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers
(New York: IEEE Press, 1993).

1
Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,”
Mind
59, no. 236 (October 1950), pp. 433–60.

2
Turing initially introduces the Turing test by way of analogy to a game in which a judge is conversing over “teleprinter” with two
humans
, a man and a woman, both of whom are claiming to be the woman. Owing to some ambiguity in Turing’s phrasing, it’s not completely clear how
strong of an analogy he has in mind; for example, is he suggesting that in the Turing test, a woman and a computer are both claiming specifically to be a woman? Some scholars have argued that the scientific community has essentially swept this question of gender under the rug in the subsequent (gender-neutral) history of the Turing test, but in BBC radio interviews in 1951 and 1952, Turing makes it clear (using the word “man,” which is gender-neutral in the context) that he is, in fact, talking about a
human
and a machine both claiming to be
human
, and therefore that the gender game was merely an example to help explain the basic premise at first. For an excellent discussion of the above, see Stuart Shieber, ed.,
The Turing Test: Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of Intelligence
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004).

3
Charles Platt, “What’s It Mean to Be Human, Anyway?”
Wired
, no. 3.04 (April 1995).

4
Hugh Loebner’s Home Page,
www.loebner.net
.

5
Hugh Loebner, letter to the editor,
New York Times
, August 18, 1994.

6
The Terminator
, directed by James Cameron (Orion Pictures, 1984).

7
The Matrix
, directed by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski (Warner Bros., 1999).

8
Parsing the Turing Test
, edited by Robert Epstein et al. (New York: Springer, 2008).

9
Robert Epstein, “From Russia, with Love,”
Scientific American Mind
, October/November 2007.

10
97 percent of all email messages are spam: Darren Waters, citing a Microsoft security report, in “Spam Overwhelms E-Mail Messages,”
BBC News
, April 8, 2009,
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7988579.stm
.

11
Say, Ireland: Ireland consumes 25,120,000 megawatt hours of electricity annually, according to the CIA’s
World Factbook
,
www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2042rank.html
. The processing of spam email consumes 33,000,000 megawatt hours annually worldwide, according to McAfee, Inc., and ICF International’s 2009 study, “The Carbon Footprint of Email Spam Report,”
newsroom.mcafee.com/images/10039/carbonfootprint2009.pdf
.