Pleasantries are low entropy, biased so far that they stop being an earnest inquiry and become ritual. Ritual has its virtues, of course, and I don't quibble with them in the slightest. But if we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can't finish.

Brian Christian

Categorized in : Needs Want Inquiry

To be human is to be a human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggests that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity.

Brian Christian

intelligent views people

Existence without essence is very stressful. by Brian Christian

Existence without essence is very stressful.

Brian Christian

stressful existence essence

Conceptual art might be, for better or worse, (definable as) the art most susceptible to lossy compression.

Brian Christian

compression might art

What a familiarity with the construction of Turing test bots had begun to show me was that we fail - again and again- to actually be human with other humans, so maddeningly much of the time.

Brian Christian

construction failing tests

The more helpful our phones get, the harder it is to be ourselves. For everyone out there fighting to write idiosyncratic, high-entropy, unpredictable, unruly text, swimming upstream of spell-check and predictive auto-completion: Don't let them banalize you. Keep fighting.

Brian Christian

swimming fighting writing