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The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive

The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive

Brian Christian The Most Human Humanから。
1950年にアラン・チューリング*1がTuring testを考案した頃、computerという英単語の意味は現在とはかなり違っていた。曰く、


(…) In the early twentieth century, before a “computer” was one of the digital processing devices that so proliferate in our twenty-first-century lives―in our offices, in our homes, in our cars, and, increasingly, in our pockets―it was something else: a job description.
From the mid-eighteenth century onward, computers, frequently women, were on the payrolls of corporations, engineering firms, and universities, performing calculations and doing numerical analysis, sometimes with the use of a rudimentary calculator. These original, human computers were behind the calculations for everything from the first accurate predictions for the return of Halley's comet―early proof of Newton's theory of gravity, which had only been checked against planetary orbit before―to the Manhattan Project, where Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman oversaw a group of human computers at Los Alamos. (p.10)
つまりは、

(…) In the mid-twentieth century,a piece of cutting-edge mathematical gadgetry was “like a computer.” In the twenty-first century, it is the human math whiz that is “like a computer.”(...) (p.11)
ということ。