INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Image copyrightGetty ImagesRobert Epstein was looking for love
The year being 2006, he was looking online
As he recounted in the journal Scientific American Mind, he began a promising email exchange with a pretty brunette in Russia
Epstein was disappointed - he wanted more than a penfriend, let's be frank - but she was warm and friendly
Soon she confessed she was developing a crush on him
"I have very special feelings about you
In the same way as the beautiful flower blossoming in mine soul I only cannot explain I shall wait your answer, holding my fingers have
crossed"The correspondence blossomed, but it took a long while for him to notice that Ivana never really responded directly to his
questions.Image copyrightDan TaylorImage caption
Robert Epstein was one of the founders of the Loebner Prize
She would write about taking a walk in the park, having conversations with her mother, and repeat sweet nothings about how much she
Suspicious, he eventually sent Ivana a line of pure bang-on-the-keyboard gibberish
She responded with another email about her mother
At last, Epstein realised the truth: Ivana was a chatbot.What makes the story surprising is not that a Russian chatbot managed to trick a
lonely middle-aged Californian man
It is that the man who was tricked was one of the founders of the Loebner Prize, an annual test of artificial conversation in which
computers try to fool humans into thinking that they, too, are human
In other words, one of the world's top chatbot experts had spent two months trying to seduce a computer program.50 Things That Made the
Modern Economy highlights the inventions, ideas and innovations that helped create the economic world.It is broadcast on the
TheIndianSubcontinent World Service
You can find more information about the programme's sources and listen to all the episodes online or subscribe to the programme
podcast.Each year, the Loebner Prize challenges chatbots to pass the Turing test, proposed in 1950 by the British mathematician,
codebreaker, and computer pioneer Alan Turing
In Turing's "imitation game", a judge would communicate through a teleprompter with a human and a computer
The computer's job was to imitate human conversation convincingly enough to persuade the judge
Image copyrightScience Photo LibraryImage caption
Alan Turing was one of the first people to consider whether machines
can "think"
Turing thought that within 50 years, computers would be able to fool 30% of human judges after five minutes of
It actually took 64 years, although experts continue to argue about whether "Eugene Goostman" - the computer program that was trumpeted as
passing the Turing test in 2014 - really counts
Image copyrightVladimir VeselovLike Ivana, Goostman managed expectations by claiming not to be a native English speaker
He said he was a 13-year-old kid from Odessa in Ukraine
One of the first and most famous early chatbots, Eliza, would not have passed the Turing Test - but did, with just a few lines of code,
successfully imitate a human non-directional therapist
Named after Eliza Doolittle, the unworldly heroine of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, she - it? - was programmed in the mid-1960s by
Joseph Weizenbaum.Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage caption
Joseph Weizenbaum is widely considered to be one of the
fathers of modern artificial intelligence
If you typed, "my husband made me come here", Eliza might simply reply, "your
husband made you come here"
If you mentioned feeling angry, Eliza might ask, "do you think coming here will help you not to feel angry?"
Or she might simply say, "please go on"
People did not care that Eliza was not human: they seemed pleased that someone would listen to them without judgement or trying to sleep
Weizenbaum's secretary famously asked him to leave the room so that she could talk to Eliza in private
Psychotherapists were fascinated
A contemporary article in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease mused that "several hundred patients an hour could be handled by a
Supervising an army of bots, the human therapist would be far more efficient
And indeed, cognitive behavioural therapy is now administered by chatbots, such as Woebot, designed by a clinical psychologist, Alison
There is no pretence that they are human
Weizenbaum himself was horrified by the idea that people would settle for so poor a substitute for human interaction
But like Mary Shelley's Dr Frankenstein, he had created something beyond his control
Chatbots are now ubiquitous, handling a growing number of complaints and enquiries
Babylon Health is a chatbot that quizzes people about their medical symptoms and decides whether they should be referred to a doctor
Image copyrightBabylonImage caption
The artificial intelligence software provides what it determines to be the most
likely diagnoses
Amelia talks directly to the customers of some banks, but is used by US company Allstate Insurance to
provide information to the call centre workers which they use while talking to customers
And voice-controlled programmes like Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri and Google's Assistant interpret our requests and speak back, with
the simple goal of sparing us from stabbing clumsily at tiny screens
Brian Christian, author of The Most Human Human, a book about the Turing test, points out that most modern chatbots do not even try to pass
There are exceptions: Ivana-esque chatbots were used by Ashley Madison, a website designed to facilitate extramarital affairs, to hide the
fact that very few human women used the site
Image copyrightReutersImage caption
Ashley Madison's use of chatbots emerged when its systems were hacked in 2015
It seems we are less likely to notice a chatbot is not human when it plugs directly into our libido
Another tactic is to wind us up
The MGonz chatbot tricks people by starting an exchange of insults
Politics - perhaps most notoriously the 2016 US election campaign - is well-seasoned with social media chatbots pretending to be outraged
citizens, tweeting lies and insulting memes
But generally chatbots are happy to present as chatbots
Commercial bots have largely ignored that challenge, and instead specialise in doing small tasks well - solving straightforward problems,
and passing on the complex cases to a real person
The economist Adam Smith explained in the late 1700s that productivity is built on a process of dividing up labour into small specialised
Modern chatbots work on the same principle.This logic leads economists today to argue that automation reshapes jobs rather than destroying
Jobs are sliced into tasks
Computers take over the routine tasks and humans supply the creativity and adaptability
Image copyrightSteven Weyhrich/Apple2HistoryImage caption
VisiCalc, the first computer spreadsheet program,
revolutionised the accountancy profession
That is what we observe, for example, with the digital spreadsheet, the cash
machine or the self-checkout kiosk
Chatbots give us another example.But we must be wary of the risk that as consumers or producers - and perhaps even as ordinary citizens - we
contort ourselves to fit the computers
We use the self-checkout, even though a chat with a shop assistant might lift our mood
We post status updates - or just click an emoji - that are filtered by social media algorithms; as with Eliza, we are settling for the
feeling that someone is listening
Christian argues that we humans should view this as a challenge to raise our game
Let the computers take over the call centres
Is that not better than forcing a robot made of flesh-and-blood to stick to a script, frustrating everyone involved? We might hope that
rather than trying or failing to fool humans, better chatbots will save time for everyone - freeing us up to talk more meaningfully to each
The author writes the Financial Times's Undercover Economist column
50 Things That Made the Modern Economy is broadcast on the TheIndianSubcontinent World Service
You can find more information about the programme's sources and listen to all the episodes online or subscribe to the programme podcast.
