SPEAKER_00: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.
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SPEAKER_06: 50 things that made the modern economy with Tim Harford.
SPEAKER_03: Robert Epstein was looking for love. The year being 2006, he was looking online. He began a promising email exchange with a pretty brunette in Russia. Epstein was disappointed. He wanted more than a pen friend, let's be frank, but she was warm and friendly. Soon,
SPEAKER_03: she confessed she was developing a crush on him.
SPEAKER_01: I have very special feelings about you. It, in the same way as the beautiful flower blossoming in my soul, I only cannot explain. I shall wait your answer holding my fingers have crossed.
SPEAKER_03: The correspondence blossomed. It took a long while for Epstein to notice that Ivana never really responded directly to his questions. She'd write about taking a walk in the park, having conversations with her mother, and repeat sweet nothings about how much she liked him. Suspicious, he eventually sent Ivana a line of pure bang on the keyboard gibberish. She responded with another email about her mother. At last, Robert Epstein realised the truth. Ivana was a chatbot. What makes the story surprising isn't that a Russian chatbot managed to trick a lonely middle-aged Californian man. It's that the man who was tricked was one of the founders of the Löbner Prize, an annual test of artificial conversation in which computers try to fool humans into thinking that they, too, are human. One of the world's top chatbot experts had spent two months trying to seduce a computer programme. Each year, the Löbner Prize challenges chatbots to pass the Turing test, proposed in 1950 by the British mathematician, code-breaker 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. Alan Turing thought that within 50 years computers would be able to fool 30% of human judges after five minutes of conversation. Not far off, it took 64 years, although we are still arguing over whether Eugene Guzman, the programme that in 2014 was trumpeted as passing the Turing test, really counts. Like Ivana, Guzman 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. She... it... was programmed by Joseph Weitzenbaum in the mid-1960s. If you typed, my husband made me come here, Eliza might simply reply, your husband
SPEAKER_02: made you come here. If you mentioned feeling angry, Eliza might ask, do you think coming here
SPEAKER_04: will help you not to feel angry? Or she might simply say, please go on. People didn't care
SPEAKER_03: that Eliza wasn't human. At least someone would listen to them without judging them or trying to sleep with them. Joseph Weitzenbaum's secretary 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 computer system. Supervising an army of bots, the human therapist would be far more efficient. And indeed, cognitive behavioral therapy is now administered by chatbots such as Wobot, designed by a clinical psychologist, Alison Darcy. There's no pretence that they're human. Joseph Weitzenbaum himself was horrified by the idea that people would settle for so poor a substitute for human interaction. But like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, he'd created something beyond his control. Chatbots are now ubiquitous. They handle complaints and inquiries. Babylon Health is a chatbot that quizzes people about their medical symptoms and decides whether they should be referred to a doctor. Amelia talks directly to the customers of some banks but is used by Allstate Insurance to provide information to the call centre workers who themselves are talking to customers. And Alexa and Siri interpret our voices and speak back with the simple goal of sparing us 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 don't even try to pass it. There are exceptions. Ivana-esque chatbots were used by Ashley Madison, a website designed to facilitate extramarital affairs, to hide the fact that few human women used the site. It seems we're less likely to notice a chatbot isn't human when they plug directly into our libido. Another tactic is to rile us up. One effective chatbot, M Gons, tricks people by starting an exchange of insults. Politics, 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. Seeming human is hard. Commercial bots have largely ignored the challenge and specialise in doing small tasks well, solving straightforward problems and handing off the complex cases to a person. Adam Smith explained in the late 1700s that productivity is built on a process of dividing up labour into small specialised tasks. Modern chatbots work on the same principle. This logic leads economists to believe that automation reshapes jobs rather than destroying them. Jobs are sliced into tasks, computers take over the routine tasks, humans supply the creativity and the adaptability. That's 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, producers and perhaps even as ordinary citizens, we can tort 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're settling for the feeling that someone's listening. Brian Christian argues that we humans should view this as a challenge to raise our game. Let the computers take over the call centres. Isn't that better than forcing a robot made of flesh and blood to stick to a script, frustrating everyone involved? We might hope that rather than fooling humans, better chatbots will save time, freeing us up to talk more meaningfully to each other.
SPEAKER_06: The perfect guide to the history of chatbots is Brian Christian's The Most Human Human. For a full list of our sources, please see bbcworldservice.com slash 50things.
