As the level of knowledge on hand increases, our ability to create technology rises. Just in the past forty years, humans have created an almost infinite amount of programming languages. Using programming languages, we have been able to advance technology like never before. A relatively new concept that computer scientists are working on is the subject of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science that deals with the capability of a computer to simulate intelligent human behavior. In Brian Christian's excerpt, "Authenticating" he studies the differences between computers and humans, and analyzes the differences by having conversations with bots. Although the computers may seem as if they are human when conversing, they are not. Whatever the computer replies is the product of programs humans wrote, but at the same time there are many differences because computers are just a reflection of us. Although artificial intelligence blurs the boundary line of what it means to be human, computers do not converse like humans because human authenticity is established via our ability to reason and express emotion. .
The ability to reason is a vital attribute for humans and many living organisms. With the ability to reason, we are then able to make decisions based on certain situations. A common misconception of artificial intelligence is that the computer's output is self-initiated. To date, not one computer has made the simplest self-initiated decision and has demonstrated an ounce of intelligence. Every output generated by a computer was first programmed by a human. Another misconception about online programs such as Cleverbot is the fact that people think they are talking to an actual computer. The computer did not initiate the reply, humans wrote code that forces the bot to output certain sentences based on what the original input is. Humans did not write code for every situation, though, "[w]hat you get [is] the cobbling together of hundreds of thousands of prior conversation, is kind of conversational purée" (Christian 100).
