What obviously started based on the premise of entering to be a confederate in the annual Loebner Prize (based on the Turing Test), where the author would be a human trying to differentiate himself from various chat software programs attempting to pass as human, and what it means to win the award of being "the most human human" in this contest, Brian Christian delves into a delightful examination of:
- What differentiates human thinking from computer "thinking"? Or from the cognitive processes of non-human animals?
- How does human thinking work?
- What makes for interesting conversation? When do conversations work or not work? What conversations (and thus people) are most memorable? When are our conversations more robotic in nature?
- What aspects of language make it a uniquely human endeavour?
- What is the nature of emotion? Creativity? Poetry? Art?

That Christian was able to explore all this while also spicing the mix with terrific references to source material from Aristophanes and Plato to grunge music, Heisenberg, Hofstadter, and David Foster Wallace, Cameron Crowe films, Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov, Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, and Bertrand Russell, Isaac Newton, Ezra Pound and Allen Ginsberg, the music of Sting and Feist and Bach, TED Talks, Terminator and The Matrix and Glengarry Glen Ross, Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamp, Freakonomics, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. . . . I not only learned a lot, but also felt as if I had just walked into a room full of old friends, while also meeting some new friends to get to know.

A terrific, fun, and enlightening read.