Human-Complete Problems

Occasionally, I manage to be clever when I am not even trying to be clever, which isn't often. In a recent conversation about the new class of doomsday scenarios inspired by AlphaGo beating the Korean trash-talker Lee Sedol, I came up with the phrase human complete (HC) to characterize certain kinds of problems: the hardest problems of being human. An example of (what I hypothesize is) an HC problem is earning a living. I think human complete is a very clever phrase that people should use widely, and credit me for, since I can't find other references to it. I suspect there may be money in it. Here is a picture of the phrase that I will explain in a moment. In this post, I want to explore a particular bunny trail: the relationship between being human and the ability to solve infinite game problems in the sense of James Carse. I think this leads to an interesting perspective on the meaning and purpose of AI. The phrase human complete is constructed via analogy to the term AI complete, an ambiguously defined class of problems, including machine vision and natural language processing, that is supposed to contain the hardest problems in AI. That term itself is a reference to a much more precise one used in computer science: NP complete, which is a class of the hardest problems in computer science in a certain technical sense. NP complete is a subset of a larger class known as NP, which is the set of all problems for a certain class of non-God-level computers.