My tired and activity-addled brain just can’t handle longform right now, so I admit that so far I’ve only skimmed this John Seabrook piece for The New Yorker (via Mark Isero) about a machine learning to write, specifically to read the passages that said machine wrote after analyzing the magazine’s archives.
“The more machines rely on language,” the machine itself declares, “the more power they have to distort the discourse, and the more that ordinary people are at risk of being put in a dehumanized social category.”
If you know me, this entire experiment (and I swear that I will get around the reading the article for real and in full) can’t help but make me think again about Galatea 2.2, by the end of which its machine, Helen, having been brought into a world that didn’t bother preparing a proper place for her, declares, “This is an awful place to be dropped down halfway.”