On Oct 20, 2011, at 9:24 AM, Alicia Henn wrote: > http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/books/review/do-androids-dream-of-electric-authors.html?scp=3&sq=androids+electric&st=nyt > > Here's an amusing article about automated book writing, complete with how > essential human authors are to robo wiki-harvesting.
The first thing I was going to do was to copy and paste your e-mail and resend it. Or make a script to do it for me. Then I went and read the article and halfway through I didn't know what "diaspora" meant so I double-clicked, hit Command-C and was about to pop over to Dashboard and put it in the dictionary when a little text-bubble with a question-mark popped up. I clicked it and it loaded a pop-up with the American Heritage definition. Good robot. Then I finished the article and thought, "wow, reCAPTCHA is going to get really really difficult soon." (Since, when you answer a reCAPTCHA you get two words: one that is known-human-readable, and one that is an OCR error, so when you answer it correctly, you are actually assisting automatic OCR. I figured it would soon be, "are these Wikipedia articles related?") It's really too bad they make paper books out of drivel. [Insert joke about Congress.] I can see cranking out eBooks, but in a way, it would be not-quite-trivial to make something that makes a Wikipedia eBook (if there isn't one already.) "Hitchhiker's Guide" here we come. ---Jason Olshefsky http://JayceLand.com/ http://JayceLand.com/blog/ 585-789-1473 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en.
