The more I think about this thread and the article, the more interesting
this whole thing is getting. I'm trying to recall a section of one of
Neal Stephenson's novels, maybe Snow Crash (too tired and cold-ridden to
go digging right now), where some characters immerse themselves in a
kind of hive-semiconsciousness in a community built around that idea.
The robo editor notion and the unending streams of search-based
associative language and connection remind me for some reason of that
Stephenson idea.
The Web and its multimodal, multimedia, deeply-immersive engagement with
our minds may represent an embryonic form of that hive-mind gestating in
the human species, and all one needs to do is to run some searches to
tap into the stream. Once in, things become incomprehensible at the
more-conscious levels of thought but eerily resonant below them.
An example. I Googled three offhandedly-chosen words: "grandiloquence
tertiary quadrature" and got back 94,000 hits. Some were dictionaries
and lexicons, but then in came some strange things: a Hungarian blog, a
blog constructed of what appeared to be random sentences, a Polish blog
of random language, and I found myself having to resist the pull to
continue immersing myself in it all. So what's the pull, and why is
anyone pulling? This looks a bit to me like a tradeoff from conscious
rationality toward preconscious associativity, but I'm not any more sure
of this than I might be about anything that works on my mind where I
can't detect it well.
Maybe we're headed somewhere new - who knows?
On 10/20/2011 10:22 AM, Jason Olshefsky wrote:
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
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