[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> The bias of translating programs

[Keith Sanborn <mrzero@panix.com>]

I found wade tillett's experiments with machine assisted poetry generation
to be moderately interesting. The language poets and their sympathizers 
have been making such use of artificial stupidity for as long as micros
were cheap. I think the first example was more interesting because of the
intentionality implied in the degree of intervention. The second
example--and don't get me wrong I like Finnegan's Wake better than
Ulysses--the more nearly it approached machine intelligence, the less
interesting it became, or rather the less I cared about it. It does
however occupy a kind of queasy space between the sound symbolism of the
dadaist and futurists and the more baroque modulations of the
letterists. All the same, it ain't Klebnikov. OK it's not 1923 either, so
there is something in it worthy of attention. Perhaps it will take the
machines more intelligent that humans that will arrive in 30 years or so
to appreciate it.

Perhaps it's only that machine consciousness, in so far as it intersects
with human intelligence, represents a degree of difference (or is it
sollipcism?) that may be inherently unfathomable for humans, or at least
this human. What then does machine communication represent, as
differentiated from human communication?

Perhaps I merely resent machine indifference to meatbound
consciousness. Nostalgia? Perhaps.

No, I don't think a nostalgia for human is the autonomic response. I
actually enjoy reading phone books.

Keith Sanborn


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