automation
Texts
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The Reading Machine Revisited
It’s easy to fixate on the cognitive events that constitute the act of reading, the silent process happening inside our head as our eyes scan the words and our mind makes sense of them—or whatever it is that it does—but there’s another way of looking at this phenomenon. It can be observed from the outside, as a behavioural phenomenon—a theory of reading without a theory of mind -
The Amanuensis
Trained on my library of articles on Instapaper, the Amamnuensis will select articles from my Twitter feed and my Feedly feed. These are in turn saved to Instapaper. Depending on level of confidence, some are marked as favourites . Even more assortative links are shared on Twitter. The Amanuensis highlights interesting passages. The Amanuensis is trained on the books I’ve read. The Amanuensis... -
The Reading Machine
At one point in the distant future, long after our sun has faded and its planets have passed, Pantography will produce the text, “in a village in la mancha, the name of which i cannot quite recalk”. One hour later, right on schedule, it will come out with a line that is indistinguishable from the opening words of the Penguin edition . If, upon seeing it, you were to hurry off to...
Citations
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But Nietzsche did not surrender. In one of his last typewritten letters he addressed media-technological complements and/or human substitution: the phonograph and the secretary. “This machine,” he observed in another...
Kittler: Gramophone, Film, Typewriter p252 -
Writing, this ordering of written signs into rows, can be mechanized and automated. Machines write faster than human beings. And not only that: they can vary the rules for assembling signs (the rules of orthography)...
Flusser: Does Writing Have a Future? p. 8 -
All writing is orderly, and that leads directly to the contemporary crisis in writing. For there is something mechanical about the ordering, the rows, and machines do this better than people do. One can leave writing, this...
Flusser: Does Writing Have a Future? p. 5 -
The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for...
Adams 1988 p. 3 -
[…] it is beneath human dignity to be concerned with matters that can be left to machines.
Flusser: Does Writing Have a Future? p. 26 -
[I]t is with a clear conscience and without regrets that I state that my place could perfectly well be occupied by a mechanical device.
in “Cybernetics and Ghosts” (1967) Calvino: The Literature Machine p. 16 -
Once we have dismantled and reassembled the process of literary composition, the decisive moment of literary life will be that of reading. In this sense, even though entrusted to machines, literature will continue to be...
in “Cybernetics and Ghosts” (1967) Calvino: The Literature Machine p. 16