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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