turing test
“Where the machines were identified correctly by the human interrogators as machines, the conversational abilities of each machine was scored at 80 and 90%. This demonstrates how close machines are getting to reaching the milestone of communicating with us in a way in which we are comfortable. That eventual day will herald a new phase in our relationship with machines, bringing closer the time in which robots start to play an active role in our daily lives.”
AP press
What if the venerable book is also a robot; a device simulating human behavior?
advent of news
“At 10:10 we find that fourteen pages have been locked up and sent to the stereotypers. Twenty-six pages remain, and we must get the news into them and get them away at a rate of about one a minute. Type is scattered all over the room, coming hot from 80 type-setting machines. The minutes are flying by with the speed of a robot bomb; but so also are the pages. They must not be bunched in closing as that would choke the stereotyping department and delay the edition. At 10:30 there are ten pages to go; at 10:35 there are six pages; at 10:40 the last page has been locked up, and the edition has gone to press on time. In twenty minutes it will be selling on the street. “ from The Newspaper, Its Making and Meaning, 1945
The expectation of hourly news had its advent in the hot metal era. The many hand-offs from typewriter to Linotype setting to stone composition to plate casting to press rolling to street hawking were not necessarily more or less complex than digital transmission. But they were accomplished, at each step, with physical manipulations and human transactions.
palm reading
The i-Pod has germinated its own library of
reading applications. Meanwhile, according to
Teleread, p-books are apparently out-alluring e-books at the Boarders concept store. Why the divide between dedicated and undedicated hand-held devices?