Daily Archives: January 18, 2017

from http://twitter.com/fleurhills
via IFTTT http://twitter.com/fleurhills/status/821757933683933186

Hard not to be interested in the boundaries between humans and artificial intelligence,

Our machines are disturbingly lively

(Haraway, 2007)

I found a website which challenges you to read a poem and vote on whether it was written by a bot or a human. I voted correctly the first time, but then incorrectly about four times. Some of the poems were translated from other languages so at times it was difficult to decide. My second correct vote for Written by a human felt unmistakable though. A way-in to investigating computer-generated poetry and exploring the boundaries between humans and robots.

Humans and human-coded robots?

Haraway, Donna (2007) A cyborg manifesto from Bell, David; Kennedy, Barbara M (eds),  The cybercultures reader pp.34-65, London: Routledge.

Not streaming but waving

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Not streaming but waving

I had a blog breakdown yesterday when my ifttt applets stopped working. I started to panic a bit, thinking I would get left behind and leave no evidence of any digital life for days. Some dismal time was spent testing, not reading.

Then I decided to turn things around, thinking that silence and absence are meaningful anyway. A pause in my lifestream blog would signify something – illness, existential crisis, network problems, emergency at work … and probably nobody else would even notice 🙂

I’m quite used to technology going ‘wrong’ and trying to find the logical reason for why things aren’t working as they should, but yesterday was a classic example of letting my human-ness (emotions) get in the way of calmly working things out. It would’ve been better if I could have switched over to Replicant mode!

Only through the administration of a subtle verbal cognitive test is one able to separate humans from Replicants (Miller, 2011)

Miller, V. (2011) Chapter 9: The Body and Information Technology, in Understanding Digital Culture. London: Sage.