TechTakes

So happy to be of service!

There is no way the difference isn’t obvious to anyone who’s ever willingly read a poem, and the authors of the paper must know it.

I'm honestly not sure that they know, unfortunately. I think that the authors might be the kind of people who have literally never thought about the arts in a meaningful way. If you've never spent a lot of time with these people, it can be really really difficult to imagine it because it's frankly fucking insane, but it's disturbingly common. Philip Agre has written wonderfully on this. He was once like that, and that essay describes his awakening.

I had incorporated the field's taste for technical formalization so thoroughly into my own cognitive style that I literally could not read the literatures of nontechnical fields at anything beyond a popular level. The problem was not exactly that I could not understand the vocabulary, but that I insisted on trying to read everything as a narration of the workings of a mechanism. By that time much philosophy and psychology had adopted intellectual styles similar to that of AI, and so it was possible to read much that was congenial -- except that it reproduced the same technical schemata as the AI literature. I believe that this problem was not simply my own -- that it is characteristic of AI in general (and, no doubt, other technical fields as well). This is not to say that AI has no intellectual resources and no capacity for originality. In recent years particularly, the field has made productive connections with a wide variety of other technical fields, establishing common cause through the sharing of technical schemata.

I love how he describes the feeling.

I still remember the vertigo I felt during this period; I was speaking these strange disciplinary languages, in a wobbly fashion at first, without knowing what they meant -- without knowing what sort of meaning they had. Formal reason has an unforgiving binary quality -- one gap in the logic and the whole thing collapses -- but this phenomenological language was more a matter of degree; I understood intellectually that the language was "precise" in a wholly different sense from the precision of technical language, but for a long time I could not convincingly experience this precision for myself, or identify it when I saw it. Still, in retrospect this was the period during which I began to "wake up", breaking out of a technical cognitive style that I now regard as extremely constricting.

I think that we've all experienced minor versions of this, like when you (re)read a difficult text and it finally clicks. It really is almost dizzying! Imagine doing it for all nontechnical fields.