Posts
Comments
I’m not sure we need another term. Instead, it would be helpful to be precise about human agency versus AI agency. Some of the difficulty with terminology involves how much we tend to obscure the human labor underlying certain processes. It is not, for example, accurate to say that AI can now design cities. This kind of phrasing gives AI agency, and even anthropomorphizes it. It is more accurate to say city planners can now use a machine learning system to analyse survey data about which street designs are the safest and so on… If we could be more precise about what is going on with our systems and give humans their just due, then some of this confusion (and fear that the robots are taking over) would die down.
“I'd argue that, just by knowing that a play is by Shakespeare, we assume that it's deep and meaningful, and read in deeper interpretations and symbolism than we would otherwise.”
I largely agree, but there are some Shakespeare plays that are just not that deep or meaningful—Romeo and Juliet, for example. I think Shakespeare knew he was writing about some silly teenagers, but contemporary readers invest their relationship with more profundity than the play warrants. And, just to be a bit more nuanced, I read his plays for their superior wordplay and less for the deep interpretations that literary critics lay on top of them.