Kathryn

“The very act of looking at an old painting can be so strange. It is an activity that is often bound up with class identity or social aspiration. It can sometimes feel like a diverting, or irritating, stroll among White people’s ancestors. It can also often be wonderful, giving the viewer a chance to be blessed by a stranger’s ingenuity or insight. But rarely, something even better happens: a painting made by someone in a distant country hundreds of years ago, an artist’s careful attention and turbulent experience sedimented onto a stretched canvas, leaps out of the past to call you—to call you—to attention in the present, to drive you to confusion by drawing from you both a sense of alarm and a feeling of consolation, to bring you to an awareness of your own self in the act of experiencing something that is well beyond the grasp of language, something that you wouldn’t wish to live without.”
― Teju Cole, Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time

“Lovelace defined as an ‘operation’ the control of material and symbolic entities beyond the second-order language of mathematics (like the idea, discussed in chapter 1, of an algorithmic thinking beyond the boundary of computer science). In a visionary way, Lovelace seemed to suggest that mathematics is not the universal theory par excellence but a particular case of the science of operations. Following this insight, she envisioned the capacity of numerical computers qua universal machines to represent and manipulate numerical relations in the most diverse disciplines and generate, among other things, complex musical artefacts: [The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine … Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”
― Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence

“What remains is the work, and I don’t have to love him to know that I need to know what he knows, the knowledge that hums, centuries later, on the surface of his paintings, knowledge of all the pain, loneliness, beauty, fear, and awful vulnerability our bodies have in common.”
― Teju Cole, Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time

“Teams are working on products that will generate new DNA sequences using only natural language instructions. Transformer models are learning the language of biology and chemistry, again discovering relationships and significance in long, complex sequences illegible to the human mind.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future