Kathryn

“The scale shift of labour composition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries affected also the logic of automation, that is, the scientific paradigms involved in this transformation. The relatively simple industrial division of labour and its seemingly rectilinear assembly lines could easily be compared to a simple algorithm, a rulebased procedure with an ‘if/then’ structure which has its equivalent in the logical form of deduction. Deduction, not by coincidence, is the logical form that via Leibniz, Babbage, Shannon, and Turing innervated into electromechanical computation and eventually symbolic AI. Deductive logic is useful for modelling simple processes, but not systems with a multitude of autonomous agents, such as society, the market, or the brain.”
― Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence

“data mining promised to overcome usual ways of dividing and understanding the world.”
― Chris Wiggins, How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms

“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

“For Sebald, speaking in 1997, the difference between his own situation as a writer and Dickensian (or Austenian) exemplarity is primarily historical: If you refer to Jane Austen, you refer to a world where there were set standards of propriety which were accepted by everyone. Given that you have a world where the rules are clear and where one knows where trespassing begins, then I think it is legitimate, within that kind of context, to be a narrator who knows what the rules are and who knows the answers to certain questions. But I think these certainties have been taken from us by the course of history, and that we do have to acknowledge our own sense of ignorance and of insufficiency in these matters and therefore to try and write accordingly.”
― Timothy Bewes, Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age