From the cutting room floor: further thoughts about human and machine writing

Nothing new under the sun: This machine, built in the 18th century, can write. It’s one of the Jaquet-Droz automata. (Photo by Rama. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 France.)

One of my reactions to pandemic-induced isolation, fretfulness, and so forth has been to get up during the night, read things online, and jot notes about what I’m reading. One outcome of my nighttime reading was that I proposed to FastCompany.com an essay about computers that write, which was published last week. You can find...