AI legibility, physical archives, and the future of research

where AI may hit an unexpected wall is any domain which depends upon some combination of intuition, physical presence, and illegible data .

Like, say, history.

Over long periods of time spent in physical archives, you develop a holistic picture of a slice of history that is necessarily individual to you, as the researcher, because you can’t control or even fully understand what your brain finds interesting in a set of documents. They’re just ... interesting . Maybe not to anyone else, at first. But over t... See more