In putting the algorithm in charge gramatically, researchers abnegate their own complicity—and by extension, our agency in the matter.

Clark’s program was intelligent in the sense that it modeled the “rational pursuit of goals.”

“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Derived from Chomsky’s procedural grammar, the sentence may be correct according to the rules of language. But to know that ideas don’t sleep, or that one does not sleep furiously, requires experience in the physical world.

The work of encoding values into software systems can now be more trivially automated.

Platonic universal rationalism tolerates contingent, nonrational paths to enlightenment.

Did it actually “compile” or “present” anything, or was that done by Gregory Crane and his team from Tufts University, the makers of the project? Their smarts made me smarter. But how is it that we find it so natural to cede agency to the tool?

History’s subtle advantage lies in the revealing of trajectories through time.

The best of us occurs more rarely in comparison to our base impulses. Frequency alone therefore does not suffice for intelligence, in a basic pedagogical sense.

The smart table, in the words of Karl Marx, another furniture enthusiast, “changes into something transcendent,” a fetish, turned onto its head, fashioning grotesque ideas out of its wooden brain, as it recedes into the backdrop of ordinary commodities.