## Metadata - Author: [[Sven Birkerts]] - Full Title: The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing - Category: #books ## Highlights - The ever-narrowing interval between man and machine was dramatically illustrated in the 2016 face-off between Japanese Go master Lee Sedol and Demis Hassabis’ AI program AlphaGo, which has been documented in Benjamín Labatut’s recent novel, The Maniac, which is very much about that interval. The five-game match played in Seoul was filmed and can be viewed online. ([Location 49](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFRPB5DK&location=49)) - Words treated as merely functional begin to lead us to a gradual acceptance ([Location 73](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFRPB5DK&location=73)) - Expressive intention is so readily assumed, even when it’s not there. Does it matter? Will people continue to think it does? ([Location 89](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFRPB5DK&location=89)) - This state has been called, mysteriously, the uncanny valley, defined by Wikipedia as a hypothesis predicting that “any entity appearing almost human will risk eliciting cold, eerie feelings in viewers.” Lacking the basic certainty about the status of a work, the reader experiences an unanchored expression, a diminished version of the traditional circuit of exchange, a sense that everything might now live inside parentheses. ([Location 94](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFRPB5DK&location=94)) - There is also the easily overlooked but highly important matter of projection. Projection is when the reader imposes onto a text qualities that may not be part of the work—impositions that may have everything to do with the reader’s wants and needs. Projection makes a literary work come alive; it draws on the will to believe. ([Location 99](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFRPB5DK&location=99)) - AI will never write a book that tells us something. . . new about being human—something recognizably true yet so personal as to be unheard of. That combination is a hallmark: familiarity—I can feel the open-palmed, non-plussed, frustrated truth-telling ([Location 136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0DFRPB5DK&location=136))