Lit Hub
It’s 2019. I’m in a bar in Providence, Rhode Island, chatting with graduate students and researchers with PhDs. One of them, who holds a PhD in Latin American literature, observed approvingly that programmers were now teaching robots how to write poetry. But this struck me as a total waste of time. Why would anyone bother making robots who could write poetry, except to advance the field of robotics? His answer: it was worth building robots who could write poetry “so that people won’t have to”…. In that moment we were at odds about the essence of humanity.