“Heron's rope encodes motion, al-Khwarizmi's procedure survives the mathematician, the Golem obeys the letter, Babbage separates program from machine, and Turing makes computation independent of any particular material device. The through-line is not "ancient AI;" it’s the dream that command can be written in a form that executes without subjectivity, without concern or care or even any particular materiality.”

- from an upcoming essay.

Contemporary Tech/A.I./ideas about Computation are not new—they belong to History, maybe even prehistory. They represent Man’s ancient, eternal obsession with manipulating the world around him, acting to bring the world into accordance with his own will… It seems we’ve forgotten that the notion of a generalized quality common to animals, machines, even disembodied processes that can be summed up as purposive behavior (or Intelligence), studied, and replicated for a given purpose was an eighty-or-so-years-old innovation that might have been common among mathematicians or engineers, but was in fact never properly accepted among philosophers and other theorists of Humanness. If anything Human does indeed make it out of the near future, it will be because it inhabits a world in which it doesn’t have to obey laws of Identity, it doesn’t have to Enjoy what it can never have, it doesn’t even have to know what it wants (because it can’t!)!