The Wall Street Journal reviews Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World, by Christopher Steiner.
“In the mid-1970s, Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT railed against depriving humans of their capacity to choose, even if computers could decide everything for us. For Weizenbaum, choosing and deciding were different activities—and no algorithm should be allowed to blur the difference.”
However, the earliest algorithm has been found on a clay tablet from roughly 2500 BC and now these codes can be found in almost every sector of life – music, health care, business, Google, and police stations. Even Oulipo has provided algorithms for writing but, for now at least, we can trust that the writing process has remained mostly human.
