things that talk
Via Compatriot G, straight to my inbox and apropos of my interest in bots and agency. I’m filing it here so I can find it again.:
"As Descartes pointed out in the Discourse on Method, genuine language must be inventive and apt, capable of an indefinite number of utterances that suit the circumstances in which they are uttered. Hence parrots and all manner of parroting devices, from echo chambers to tape recorders, are disqualified from true speech. Descartes believed that language was distinctively human, a criterion for distinguishing anthropos from automaton" (Lorrraine Daston, Things that Talk 11).