What scanners can't do
The First Monday article by Paul Duguid on Google Books’ mangling of Tristam Shandy is an eye-opening read.
By showing that, at least in this instance, Google fails to come to grips with the “bookish character of books”, Duguid suggests that the attempt to build a library by disembodying books is a naive one, fated to create a resource of far less quality and utility than an actual bricks-and-mortar library.
Duguid’s critique bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Hubert Dreyfus’ skewering of 1980’s-era artificial intelligence. Dreyfus’ critique hinged on the argument that the attempt to build machines of human-level intelligence without embodying them so they could interact with the physical world was doomed to failure.
As vilified as Dreyfus was by the AI community for his position, in the more than thirty years that have passed since “What Computers Can’t Do” was first published, there have been no effective responses, save that of Rodney Brooks and others in the artificial life movement who essentially ceded the point by instead building embodied insect-level intelligences.