A chance to change vs. life autocorrect

I was talking more about the aesthetics and culture, how it is "calcified" as Kevin Slavin says, into algorithms. In fact this is not new: since we invented means of "externalizing minds" (print, etc), we suffered unintentionally form that process of "calcification". 

At first the intention is good: to crystallize, computerize and automate what you like - so as to discover or enhance automatically the things you like most about the world you live in. But then.. there is no space for change, control or exploration (here I totally agree with Kevin).

Kevin talks a lot about the financial world, and I think this is a good (important) example with profound consequences. I was thinking more about very subtle "differences" that at the end make huge cultural shifts (perhaps even more important consequences after all). For instance, take language and speech. Think what the word-processor has done to writing. From the XVI century onwards, books were written in which words had different spelling (in the same page sometimes! I had evidence in my own hands), and nobody cared. Then, by the end of the 19 century, "proper" grammar and spelling became a social selection force: good jobs for the ones who wrote better, without "mistakes" or misspelling. Computers and word processors seem at first to "democratize" the situation, but the price to pay is that "calcification" of language. There is no more right to explore - and I say "explore", I don't say the right to "make mistakes" because this is the whole point.

Language was a living thing, now is a solidified, complex and arbitrary structure of symbols. And from spelling, to grammar, to politically correct writing... All this can be embedded in an algorithm that would help you make "mistakes". Lately I had noticed another example of this, in the field of photography: as an early example of this, my brother (who is an artist living in Paris) exhibited a work called "non facture", back in 2000 or before (I owed my first digital camera in 2003). The idea was to take pictures, bring the rolls to the shop for developing at "La Fnac". The guys there would then look at the pictures, and if they *they* found the picture was not good (not properly focused, or whatever reason), they would stamp it with a sticker saying "non facture" (meaning you would not pay for it). My brother exhibited only these pictures; in a world: he tried to expose the "aesthetics" of the "algorithms" these guys were using to separate good from bad pictures. Amazingly, there was some coherence in the exhibition... An algorithmic aesthetic was emerging from that!! 

Now ASIC chips are doing the same in real time, inside digital cameras. There are modes (that one promptly forget to disable) that don't let you take pictures if the person is overexposed, underexposed or... not smiling. This is just an example, another example of what I would call "willful calcification" to extend Kevin language. It is not about efficiency, but about the danger of inverting the power of algorithmic aesthetics: use them not to explore, but to judge works of art. 

Then of course one can wonder if one day these algorithms will get sophisticated enough, meaning by that more "human". We are algorithms after all. 

A form of (controlled?) chaos should be introduced in the loop to give us a chance to change...