It sounds rather a lot like Cold Reading, actually, or perhaps Chauncy Gardiner. Who deserves the credit when we are fooled into thinking the machine is clever?

I'm reminded of surrealist techniques like those used by Ernst...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealist_techniques

Just because the meaning is produced through a computer-aided process doesn't mean that there was a loss of artistic agency. A whole lot of what we call authorhship occurs by accident, right?

The weight of intellectual cyborgism as you called it is profound, though perhaps not obvious to some. Search engines and the program Steven Johnson uses are external to the user. We operate on them externally, and thus have the sense that our thinking and actions are still driving them, and not vise versa.

Imagine the DEVONthink software were somehow embedded into our brains (which isn't as far a stretch as it once was)?! We often use the physical separation between us and our machines to assure ourselves of our cognitive separation. But the lines are blurring!

Does anyone know of the new programs hitting the market this year that Steven Johnson was referring to? I feel like I want to get my hands on one of these.

I like this "intellectual cyborgism" meme, because its hotness amuses me; however, it's also possible to look at the phenomenon in a more sober way: the emotional reaction that some modern software gets these days, particulary from some of the more, say, "sensitive" writers and scientists perhaps closer associated to a "design" than to an "engineering" background, to me mostly means that software writers get better at expressing themselves through code.

Software is an expressive medium, like books and movies, and software writers, having mastered the basics of "implementing intelligence" at the level of numerical calculations - producing word processors, spreadsheets and other "character-independent" applications, are beginning to learn to exploit the user's emotions by implementing intelligence wy ways of the "character" a piece of code might communicate.

I expect vast improvements in this area of human-computer-interfacing in the next few years, but would like to remind you that it involves an illusion: the intelligence that you might feel when working with latest-generation software right now is that of another human expressing her/himself.

The machine provides only the transfer mechanism for human-to-human communications, where one part of the communication happens to come in a "stored" form. On the input side, this is not fundamentally different from how a book works - someone has to write it -; however, when it comes to the output side, books can only ever represent old data - the known" -, while we're getting to the point where we get machines to generate useful new data - the unknown.

Sorry I'm coming late to this crazy-smart discussion. Danil, I love the Chauncy Gardiner comparison!

Greg, yep, there's a big streak of surrealist ideology in this. It also reminds me of the craze in the 60s for "idea cards" -- decks of cards that had various ideas and questions on 'em, and you'd shuffle them up, pick a few, and try and apply them to whatever problem you were thinking on. The concept was, roughly, the same: Let an outside, impassively "alien" intellectual construct hybridize your own thinking, and see what emerges.

Steve, I don't know what's on the market, but I want some of it too!

Dirk, that's a great point: Books are, of course, a traditionally robust way of encountering a package of information outside yourself -- my incredibly awkward way of saying "learning", heh. The traditional tools of scholarship -- the concordance, the footnotes, the index -- could be seen as pre-computational methods of parsing data in intriguing ways.

I don't think either he or the software deserves the credit for the concept. Rather, this is a connection that has been made through the collective intelligence of the English language. It's no coincidence that the same word was used to mean similar things, and simply by the fact that such terms exist, we can see that the association is by no means novel.

Still, it's clear that this particular quote would not have existed without the combination of the writer and the software. The value of the software here seems to be that it was simply able to bring his attention to the connection. It was able to focus on a conceptual link that was found specifically within his use of the language, and thus one that would immediately resonate with him. He is still needed to filter through the results returned by the search and do the actual writing. Who knows what other tangential connections were produced that were simply useless?

I want to see oll the sexy girls
end then I well chuose