Not Pound Materials per se. But the richness of the possibilities of
such materials for poetry. I hope you are right about the "overoptimism"
of the pursuit of human rights for computers. But the push has huge
corporate interests behind it, and corporations are already considered
'individuals' in a court of law which is quite an ontological [e.g.
expansion of legal taxonomies] slight of hand in and of itself. CP Tim
Bray wrote:
>
> At 09:44 PM 02/06/01 -0400, R. Gancie/C.Parcelli wrote:
> >Because of the broad commercial applications in industry, the U.S.
> >Congress
> >and the courts will in the near future be taking up the question of
> >whether or not to grant
> >"human rights" to automata, or robots.
>
> This posting is technically overoptimistic.  Among other things
>
>  - Von Neumann provided one of the stepping stones that may get
>    us to intelligent machines, but not the biggest
>  - Machines are not remotely close to acting intelligent.
>  - The decades-long quest to make them intelligent has foundered
>    on the rock of our ignorance of how our own  minds work.
>
> One of these decades, these issues will become material.  Er,
> where does EP come in? -Tim