Following that last post, more on the ways in which we have to become more adept at understanding machine intelligences, and becoming comfortable with the opaque nature of conversing with things that don’t share any reference points with you: Kevin Slavin at Lift. Includes the line, “New York City is becoming optimised to run like a motherboard…and you, all of you, are just loitering” (by way of Neal Stephenson).
Related: Geoffrey West on using complexity theory to consider cities as organisms, and Grant Morrison’s city-virus:
No one’s really sure where it came from or who brought it to us, but like all viral organisms, its one directive is to use up all available resources in producing copies of itself. More and more copies until there’s no raw material left and the host-body, overwhelmed, can only die. The cities want us to become good builders. Eventually, we’ll build rockets and carry the virus to other worlds.