BrainGate |
The title here is in reference to the human flesh
search engine, and only in theory, not in practice. The ‘flesh engine’ is
used for public humiliation, but the idea of it is simply the use of a
distributed process using humans as opposed to computers – not artificial
intelligence exactly, but an artificially-mediated human intelligence.
Nonetheless, this organizing agent, the whole of a particular population,
produces a unique database of smell-descriptions that defies our contemporary
notions of a “searchable database” to create the dirtiest of dirty data.
Snippets from Hidden Scents; this one is in relation to the way People
organize the names of smells, as compared to the science of chemistry or the
fragrance industry:
In this compartment of olfactory classification, smell is
organized by the human organism at large, the flesh of the anthroposphere, if
you will. Whereas scientific taxonomies and fragrance industry inventories are
themselves products of human endeavor – created for humans by humans – the
(unconscious) categorization of odors by the general population is a separate
system altogether.
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