How Computers Learned to Read

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. We live in a world where facial recognition has become so sophisticated that we're being forced to ask very serious ethical questions about it. In China, it's being used to detect toilet paper theft. But I want to take a step back from the big hairy ethical questions and consider how we started on this road--with typography. Optical character recognition, or OCR, is a technology that came up with computing in general.