Does Technology Have a Soul?

It had come up before, my tendency to attribute life to machines. Earlier that year I'd come across a blog run by a woman who trained neural networks, a Ph.D. student and hobbyist who fiddled around with deep learning in her spare time. She would feed the networks massive amounts of data in a particular category--recipes, pickup lines, the first sentences of novels--and the networks would begin to detect patterns and generate their own examples. For a while she was regularly posting on her blog recipes the networks had come up with, which included dishes like whole chicken cookies, artichoke gelatin dogs, and Crock-Pot cold water. The pickup lines were similarly charming ("Are you a candle? Because you're so hot of the looks with you"), as were the first sentences of novels ("This is the story of a man in the morning").