They flag offensive content on social networks and delete spam from our inboxes. At the hospital, they help convert patient--doctor conversations into insurance billing codes. Sometimes, they alert law enforcement to potential terrorist plots and predict (poorly) the threat of violence on social media. Legal professionals use them to hide or discover evidence of corporate fraud. Students are writing their next school paper with the aid of a smart word processor, capable not just of completing sentences, but generating entire essays on any topic.

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.

For the average player, trying to beat the computer at chess (even when you're just playing on'easy' on your laptop) is a difficult task. But as humans, we take solace in the fact that chess Grand Masters are still able to win against machines. Despite chess engines being capable of searching through 200 million possible moves going against a human player who can only think of maybe five moves per second, the masters still manage to play at the same level as the advanced tech. By evaluating chess moves and having the ability to narrow down the most advantageous avenues of search, thus whittling down the options to just a few, notable possibilities. Computers are unable to this as efficiently as humans, which is why humans still have the upper hand (or at least a somewhat level playing field) when playing against machines.