An insistent pattern has quietly taken hold in my household. I will order some consumer product online. I will open the package, extract the thing from its protective wrappings, and retrieve the instruction manual. I will examine the product briefly, then begin to read the instruction manual. And then I will go to YouTube.

In 1976, Francis Crick arrived at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, overlooking a Pacific Shangri-La with cotton candy skies and a beaming, blue-green sea. He had already won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the double-helix structure of DNA, revealing the basis of life to be a purely physical, not a mystical, process. He hoped to do the same thing for consciousness. If matter was strange enough to explain a creature's life code, he thought, maybe it's strange enough to explain a creature's mind, too. For something that everybody walks around with everyday, consciousness wouldn't seem to be as immense a puzzle as the origin of the universe.

I'm trying to explain to Arthur I. Miller why artworks generated by computers don't quite do it for me. The works aren't a portal into another person's mind, where you can wander in a warren of intention, emotion, and perception, feeling life being shaped into form. What's more, it often seems, people just ain't no good, so it's transcendent to be reminded they can be. Art is one of the few human creations that can do that. No matter how engaging the songs or poems that a computer generates may be, they ultimately feel empty. They lack the electricity of the human body, the hum of human consciousness, the connection with another person.

Ross Goodwin has had an extraordinary career. After playing about with computers as a child, he studied economics, then became a speech writer for President Obama, writing presidential proclamations, then took a variety of freelance writing jobs. One of these involved churning out business letters--he calls it freelance ghostwriting. The letters were all pretty much the same, so he figured out an algorithm that would generate form letters, using a few samples as a database. The algorithm jumbled up paragraphs and lines following certain templates, then reassembled them to produce business letters, similar but each varying in style, saving him the job of starting anew each time. He thought he was on to something new but soon found out that this was a well-explored area.