John Henry is an improbable folk hero; he came to a bad end after opposing an advance in technology that made life better.

Telescopes reduced God's dominion over the cosmic spheres, washing machines reduced the household's dominion over women, automobiles reduced the dominion of horse manure over streets, Chinook and Deep Blue reduced the dominion of experts over board games.

At every step people worried what these advances meant, while at the same time embracing and adapting to them.

Ever since Barthes told us the author is dead, we have been expected to judge a text on its own merits, without worrying about the author's intentions, culture, psychology or (I suppose) whether it is made out of meat. Perhaps that is a good way to look at computer-generated writing.

These baseball blurbs both sound pretty crappy to me, desperately trying to make a few statistics read like a story. If it's any comfort, the algorithm almost certainly has a phrasebook based on the many ways human sportswriters have devised to express baseball concepts and it simply mixes and matches these terms with less creativity than it takes to play Mad Libs.

Nevertheless, it seems inevitable that a computer-generated novel will one day become a bestseller.

If algorithmic writing creeps you out, Der Bibelschreiber will surely give you the willies.