doodads

But there’s freedom in insignificance, of losing your stray thoughts and anxieties to the dance that fabric does against your skin, in the way your fingertips run over little details and doodads, in constructing an elaborate vocabulary largely spoken to yourself to describe small and private rituals and pleasures.

On Sept. 22, hundreds of Pearce students wore mums festooned with ribbons, feathers, teddy bears, cowbells, whistles and various other doodads.

He describes all the doodads in his digital workshop as “enchanted objects,” and cites the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

He makes the case rather to credit a secretary of Norwegian descent, Eleanore Lilleberg, who was tired of referring to the “gold knights in her care” as “doodads, thingamajigs, hoozits and gadgets” and mentally conjured a military veteran with dignified bearing she’d known as a girl.

I wanted to figure out whether machine learning—and all the suddenly ubiquitous, A.I.-flavored doodads that have captured the tech world’s imagination in recent months—has anything useful to offer in terms of facilitating human connection.