Jobs at The Facing Page: Editorial services

This startup ( thefacingpage.org ) is dedicated to a single experiment: reproduce in silico the same collaborative, population-level, biological processes that lead to the evolution of beauty in the natural world and channel these processes toward the translation and editorial revision of works of literature, academic scholarship and text-based advertisements. It's an open question whether we can adapt a text in translation to the cognitive and aesthetic preferences of a target audience/language community in much the same way that, for example, flowers evolve through a process of shared historic interaction to appeal to the preferences of pollinating animals. More intriguingly still, and as a potential result of having to advertise their beauty across the great evolutionary chasm that separates them from their distantly related pollinators, flowers have succeeded in "communicating across the gaps", as it were, transcending many of the boundaries that define the numerous, distinctive and often segregated sensory worlds of animals. For who among us hasn't stopped to smell the roses? And yet, there are no genes in common between the olfactory receptors of insect pollinators and vertebrates. Indeed, some theorists believe that the near universal appeal of flowers can only be fully accounted for in terms of this "communication across the gaps" hypothesis. Likewise, perhaps the divide between individual minds or language communities is meaningfully analogous and just as far-reaching? Please join us in our effort to "communicate across the gaps" using evolutionary methods in AI inspired by the new science of aesthetics, and in so doing produce works of potentially universal beauty.