Banned Books and Computer Writers

Here's two Guardian Unlimited columns that caught my eye this week.

The first I spotted at SF Signal in which Alastair Harper ponders what the future may hold for writers as computer software is now capable of editing prose, it isn't a big leap of the imagination that they'll be able to write them in the future:

It would also seem that science fiction writers have again got it wrong. In the great future-science documentary that was the film of Isaac Asimov's short story collection I, Robot, Will Smith's character smugly argues that machine can never best man since they could never be poets. As it turns out, they have that market covered before they even got to laser death rays. The next Deep Blue contest of man versus machine will presumably be over the Booker prize. Ladbrokes may well be accepting bets already.

The second is by John Freeman as he talks about Banned Book Day and compares banned books to gateway drugs:

It's all part of what ought to be called the War on Gateway Drugs. That's what books really are to children and young people - gateways to new experiences, greater complexities. And what better way to protect them from these things - otherwise known as 'the world' - than by staunching the problem at its source?