1
Before developing his communication theory, Weaver makes clear that his use of the concept of information is absolved of meaningfulness and intent to influence, thus focusing on the level of technical problems of communication and excluding its semantic and influential levels (pp.30). In a process of abstraction, he is breaking information down to units and shows that messages are constituted as a series of discrete symbols – some of which get chosen freely from a definite field of possibilities (the extent of which is described as entropy, pp.31) while the rest are controlled by the statistical associations (pp.34).  It is interesting how such a process of quantification reveals the underlying structure of language and thus, the very nature of communication. However, to whom does it reveal it to? Weaver was a pioneer of “machine translation”, so is the receiver of his communication theory a machine rather than a human? If this is the case, does this suggest that (since his theory derives from the technical level of communication) the levels of semantics and influence (that is, meaning and intent) belong only to the human realm?
Today, the field of Artificial Intelligence investigates the ways in which meaning and intent are indeed produced from dynamic and complex statistical associations. How has communication theory evolved to accommodate this new reality?

2 (not really a question actually, just an observation)
It its telling to see that, even a figure as open-minded as Alan Turing – who himself did not exactly blend in the moral construct of postwar Britain – is nonetheless, a product of his environment: In order to prove the absurdity of the Theological Objection (which paired animals with machines due to their supposed inability to think), he wonders what a Christian would think of the fact that the Muslim religion considers women soul-less. However, Turing’s source is unknown (there is no such statement in the Qu’ran). This suggests that he is himself using a preconceived notion of theological origin – which is, paradoxically, exactly what he is arguing against.

However, if one reads between the lines of this unfortunate example, it looks like Turing identifies an emergent thread between animals, machines and women, decades before the intellectual movements of technofeminism and ecofeminism manifested themselves.

3
Turing explores the nature of possible machine mistakes as twofold (pp.58): these deriving from technical failures of mechanical or electrical kind, and those of logically wrong conclusions. The former is about what we often refer to as bugs or glitches, namely malfunctions of hardware – a natural consequence of the fact that a machine is a material artifact. Maybe, in a similar manner, machines are as much subject to failure as human bodies that suffer organ failures. On the other hand, the error of conclusion seems to differ in nature. It derives from the program or the software, as opposed to the hardware. Being universal, digital computers may be programmed to perform any set of instructions (pp.53), however there is no guarantee that this set of instructions has not inherited the logical gaps or bias of its author. Tellingly, man may reach a false conclusion following the method of scientific induction (pp.57) as much as the machine, since it is programmed by man (pp.58). In which ways are machine errors inevitably human?