A particular kind of technological optimism assumes that anything worth knowing can eventually be measured, modelled, and optimised.
Liam Spradlin calls it computism and begins his argument in a Silicon Valley test kitchen where engineers are trying to build an oven capable of cooking Michelin-quality food without the messy intervention of an actual cook.
From there, the essay becomes an argument about something much larger than cooking. What happens when subjective experience is treated as a problem of insufficient data? What happens when taste, judgement, and intuition are regarded not as forms of knowledge in their own right, but as imperfections waiting to be translated into something a machine can understand?
The essay begins with a kitchen, a chef, an oven, and the stubborn fact that an oven cannot taste.
It turns out to be a much bigger problem than it first appears.
Read: Who Will Taste the Cherries?
Liam Spradlin, Aeon, September 2026.
Why RareRead picked it
It gives a name to an assumption that is increasingly difficult to see from inside the systems built upon it: that if something cannot be measured, represented as data, and optimised, it is somehow an inferior form of knowledge.
And it leaves you with an uncomfortable question.
If we eventually succeed in making everything computable, what happens to the things that were never meant to be computed?