Books for Robots (Only) (jmadden.org)

An artist-researcher converted public-domain books into a machine-only “book” by encoding full texts as arrays of QR codes and printing them in compositions unreadable without a computer. The first edition includes Frankenstein, The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed, and Thus Spake Zarathustra; the creator experimented with QR-layouts to balance visual interest, scanning efficiency, and usability by machines. The piece is both a physical artwork and a thought experiment about robots that might learn from books: it imagines corpora written in a language meant for machines rather than humans, and raises questions about leisure, learning, and the social role and comforts given to embodied AIs. For the AI/ML community this is a provocative, low-tech exploration of dataset design and value alignment: it foregrounds how the medium and curation of training texts shape what machines learn about norms and decision-making. Encoding human literature as machine-readable QR mosaics highlights practical issues (data accessibility, scanning/decoding robustness, provenance and bias control) and conceptual ones (how to encode moral exemplars, anthropomorphism, and cultural transmission to embodied agents). As a speculative artifact it prompts researchers to consider not just model architectures but the physical and representational formats through which future robots will ingest social knowledge.