p. 41 on obsession with automating language

"The promise of a theory of language that could eliminate exactly what had troubled almost every student of language to that day namely, the inability to fully formalize linguistic practice, or to come up with fully automatic schemes for language-to-language translation- -spread through the intellectual community like wildfire. Notably, the thinkers who were most struck by these theories were almost exactly the same ones who were so possessed by computers: they were generally white, highly educated males, and rarely female or people of color. They were also, for the most part, not linguists."