For years, Justice Potter Stewart has taken crap for his famous quote about pornography: “I know it when I see it.” The more prudish members of the Court declined Justice Stewart’s offer to watch any borderline material so he could give his thumbs up or down, but legal scholars have long speculated that the rise in applications for clerkships with the good Justice was not happenstance.The search to define another subjective quality that people seem to think they have a decent idea about, beauty, dates back at least to Socrates. Luckily, we post-modern folks have invented machines to do all the heavy philosophical lifting for us. Israeli scientists have triumphantly announced that they have empirically solved the age old question of beauty: they invented a computer that tells them whether a woman is hot or not.The computer works much like chess wonder Deep Blue. The “researchers” plug in a series of factors, a picture, and out pops the grade. Seems simple, but commentators are heralding the machine as a breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence. Aesthetic judgments are linked with higher cognitive functions, like abstract thought and judgment, and here’s where Socrates comes into the story again. He got a 3.Like every step forward in the quest for an empirically defined Universe, naysayers have predicted doom. Some have seen a future where 4’s can no longer ask 8’s to the prom, thereby destroying one of Hollywood’s most profitable plot retreads. Others think computers will cease doing advanced work like modeling urban traffic patterns or calculating decimals of Pi and will instead hang out around coffee shops all day.But I see two main benefits. The first is efficiency: people use to waste hours debating hotness, or endlessly clicking through websites like “Hot or Not”. No more.The more important benefit is that in the coming war with the machines, we can trust that they will waste hours quantifying and compulsively masturbating to endless Victoria’s Secret catalogs or five year old issues of Playboy. Whose to say that John Connor doesn’t defeat the Terminators with a strategically placed cardboard box of Barely Legals?