Literary Theory for Robots
How Computers Learned to Write
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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Publisher Description
“Surprising, funny and resolutely unintimidating.” —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times Book Review
In the industrial age, automation came for the shoemaker and the seamstress. Today, it has come for the writer, physician, programmer, and attorney.
Literary Theory for Robots reveals the hidden history of modern machine intelligence, taking readers on a spellbinding journey from medieval Arabic philosophy to visions of a universal language, past Hollywood fiction factories and missile defense systems trained on Russian folktales. In this provocative reflection on the shared pasts of literature and computer science, former Microsoft engineer and professor of comparative literature Dennis Yi Tenen provides crucial context for recent developments in AI, which holds important lessons for the future of humans living with smart technology.
Intelligence expressed through technology should not be mistaken for a magical genie, capable of self-directed thought or action. Rather, in highly original and effervescent prose with a generous dose of wit, Yi Tenen asks us to read past the artifice—to better perceive the mechanics of collaborative work. Something as simple as a spell-checker or a grammar-correction tool, embedded in every word-processor, represents the culmination of a shared human effort, spanning centuries.
Smart tools, like dictionaries and grammar books, have always accompanied the act of writing, thinking, and communicating. That these paper machines are now automated does not bring them to life. Nor can we cede agency over the creative process. With its masterful blend of history, technology, and philosophy, Yi Tenen’s work ultimately urges us to view AI as a matter of labor history, celebrating the long-standing cooperation between authors and engineers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this thought-provoking treatise, Tenen (Plain Text), a Columbia University English professor and former software engineer, examines the forebears of text-generating artificial intelligence. Highlighting how contemporary concerns about AI echo centuries-old debates, Tenen notes that 17th-century poet Quirinus Kuhlmann objected to German polymath Athanasius Kirchner's Mathematical Organ—a box-shaped device with a complex system of wooden slates that, when properly arranged, could "compose music, write poetry... and even do advanced math"—because Kuhlmann believed it reduced users to parroting information, instead of producing genuine knowledge. Elsewhere, Tenen covers such experiments as William Cook's 1928 Plotto manual for generating story ideas ("imagine a really complicated Choose Your Own Adventure story," which allowed authors to chart a plot from start to finish) and linguist Noam Chomsky's semisuccessful attempts to teach English grammar to a primitive computer in the 1960s. The history provides crucial perspective on the contemporary AI boom, and Tenen's incisive analysis offers cautious optimism about the future, suggesting that while AI will upend the jobs of legal professionals, writers, and other "intellectual laborers," those workers will also be "freed" from regurgitating facts and can instead "challenge themselves with more creative tasks." Timely and original, this is an essential resource on the history of text-generating AI, and its future. Photos.
