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 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.
Peculiar ... Tenen does not go about making this argument the way one might expect, drawing direct lineages from, say, Noah Webster’s dictionary to auto-correct. Instead, he assembles a dollhouse of obscure 'literary robots' throughout history.
Playful ... He puts his disparate skill sets to use in a book that is surprising, funny and resolutely unintimidating, even as he smuggles in big questions about art, intelligence, technology and the future of labor ... By thinking through our collective habits of thought, he offers a meditation all his own.
The underlying problem at the heart of Literary Theory for Robots is the irreconcilable conflict between the goal of the book and the goal of its author. The goal of a book like this is to educate the non-specialist reader about the nuances of AI’s interaction with the literary and artistic worlds of human creativity. But the goal of its author is pretty clearly to thrill-frighten a TED talk audience already tipsy on afternoon white wine.
