Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen
Depending on your perspective, AI promises or threatens to permeate our lives in every aspect from the trivial to the profound. In the often-brilliant Literary Theory for Robots, Dennis Yi Tenen takes a different view. “I know the current moment of excitement over new technology will subside, diminished by the frenzy of its grifters and soothsayers. What remains will be more modest and more significant.”
Tenen brings an unusual perspective to the subject. A Microsoft engineer-turned-Columbia University comp lit professor, Tenen straddles technology and humanities, and sees the many continuities between those usually segregated domains. He traces the roots of computer science to the medieval Islamic mystic Ibn Khaldun and mathematician al-Khwarizmi, who coined the word algorithm. He recalls the 17th century German, Athanasius Kircher, whose “Mathematical Organ” was a device guided by instructions called “applications,” and Gottfried Leibniz’s universal systems whose grand schemes looked forward to the coding behind our computers. And then there was Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada Lovelace, whose Analytical Engine was a programmable computer in the 1820s.
The work of linguistic theorists as well as statisticians made possible the more recent breakthroughs in “machine-learning.” However, despite AI’s ability to gather the contents of the world’s libraries—as well as the irrelevancies of everyday digital communication—machine intelligence doesn’t “contain a mind as such,” Tenen insists, but “expresses minds metaphorically through a fuzzy, loose analogy with human brains.” Much of computer science runs on metaphor, just like literature. But chatbot “work by mechanisms emphatically not human. We certainly do not produce language in our minds by statistical probabilities.”
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The arc of history bends toward automation through labor saving devices of all sorts. Tenen cites the job losses suffered by shoemakers resulting from the spread of industrial technology. And now? “Automation has come to knowledge work,” he writes, adding, “work that can be automated loses its economic value.” Here, he becomes a bit glib. Describing the time-saving aspects of digital research, “today’s scribes and scholars can challenge themselves with more creative tasks.” Great, but who will pay them a living wage?
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