Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education had a featured article Wednesday entitled “The Ghost Writer in the Machine”  which was a critique of Dennis Yi Tenen’s new book Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write.  The article, written by Matthew Kirschenbaum, a distinguished university professor of English and digital studies at the University of Maryland at College Park, takes a measured critique of Tenen’s book from the point of view of a scholar.  Kirschenbaum comments that the book is marketed for “general readers.” Here are several excerpts.

“By looking at where we’ve been, he argues, we can gain some insight into where we might be headed.

The opening chapters of Literary Theory for Robots walk us through a range of historical figures and their associated writings, thought experiments, and sometimes actual devices. Some, like the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz or the mathematicians and inventors Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, are familiar as recurring characters in popular histories of computing; others, like the medieval Tunisian scholar Ibn Khaldun, the German poet Quirinus Kuhlmann, and the 17th-century Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, are likely less so.

…

Tenen develops two converging themes. The first is that the quest for a universal symbolic language was also accompanied by a quest for a universal machine, what ultimately became the modern computer. The second is the idea that “intelligence” is always an artificial construct, which is to say a function of external conditioning and tools as much as it is innate ability or aptitude.”

Kirschenbaum’s conclusion:

“We may think we know how robots learned to write; at the very least, as Tenen shows, it makes for a great story. But is it the history that will matter in the end? And who — or what — will get to write it?”

I have just ordered Tenet’s book on Amazon.

Tony

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