Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Feb.)
Guardian Review
Hark. The end is nigh. "In the industrial age, automation came for the shoemaker and the factory-line worker," writes Dennis Yi Tenen near the start of Literary Theory for Robots. "Today, it has come for the writer, the professor, the physician, the programmer and the attorney." Like the end-of-the-planet movies that pelted the multiplexes at the turn of the millennium, newspapers and - increasingly - bookshops are awash with economists, futurologists and social semioticians talking up, down and about artificial intelligence. Even Henry Kissinger, in The Age of AI (2021), spoke of "epoch-making transformations" and an imminent "revolution in human affairs". Tenen, a tenured professor of English at New York's Columbia University, isn't nearly as apocalyptic as he initially makes out. His is an oddly titled book - do robots need literary theory? Are we the robots? - that has little in common with the techno-theory of writers such as Friedrich Kittler, Donna Haraway and N Katherine Hayles. For the most part, it's a call for rhetorical de-escalation. Relax, he says, machines and literature go back a long way; his goal is to reconstruct "the modern chatbot from parts found on the workbench of history" using "strings of anecdote and light philosophical commentary". This chatbot backstory begins with Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun's 1377 Muqaddimah, which includes a description of "zairajah", a kind of "letter magic" performed via a sort of horoscope, in which a large circle encloses other circles which, in turn, represent various elements and branches of science. Was this an apparatus for analogical reasoning? For astrological projections? Tenen refers to its "computational" cycles and "procedurally generated text", and likens it to a "14th-century AI performance". "Think of the electronic databases working in the background of every hospital as giant zairajah circles, spinning a yarn that connects patients, physicians, pharmacies and insurance companies." Tenen is fond of what he calls "lovely weirdos": the 13th-century Mallorcan hermit and philosopher Ramon Llull whose rotating paper charts informed both Francis Bacon and Gottfried Leibniz's forays into binary code and cipher systems; Georges Polti, a Frenchman whose Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations (1895) offered vivid scenarios ("daring enterprise", "fatal imprudence", "conflict with a god") to inspiration-free writers; Andrey Markov, a Russian mathematician whose groundbreaking work developing models of probability - later known as the Markov chain - stemmed in large part from his time studying linguistic patterns in Alexander Pushkin's verse-novel Eugene Onegin. Their accomplishments are undeniable, but no biographical information is given to justify the label "weirdo". Tenen is more at ease discussing technology than individuals. A 1935 writing manual called The Plot Genie Index came with a wheel called the "Plot Robot" to help its users devise stories. The Qwerty keyboard was designed to slow down typing and make keys less likely to jam. As early as 1959, Bell Telephone Labs patented a device for the Automated Reading of Cursive Scripts. Innovations such as the Random English Sentence Generator were funded in large part by the US army and air force. Boeing drew on Vladimir Propp's 1928 Morphology of the Folktale to enhance its ability to generate useful reports about unusual aircraft events. kLiterary Theory for Robots is part of a new series from Norton in which academics are asked to condense complex ideas into small volumes for non-specialist audiences. Tricky: professors build their reputations by writing for their peers rather than for the public. Tenen tries to be peppy and populist, but, like a Ted Talk "thought leader", ends up sounding ingratiating. One chapter begins "Let me let you in on a little secret"; another is entitled "9 Big Ideas for an Effective Conclusion". Sentences are peppered with exclamation marks and cringey turns of phrase ("Whoa, these things are old!"). Unsubstantiated claims recur. "Modern humans", we're told, treat toasters "with disdain". Apparently, "Not long ago, one way of appearing smart involved memorizing a bunch of obscure facts". Today, most of us are still Romantics for whom "there's just something unsavoury about the thought of individual human genius being diminished by mechanical reproduction". A former Microsoft engineer, Tenen has sunny instincts. He believes that machine texts have plenty of "potential for creativity and collaboration". But he is aware of shadows too. Algorithmic biases, super-scale disinformation, the suspicion that AI "thinks like a state [and] understands like a corporation". Politics is not his strength, though. Acknowledging that coming labour-market disruption may mean fewer doctors, or even software engineers, he adds, "those that remain will also find their work enriched". Hoo-bloody-ray. Tenen doesn't talk about the death of the author, but he does refer to his own sense of a "receding share of authorial agency". He means that he uses dictionaries, encyclopedias and search engines - and, when doing so, is drawing on "a shadow team of scholars and engineers" who developed those tools. This, to him, is a revelation: "Intellect requires artifice, and therefore labour." I don't know anyone - book historian or general reader - who ever thought otherwise.
Kirkus Review
An intriguing glimpse into how the secret machinery that makes our technology work has deep roots in philosophy, poetry, and linguistics. We've become so used to computers that can understand what we put on a screen--checking our spelling and correcting our grammar--that we forget that they use complex, clever processes to do so. In this brief, pithy book, Yi Tenen, a former software engineer at Microsoft and current affiliate at Columbia University's Data Science Institute, suggests that giving computers literacy should be seen as one of the most essential technological feats of the 20th century. Locating the beginning of the story is difficult, since Arabic philosophy, Chinese numerology, and other intellectual traditions from around the world and across centuries all have antecedents. Mechanical cypher systems also played a role, as did early attempts at creating a math-based language. Babbage, Bacon, and Leibniz were all interested in giving machines an interactive element, and Turing made a huge contribution with his theories of coding. For decades, people had contrasting ideas on how to get computers to "read," but all ran into the problems of defining intelligence, communication, and understanding. As Yi Tenen shows, we tend to see the human mind as a metaphor, but the author believes that this is not really an appropriate comparison: The repetitive, algorithmic pattern of machine learning does not reflect the conceptual, intuitive nature of human development. The advent of personal computers started tech on the path to artificial intelligence, although getting everything to work together requires extensive collaboration and creativity. Yi Tenen, stirring some wit and anecdotes into the story, sets out the material in non-technical terms, making for an entertaining, informative read. An eclectic and erudite tale of how wide-eyed visions become smart, interactive tools. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
