Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write

In putting the algorithm in charge gramatically, researchers abnegate their own complicity—and by extension, our agency in the matter.

The work of encoding values into software systems can now be more trivially automated.

AIs operate in the social sphere in ways more similar to those of states and corporations than robots or marionettes. Therefore, it becomes useful to consider them in the tradition of political thought that deals with collective personhood, in works such as Hobbes’s Leviathan, Plato’s Republic, or How Institutions Think by Mary Douglas.

In the applied world, intelligence bubbles above shared capacity. But no matter how cleverly effervescent, once a smart tool reaches general adoption, it dissipates into the surface of baseline intelligence.

Visiting an imaginary botanical garden of the world, we find a multitude of conflicting labels, some torn, others written over or illegible.

From the nineteenth century onward, the notion of template-based manufacturing permeated all human industry, and especially the manufacture of consumer and capital goods, like clothing, furniture, machinery, or equipment.

An odd sort of a friendship developed between the young Lovelace and the older Babbage. Growing up in the shadow of her famously philandering father, the poet and baron George Byron, whom she barely knew, Ada had been discouraged from literary study. Her mother, Lady Anne Isabella Byron, a strict Christian and a formidable intellect in her own righ

Ada remained fascinated with her father’s legacy however, viewing herself a unique synthesis of scientific reason and poetic sensibility.

History’s subtle advantage lies in the revealing of trajectories through time.