It’s a little like light-a particle that moves in a wave. “Intelligence as Metaphor,” he posits in the title of the first chapter: surprisingly plural (“collective,” the “personification of a chorus”) but also annoyingly singular (“evolv on a spectrum, ranging from ‘partial assistance’ to ‘full automation”). we can begin to describe the ways in which the meaning of intelligence continues to evolve.” To be honest, the book might have benefited from a few more such arguments: terms like smart, intelligence, thinking, and automation have a way of slipping their semantic skins, siblings that are erratically twins. On super-intelligence: “AI will neither destroy humanity nor solve all its problems.” On regular intelligence: “Rather than argue about definitions. He is neither contrarian nor obsequious: I imagine Dennis is one of those annoyingly adept dinner guests, who completely scrambles conversations even as he appears to agree with everyone. Richards, he says, was an “an unsentimental scholar, writing with clarity and sharp insight.” The same can be said of this author: Tenen’s tone throughout is lucid, nuanced, and expert, with a fizzy sense of humor. Richards’s influential 1926 book Science and Poetry the contradiction inherent there doesn’t bother Tenen in the least. He calls the book “both a tribute and a rejoinder to” I.
Tenen is a surprisingly open-handed thinker, and he seems to go out of his way not to close down or block off avenues of consideration. If you find yourself resisting the rhetorical thrust of these questions, you’re still welcome here. “Does natural intelligence end where I think something to myself, silently, alone? How about using a notebook or calling a friend for advice?” “What separates natural from artificial forces?” he asks. Thinking and, in turn, writing, happen in collaboration with one’s muses, peers, and precursors, and with one’s tools, from dictionaries and word processors to “style guides, schemas, story plotters, thesauruses, and now chatbots.” For Tenen, these disparate participants braid into the thinker, the writer, and the maker.
was ever to imagine intelligence in a vat of private exceptional achievement,” he explains. However, in most ways, we’re not.įor Tenen, the most important idea in his book-he calls it the punchline, and “spoils it” on page fourteen-is that artificial intelligence is just the latest step in a history of collective intelligence, where human beings use books, tools, technology, and each other to accomplish new tasks.
We can act as if we are part of a true collective, integrated with everyone and everything that has ever marked us, because in a way we are. This winter-433 days after the public launch of ChatGPT, and into a world where the relationship between humans and computers is seemingly in the midst of full renegotiation-Tenen returns with a slim hardcover volume that instantly feels authoritative: the work of a clever, sparkling literary scholar who believes he understands what’s going on with AI, how we got here, and what to say about it. A one-time software engineer (he worked on Microsoft Windows XP), Tenen returned to school for a PhD in comparative literature, writing his dissertation, “The Poetics of Human-Computer Interaction” and publishing a book on a similar topic in 2017. It’s part of his internal algebra, but who can say exactly how?Īrt, technology, and their intersection form the common threads in Tenen’s professional life. The influence of Uriah Heep, and of that childhood episode, is subterranean. The experience marked him-the music, the exposed reel-to-reel, the way you could physically adjust the tape and hear a corresponding noise-but it does not appear in his new book, Literary Theory for Robots, at least not directly. Tenen, who now teaches at Columbia, was born in Moldavia in a recent interview with Douglas Rushkoff, he described the Uriah Heep album, their version of Jesus Christ Superstar, as “the first Western musical thing” he ever listened to. When the literary scholar Dennis Yi Tenen was a child, his father brought home a reel-to-reel recording by the British prog metal band Uriah Heep. Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write by Dennis Yi Tenen.