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The following excerpt is from Andrew Piper’s review of From Literature to Biterature: Lem, Turing, Darwin, and Explorations in Computer Literature, Philosophy of Mind, and Cultural Evolution in the Literary Review of Canada November issue.
The question of whether computers will be able to write depends on the more elementary question of whether computers will be able to think, or whether they already do. For those unfamiliar with this terrain, Swirski is an amiable, fast-paced guide through the greatest hits of the last half-century of research on artificial intelligence. (Readers looking for an up-to-date review of AI research will have to look elsewhere.) We learn about the Turing Test, the annual contest in which human judges try to guess whether an anonymous interlocutor is human or machine; the Chinese Room, a thought experiment proposed by the philosopher John Searle that seems to have confused people, not machines, for decades; and Deep Blue, the IBM machine that beat Garry Kasparov in chess, and its successor Watson, who won Jeopardy!
At the basis of all of these debates lies the rather straightforward philosophical distinction between intention and outcome when it comes to consciousness. To return to Searle, if I successfully communicate to you in Chinese by manipulating symbols according to a set of rules, do I understand Chinese? The answer seems to depend on where I do it, that is, the scale at which this process takes place. If in a room, then no. If inside my head, then yes. So where and when is “mind”? When do lower order things, like neurons, coalesce into higher order things, like mind or “consciousness”? How can you tell a river from the drops of water within it?
Of course, this is just the beginning of even knottier problems. For example, consciousness in living beings is the result of an entity that initially wanted something because it was alive. Thought and volition are deeply intertwined. Do computers want anything? If not, can they be made to want? Trickier still is the distinction between consciousness and creativity. Thinking is not the same as writing. As a society we continue to struggle to educate all of our conscious offspring. Education appears to be on the brink of economic collapse today, and yet would we invest still more resources to educate our microprocessors?
But let’s just say for a moment that computers could write. What then? This is Swirski at his thought-provoking best. The first problem will be one of surplus. Computers can write (and read) so much faster than we can. How could we even have a category like “literature”—a word intended to denote a poetic or narrative work of above-average linguistic quality—when billions of texts are being produced every minute by trillions of what Swirski endearingly calls “computhors”? With so many texts, what happens to critics? They will be just another outdated technology, according to Swirski, like carrier pigeons.
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