The H Factor: New book on AI that deals with human intelligence in the era of new technology

In Literary Theory for Robots, Dennis Yi Tenen’s playful new book on artificial intelligence and how computers learned to write, one of his most potent examples arrives in the form of a tiny mistake.

Tenen draws links among modern-day chatbots, pulp-fiction plot generators, old-fashioned dictionaries and medieval prophecy wheels. Both the utopians (the robots will save us!) and the doomsayers (the robots will destroy us!) have it wrong, he argues. There will always be an irreducibly human aspect to language and learning – a crucial core of meaning that emerges not just from syntax but from experience. Without it, you just get the chatter of parrots, who, “according to Descartes in his Mediations, merely repeated without understanding”, Tenen writes.

But Descartes didn’t write Mediations; Tenen must have meant Meditations – the missing “t” will slip past any spell-checker programme because both words are perfectly legitimate. (The book’s index lists the title correctly.) This minuscule typo doesn’t have any bearing on Tenen’s argument; if anything, it bolsters the case he wants to make. Machines are becoming stronger and smarter, but we still decide what is meaningful. A human wrote this book. And, despite the robots in the title, it is meant for other humans to read.

Tenen, now a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, US, used to be a software engineer at Microsoft. He puts his disparate skill sets to use in a book that is surprising, funny and resolutely unintimidating, even as he smuggles in big questions about art, intelligence, technology and the future of labour. I suspect that the book’s small size – it’s under 160 pages – is part of the point. People are not indefatigable machines, relentlessly ingesting enormous volumes on enormous subjects. Tenen has figured out how to present a web of complex ideas at a human scale.