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The Machine and the Mind

The Machine and the Mind

Author: by Jo Rushby
Date: 2024-07-30

'Will we also have machines capable of conceiving and composing poems and novels?' Italo Calvino

These prophetic words were written by Calvino in 1967 in an article entitledCybernetics and Ghosts. Nearly six decades later, the world is awash with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Every day, we read of AI taking over tasks that seemed sacrosanct to the human mind. Poems can be manufactured and novels written by a machine. ChatGPT haunts the corridors of universities. Crusty professors who still use Tippex throw their fountain pens in the air as students write literature reviews without ever visiting a library or reading a book. We all ponder, as Calvino writes,"My place could perfectly well be occupied by a mechanical device."

Similarly, in EM Forster's short story,The Machine Stops, first published in 1909, the writer foresees a world where the machine is omnipotent, controlling air, light, space, and human interactions are limited to the screen. The main character Vashti cannot envisage a world outside her room, even to the point of visiting her son. 'There were buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing...There was the button that produced literature. And there were, of course, the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.'

Oftenchanges in the world do not come from huge momentous events. But by slow, incremental changes, that suddenly gather speed, overwhelm us, and become normalised into our everyday lives. It is hard for us to imagine life without cellphones or computers, but it's not so long ago that writers were hammering their thoughts on typewriters.

For someone like me sitting in a bookshop, is this the end of literature? Not by a long chalk. More and more as the world hems us in, seeks to capture our emotions into algorithms, dominate our passions, we rebel.

For the machine does not have an imagination. Morality. Italo Calvino senses that the machine might write. But what it cannot do is replace the reader. We bring our sensibility, our desires, our accumulated learning to the text. It is said that you can never cross the same river twice. The same applies to a book. For when you read a book again, you have already changed. A loved one has died, grief takes on new meaning, you fall for the neighbour, whose family feud has ensued for a century, and suddenly the text of Romeo and Juliet takes on new meaning.

AI might be able to imitate the sound of someone playing the trumpet. But they can never create the bulging cheeks, the sweat, the ability to improvise, to lose ourselves in sheer virtuosity.

I must go now. My AI lover is on the buzzer.

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