Twain, Dylan, Dickens, McLuhan, and Bradbury weaved into and out of the conversation, and thankfully our minds have been opened by all of them. Thanks for this far ranging piece that began with technology altering our world, as it's been doing for centuries, and now at an accelerated pace.
This essay tapped into so much I have been interested in throughout my life. I was fascinated with Heinlein and Clarke as a young science fiction reader. As an engineer in journalism grad school, studying McLuhan, I developed a life-long interest in the interplay of and questions of control and affect between technology and society (and secretly kind of rooting for the best of both). As such, I have been closely following the development of ChatGPT and the story involving Clarkeworld. John, your deeply thoughtful and literary essay explores these complex questions in a way I could not have done myself. Enjoyed it thoroughly. Thank you for this terrific post.
Thanks so much! I never had a head for science, so in my youth the more "soft SF" writers Heinlein and Bradbury and Harlan Ellison were my favorites; I'm afraid I only tolerated Clarke and Asimov.
During the pandemic I read some SF, which is something I never read. I got started after watching a new Japanese film (on Netflix) based on Heinlein’s The Door into Summer. Very readable, an early time-travel story.
Then I picked up a used copy of Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (terrible title, rectified in the film, Blade Runner). Also very readable, with lots of interesting stuff left out of the film (eg, the religion that most people practice, Mercerism). The androids lack empathy; will AI chat bots ever gain that?
Also got hold of Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. Wow, Bradbury’s vision of how easy it would be to get to Mars is stunningly untechnical (launching from Ohio rather than close to the equator: wrong), yet these stories from the late 40s are so eerie: in one, the first crew to arrive safely on Mars sits drinking beer by a canal on their first evening there, tossing empties into the water: yep, that’s us, trashing the next planet too.
That led to Bradbury’s I Sing the Body Electric. Not really sci-fi, per se, more like fairy tales from a lost world. The long title story is about a robot grandma who comes to live with some children whose mother has died. Maybe that would be a good robotic use, as surrogate parents.
I still have memories of seeing as a child, and perhaps being scarred by, the film version of Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man stories, with Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom playing all the parts. (“They're not tattoos, they're skin illustrations! Don't you ever call them tattoos!” —Steiger is so scary; that still makes me jump.) Might have to look that one up too.
The Foundation series on Apple TV+ is quite interesting. I looked at used Asimov, but Foundation appeared to be multiple volumes published over decades and I just thought, Nah.
Thank you! The Martian Chronicles was a favorite of mine, and I still very much enjoy Bradbury, but I am as indifferent to the technical as he is. I was a precocious child and therefore drawn to Heinlein's later adult "sexy" novels—Stranger in a Strange Land, Glory Road, Friday, etc.—and don't remember if I read The Door into Summer. His time travel story "All You Zombies," though, is just breathtaking. I mostly read Dick as an adult and am fascinated by his gnostic Christian religious vision-conversion as discussed in VALIS.
John, a complex essay, well-worth reading for both the possibility of the end of creativity and the other possibility: "the human may prevail ..." that you suggest in your closing paragraph. I suspect that the journey, as with all things and perhaps a bit appropriately in this case trite, is the answer.
I suppose anyone writing formulaic romance novels ought to fear the new AI, and I've seen some intelligent commentary on how it might automate soul-enervating tasks like writing radio ads for local businesses. There is a human cost here, if it then requires fewer people to write radio ads, but it's typically a losing argument to try to defend human labor when the labor itself is not meaningful.
I've not yet seen anything produced by ChatGPT that ought to make literary writers worry, and clearly there can be no substitute for immersion journalism, since AI cannot walk through flooded streets or war zones interviewing suffering people.
Your point about the typewriter or the dictation-typewriter combination transforming prose style is interesting. Since AI seems to be able to imitate most prose styles, it seems a revolutionary technology in that way, and one that might seem to foreclose the possibility of innovating away from it. Even so, there is no evidence, is there, that AI could produce a fully realized bildungsroman or anything approaching James Baldwin's sentences or Toni Morrison's sensibility?
I lose the thread somewhat in your discussion of Dylan, and the subsequent comparison of humans to machines vis a vis the Aeolian Harp. The Romantic notion of channeling in that way is not at all machine-like, is it? Epiphany was/is a key part of that conceit, and it seems inconceivable that AI has the potential for sudden insight or inspiration.
I think about this similarly to Ellen Ullman in her fine 2004 essay "Dining with Robots." A robot will never be capable of enjoying a gourmet meal or the interhuman pleasure of speaking to farmers or ranchers at an open-air market in preparation for the meal. Ullman reflects, while visiting a supermarket, that instead of robots becoming more humanlike, they have made humans more robotic. That, to me, is the real danger of ChatGPT. It's not necessarily the end of innovation, but it might mark the end of readers' appetite for innovation. Those of us who need to create art or to struggle with things in essay form will assuredly continue doing so, but whether we'll have readers is another question.
Thanks! Re: the Dylan/harp section—the machine metaphor belongs to the Romantics (Coleridge's "organic harps diversely framed" as well as Shelley's remarks on the poet as harp in "The Defense of Poetry"), but I interpret them as saying that the human being is a special kind of machine, one uniquely capable of epiphany or the kind of self-reflection we call "consciousness," hence my title, "Extraordinary Machine." Machines give people epiphanies, not the other way around. I wonder if ChatGPT might have written that passage more clearly.
Haha -- I prefer you over ChatGPT. Thanks for the explanation and for contributing to the conversation here. Glad to have you as part of the collaborative.
As Mary says, lots to digest here, and I may have been reading hastily. My frame of reference for Romanticism is more the American variety. I think of the machine/mechanism trope as more typical of Enlightenment thinking, as compared to, say, Emerson's transparent eyeball or Thoreau's antipathy toward the railroad. Nathaniel Hawthorne was deeply suspicious of scientific medicine and its fascination with the corpse, and so his representations of scientists often show them meddlers. My grasp of the English Romantics is not quite as deep.
There is enough mystery left in consciousness that I tend to think of conceptual innovation as still safe from AI. If you like, see what I wrote about the neuroscience of epiphany here. What I see ChatGPT and other AI doing is more like the piecemeal achievement of insight. That flash of understanding that cognitive scientists call "sudden insight" seems to be the kind of thing one can optimize the conditions for, but cannot force. Which I think is a comfort.
Thanks! I find most of the Romantics seem to waver between hostility toward science/technology and wanting to spiritualize or humanize it—though I am more familiar with the Americans too. Poe is an interesting counterexample; I think McLuhan lauded him for understanding the relation between new technology and literature earlier than most. I definitely agree about the mystery of consciousness—Ishiguro's latest novel, about a lonely robot, suggests that even AI consciousness will itself be a mystery.
I’m tempted to say Dylan helped popular music catch up to poetry in some sense, maybe even surpass it. Throughout the 20th century, poets had been writing about anything. What is “Prufrock” about? What is “Anecdote of the Jar” about? Well, everything and nothing, one could say.
But at the time they were written, where was traditional American music? Well, the guitar was still primarily a rhythm instrument. Songs were generally just handed down, frequently adapted, but rarely created from scratch (see Carl Sandburg’s massive 1927 anthology, The American Songbag). And the subjects of those songs: heartbreak, disasters, the little cabin on the hill, the wee kirk o’ the wood. They’re definitely not about Mr. Tambourine Man.
Clearly some of the lag was due to technology; the musical equivalent of the printing press did not yet exist. But then everything changed: the technology of manufacturing musical instruments and amplifying them, the technology of manufacturing and playing records, improvements in recording microphones, etc. Lots of things happened in the 20s, including the way music was sung and played (eg, Maybelle’s Carter’s “scratch” technique made for more sound from a guitar, making performances before larger church and theater audiences possible — see link below).
1922: first country music commercially recorded; Ulysses and Waste Land published.
1925: electrical recording replaces clumsy and bulky acoustic recording, and it’s portable too.
1927: Bristol, Tennessee, recording sessions of the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, the so-called Big Bang.
So now we have technology for mass-distribution of music, not just sheet music intended for the family piano, but something anybody can play on their radio or hi-fi. But where are the songs to fill that potentially massive void?
It’s almost as though the technology, coupled with the public’s inchoate “need” for something new, willed Dylan into existence. So that not only did he show how you can write and play a song in that traditional idiom with just an acoustic guitar and a homemade harmonica holder and an untrained voice, but you can make it about anything. And then you can make it electric.
Even Dylan talks like that. In his Nobel lecture he described hearing at age 18 Lead Belly’s “Cotton Fields”: “It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me.”
Great comment—thanks for that context, especially the 1922 confluence of high modernism and country music, which I hadn't been aware of. You mention "Prufrock," which I think is Kenner's example of the first poem written on the typewriter first. So technology willed modern poetry into being, too, apparently.
The gulf in 1922 between high and low art forms sure seems deep, doesn’t it? Did technology help with the convergence? Or perhaps more accurately, the marginalization of the high forms by the low: opera, ballet, orchestral music, even poetry (although with a country as large as the U.S., the audiences for those things are still large, it’s just that the art forms are not financially self-supporting in any way and never will be again).
Certainly by the 60s the overthrow of the regime is well underway, but the players still seem to me so unlikely. Consider the sheer unlikelihood of Robert Zimmerman, who at 18 probably wanted to be Little Richard, if anybody, becoming Bob Dylan. (Or Lennon and McCartney becoming, well, Lennon and McCartney.)
A book I mention in a reply above, Hugh Kenner's A Sinking Island, discusses the great divergence arising in literature in the late 19th century as a product of both technology and mass education, which produces for the first time an audience for mass culture (i.e., neither organic folk culture nor high cultural tradition but pop entertainment produced more or less from on high). As I recall, Kenner respects the low and the high, Sherlock Holmes and Ulysses, while scorning the middle (Bloomsbury, in the case of modernism itself). But, yes, by the time we get to Bob Dylan these terms are almost unusably unstable
I’m a fan of Kenner’s A Colder Eye, about the modern Irish writers who finagled the reverse conquest of English, also known as the Irish Literary Revival: Yeats (of course) and Lady Gregory, who together founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, where Synge’s famous play debuted, setting off a riot. Later, Sean O’Casey’s plays played the Abbey and Beckett took in many a play there. And Joyce, naturally, and everyone’s favorite mocker, Flann O’Brien. Title is from Yeats’ famous line.
Thanks—I really need to read that one. I'm more familiar with the English counterpart, A Sinking Island, where Kenner almost but not quite persuasively savages Virginia Woolf!
Twain, Dylan, Dickens, McLuhan, and Bradbury weaved into and out of the conversation, and thankfully our minds have been opened by all of them. Thanks for this far ranging piece that began with technology altering our world, as it's been doing for centuries, and now at an accelerated pace.
good piece.
This essay tapped into so much I have been interested in throughout my life. I was fascinated with Heinlein and Clarke as a young science fiction reader. As an engineer in journalism grad school, studying McLuhan, I developed a life-long interest in the interplay of and questions of control and affect between technology and society (and secretly kind of rooting for the best of both). As such, I have been closely following the development of ChatGPT and the story involving Clarkeworld. John, your deeply thoughtful and literary essay explores these complex questions in a way I could not have done myself. Enjoyed it thoroughly. Thank you for this terrific post.
Thanks so much! I never had a head for science, so in my youth the more "soft SF" writers Heinlein and Bradbury and Harlan Ellison were my favorites; I'm afraid I only tolerated Clarke and Asimov.
During the pandemic I read some SF, which is something I never read. I got started after watching a new Japanese film (on Netflix) based on Heinlein’s The Door into Summer. Very readable, an early time-travel story.
Then I picked up a used copy of Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (terrible title, rectified in the film, Blade Runner). Also very readable, with lots of interesting stuff left out of the film (eg, the religion that most people practice, Mercerism). The androids lack empathy; will AI chat bots ever gain that?
Also got hold of Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. Wow, Bradbury’s vision of how easy it would be to get to Mars is stunningly untechnical (launching from Ohio rather than close to the equator: wrong), yet these stories from the late 40s are so eerie: in one, the first crew to arrive safely on Mars sits drinking beer by a canal on their first evening there, tossing empties into the water: yep, that’s us, trashing the next planet too.
That led to Bradbury’s I Sing the Body Electric. Not really sci-fi, per se, more like fairy tales from a lost world. The long title story is about a robot grandma who comes to live with some children whose mother has died. Maybe that would be a good robotic use, as surrogate parents.
I still have memories of seeing as a child, and perhaps being scarred by, the film version of Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man stories, with Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom playing all the parts. (“They're not tattoos, they're skin illustrations! Don't you ever call them tattoos!” —Steiger is so scary; that still makes me jump.) Might have to look that one up too.
The Foundation series on Apple TV+ is quite interesting. I looked at used Asimov, but Foundation appeared to be multiple volumes published over decades and I just thought, Nah.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13757540/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Thank you! The Martian Chronicles was a favorite of mine, and I still very much enjoy Bradbury, but I am as indifferent to the technical as he is. I was a precocious child and therefore drawn to Heinlein's later adult "sexy" novels—Stranger in a Strange Land, Glory Road, Friday, etc.—and don't remember if I read The Door into Summer. His time travel story "All You Zombies," though, is just breathtaking. I mostly read Dick as an adult and am fascinated by his gnostic Christian religious vision-conversion as discussed in VALIS.
John, a complex essay, well-worth reading for both the possibility of the end of creativity and the other possibility: "the human may prevail ..." that you suggest in your closing paragraph. I suspect that the journey, as with all things and perhaps a bit appropriately in this case trite, is the answer.
Thank you, Mary, and thanks for the opportunity to post it here.
I suppose anyone writing formulaic romance novels ought to fear the new AI, and I've seen some intelligent commentary on how it might automate soul-enervating tasks like writing radio ads for local businesses. There is a human cost here, if it then requires fewer people to write radio ads, but it's typically a losing argument to try to defend human labor when the labor itself is not meaningful.
I've not yet seen anything produced by ChatGPT that ought to make literary writers worry, and clearly there can be no substitute for immersion journalism, since AI cannot walk through flooded streets or war zones interviewing suffering people.
Your point about the typewriter or the dictation-typewriter combination transforming prose style is interesting. Since AI seems to be able to imitate most prose styles, it seems a revolutionary technology in that way, and one that might seem to foreclose the possibility of innovating away from it. Even so, there is no evidence, is there, that AI could produce a fully realized bildungsroman or anything approaching James Baldwin's sentences or Toni Morrison's sensibility?
I lose the thread somewhat in your discussion of Dylan, and the subsequent comparison of humans to machines vis a vis the Aeolian Harp. The Romantic notion of channeling in that way is not at all machine-like, is it? Epiphany was/is a key part of that conceit, and it seems inconceivable that AI has the potential for sudden insight or inspiration.
I think about this similarly to Ellen Ullman in her fine 2004 essay "Dining with Robots." A robot will never be capable of enjoying a gourmet meal or the interhuman pleasure of speaking to farmers or ranchers at an open-air market in preparation for the meal. Ullman reflects, while visiting a supermarket, that instead of robots becoming more humanlike, they have made humans more robotic. That, to me, is the real danger of ChatGPT. It's not necessarily the end of innovation, but it might mark the end of readers' appetite for innovation. Those of us who need to create art or to struggle with things in essay form will assuredly continue doing so, but whether we'll have readers is another question.
Thanks! Re: the Dylan/harp section—the machine metaphor belongs to the Romantics (Coleridge's "organic harps diversely framed" as well as Shelley's remarks on the poet as harp in "The Defense of Poetry"), but I interpret them as saying that the human being is a special kind of machine, one uniquely capable of epiphany or the kind of self-reflection we call "consciousness," hence my title, "Extraordinary Machine." Machines give people epiphanies, not the other way around. I wonder if ChatGPT might have written that passage more clearly.
Haha -- I prefer you over ChatGPT. Thanks for the explanation and for contributing to the conversation here. Glad to have you as part of the collaborative.
As Mary says, lots to digest here, and I may have been reading hastily. My frame of reference for Romanticism is more the American variety. I think of the machine/mechanism trope as more typical of Enlightenment thinking, as compared to, say, Emerson's transparent eyeball or Thoreau's antipathy toward the railroad. Nathaniel Hawthorne was deeply suspicious of scientific medicine and its fascination with the corpse, and so his representations of scientists often show them meddlers. My grasp of the English Romantics is not quite as deep.
There is enough mystery left in consciousness that I tend to think of conceptual innovation as still safe from AI. If you like, see what I wrote about the neuroscience of epiphany here. What I see ChatGPT and other AI doing is more like the piecemeal achievement of insight. That flash of understanding that cognitive scientists call "sudden insight" seems to be the kind of thing one can optimize the conditions for, but cannot force. Which I think is a comfort.
https://joshuadolezal.substack.com/p/where-do-your-epiphanies-come-from
Thanks! I find most of the Romantics seem to waver between hostility toward science/technology and wanting to spiritualize or humanize it—though I am more familiar with the Americans too. Poe is an interesting counterexample; I think McLuhan lauded him for understanding the relation between new technology and literature earlier than most. I definitely agree about the mystery of consciousness—Ishiguro's latest novel, about a lonely robot, suggests that even AI consciousness will itself be a mystery.
Good stuff.
I’m tempted to say Dylan helped popular music catch up to poetry in some sense, maybe even surpass it. Throughout the 20th century, poets had been writing about anything. What is “Prufrock” about? What is “Anecdote of the Jar” about? Well, everything and nothing, one could say.
But at the time they were written, where was traditional American music? Well, the guitar was still primarily a rhythm instrument. Songs were generally just handed down, frequently adapted, but rarely created from scratch (see Carl Sandburg’s massive 1927 anthology, The American Songbag). And the subjects of those songs: heartbreak, disasters, the little cabin on the hill, the wee kirk o’ the wood. They’re definitely not about Mr. Tambourine Man.
Clearly some of the lag was due to technology; the musical equivalent of the printing press did not yet exist. But then everything changed: the technology of manufacturing musical instruments and amplifying them, the technology of manufacturing and playing records, improvements in recording microphones, etc. Lots of things happened in the 20s, including the way music was sung and played (eg, Maybelle’s Carter’s “scratch” technique made for more sound from a guitar, making performances before larger church and theater audiences possible — see link below).
1922: first country music commercially recorded; Ulysses and Waste Land published.
1925: electrical recording replaces clumsy and bulky acoustic recording, and it’s portable too.
1927: Bristol, Tennessee, recording sessions of the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, the so-called Big Bang.
So now we have technology for mass-distribution of music, not just sheet music intended for the family piano, but something anybody can play on their radio or hi-fi. But where are the songs to fill that potentially massive void?
It’s almost as though the technology, coupled with the public’s inchoate “need” for something new, willed Dylan into existence. So that not only did he show how you can write and play a song in that traditional idiom with just an acoustic guitar and a homemade harmonica holder and an untrained voice, but you can make it about anything. And then you can make it electric.
Even Dylan talks like that. In his Nobel lecture he described hearing at age 18 Lead Belly’s “Cotton Fields”: “It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc4AxM0Nxa8
Great comment—thanks for that context, especially the 1922 confluence of high modernism and country music, which I hadn't been aware of. You mention "Prufrock," which I think is Kenner's example of the first poem written on the typewriter first. So technology willed modern poetry into being, too, apparently.
The gulf in 1922 between high and low art forms sure seems deep, doesn’t it? Did technology help with the convergence? Or perhaps more accurately, the marginalization of the high forms by the low: opera, ballet, orchestral music, even poetry (although with a country as large as the U.S., the audiences for those things are still large, it’s just that the art forms are not financially self-supporting in any way and never will be again).
Certainly by the 60s the overthrow of the regime is well underway, but the players still seem to me so unlikely. Consider the sheer unlikelihood of Robert Zimmerman, who at 18 probably wanted to be Little Richard, if anybody, becoming Bob Dylan. (Or Lennon and McCartney becoming, well, Lennon and McCartney.)
A book I mention in a reply above, Hugh Kenner's A Sinking Island, discusses the great divergence arising in literature in the late 19th century as a product of both technology and mass education, which produces for the first time an audience for mass culture (i.e., neither organic folk culture nor high cultural tradition but pop entertainment produced more or less from on high). As I recall, Kenner respects the low and the high, Sherlock Holmes and Ulysses, while scorning the middle (Bloomsbury, in the case of modernism itself). But, yes, by the time we get to Bob Dylan these terms are almost unusably unstable
I’m a fan of Kenner’s A Colder Eye, about the modern Irish writers who finagled the reverse conquest of English, also known as the Irish Literary Revival: Yeats (of course) and Lady Gregory, who together founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, where Synge’s famous play debuted, setting off a riot. Later, Sean O’Casey’s plays played the Abbey and Beckett took in many a play there. And Joyce, naturally, and everyone’s favorite mocker, Flann O’Brien. Title is from Yeats’ famous line.
Thanks—I really need to read that one. I'm more familiar with the English counterpart, A Sinking Island, where Kenner almost but not quite persuasively savages Virginia Woolf!