Sukhdev Sandhu at The Guardian:
Tenen, a tenured professor of English at New York’s Columbia University, isn’t nearly as apocalyptic as he initially makes out. His is an oddly titled book – do robots need literary theory? Are we the robots? – that has little in common with the techno-theory of writers such as Friedrich Kittler, Donna Haraway and N Katherine Hayles. For the most part, it’s a call for rhetorical de-escalation. Relax, he says, machines and literature go back a long way; his goal is to reconstruct “the modern chatbot from parts found on the workbench of history” using “strings of anecdote and light philosophical commentary”.
This chatbot backstory begins with Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun’s 1377 Muqaddimah, which includes a description of “zairajah”, a kind of “letter magic” performed via a sort of horoscope, in which a large circle encloses other circles which, in turn, represent various elements and branches of science. Was this an apparatus for analogical reasoning? For astrological projections?
more here.