Talking Machines: How Poets and Programmers Invented Conversational Computing

A fascinating alternative history of artificial intelligence highlights the hidden influence of both engineers and programmers, and, poets and philosophers.

  What might the history of Artificial Intelligence look like if it was reimagined as a story about the development of "Artificial Talk"? Roach's answer touches on well-known figures, such as computer pioneer Alan Turing, and technologies, such as ELIZA and Alexa, but also introduces lesser-known individuals like poet-philosopher and sometime sect leader Margaret Masterman Brathwaite, programming language inventor Jean Sammet, data conversion innovator (and domestic goddess) Poonam Patni, and Watergate-obsessed AI pioneer John Clifford Shaw. Observing how talking machines are so often gendered female, the book uses archival evidence to position contemporary AI assistants as part of a much longer tradition of writing gender onto our machines while simultaneously writing women out of histories of technological innovation.

  More than this, Talking Machines reveals the vital role that fiction, memoir, and even poetry have played in the development of modern computing. Novelists, poets, critics, and the odd English lit-trained bureaucrat were not just writers of sci-fi imaginaries of future tech, but the experts and crucial interlocutors working to construct talking machines. So too computer scientists would often turn to literary techniques and ideas to innovate technologies and models. This book recovers a structure of thought, often forgotten today, that conceives of literature and computing as part of the same conversation and shows just how central humanistic inquiry has been to the emergence of today's AI revolution, and why that history matters for our future.