From Literature to Biterature: Lem, Turing, Darwin, and Explorations in Computer Literature, Philosophy of Mind, and Cultural Evolution by Peter Swirski (review)

When an earthquake hit California on Monday, 17 March 2014, the Los Angeles Times broke the news in three minutes, informing web readers that a 2.7 quake had just happened near Westwood. The article, covering the details of the strike, was ordinary but for its final line: “this post was created by an algorithm.” The text was effectively put together with the inputs of the U.S. earthquake notification service via software created by the journalist and programmer Ken Schwencke. That algorithm, Quake-bot, is not the only existing bot reporter. Quite a few machines now can sieve data to provide timely information on corporate earnings, for example, or on sports statistics and financial markets. They take factual data, such as those spread on the web by survey systems, and fix them into templates prewritten for the newspaper’s management system, even sending reminders for the editors. This new kind of writing can be seen as the dawn of what the Polish writer and philosopher of science Stanislaw Lem anticipated ante litteram in a fictitious essay entitled “A History of Bitic Literature” (in Imaginary Magnitude [1973]), forging the neologism biterature to include any writings of nonhuman origin and designating bitic authors as computhors.

The number of stories algorithms could potentially write is growing, along with the number of sensors and alerts that are available, but the path to biterature is not straightforward. The advent of new technologies always opens questions about changes in human attitudes and their consequences, relating technological changes with philosophical and social approaches. These are the fields of Peter Swirski, professor of American literature and culture at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, who has devoted his career to analyzing how scientific advancements affect literature, art and popular culture—he is, in fact, a renowned reviewer of Stanislaw Lem. This latest book confirms his skill in handling transdisciplinary studies, blending in the proposed route from literature to biterature issues of science, mind philosophy and society.

This is not a book of futurology or literary theory. According to the author, it should rather resemble an old-fashioned book of discovery or a modern adventure story of the mind, meant to replicate for the computer what Darwin did for the human. The text adheres to no editorial codes; it consists of chapters and paragraphs cumulatively organized around the idea that, since artificial intelligence is evolving, computers will eventually be able, at least, to create works of literature of their own.

Unearthing the archaic power of narrative deep seated in consciousness and with the aim to exploit the possibilities of artificial tales as well, Swirski observes that access to writing created by machines adds literary opportunities but also spurs cultural and social concerns that call into question traditional ways of thinking. The scrutiny of the biterature perspective—he warns—turns out to be more a pressing necessity than an academic divertissement. We have bot reporters and software that adjust their digital physiology in virtual environments as computer operating systems, but in both cases machines are only able to manipulate human data and generate automated information or advertisements, as done by Amazon, YouTube, or Facebook. In describing the state of the art, Swirski praises Charles Darwin, Alan Turing and Stanislaw Lem as pioneer scholars of biological and artificial intelligences and offers further examples of individuals who trusted artificial intelligence, such as the futurists Hans Moravec and Alvin Toffler or the genius of informatics Ray Kurzweil. What unifies their works is the observation that, in any case, intelligence can be seen as an unceasing trial and error test about the future, continuously receiving sensorial feedbacks from the present while data mining past experience through cognitive skills. A machine can react; based on data we input, software systems accumulate information on what we like (books, music, voyages); that...