Our AI, Ourselves?

After over a decade of critical furor around how novels would incorporate (and survive) plot-destroying phones and social media, the latest threat to literacy is artificial intelligence. The good news is that novelists have always faced technological and social upheaval. They have mostly addressed it in one of two ways. The first is to imagine an altered future with the prescience of science fiction; Mary Shelley’s warning that humans are not always in control of their creations is, if anything, even more resonant today than when Frankenstein was first published in 1818. The second is to do what the novel, and in particular the realist novel, has always done, which is to redefine what it means to remain human in the face of technological and social revolution. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is equal parts the story of an affair and a treatise on the woes of industrialization.