While today we ask questions of Alexa, Siri, and ChatGPT, it wasn't always a given that computers would talk—nor that we would evaluate machine intelligence based on their conversational fluency. This book tells the forgotten history of how the dream—and sometimes the nightmare—of talking machines has motivated computer innovation across decades and continents. It reveals what traditional AI histories too often leave out: the women and people of colour, the poets and critics, the computer misfits and outsiders who shaped our conversational present. It demonstrates that literature and the arts have always been vital to the history of computer innovation. More than this it offers a novel way of understanding our AI-obsessed moment, how we got here, and where we might go next.
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 as 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.