What a Sixty-Five-Year-Old Book Teaches Us About A.I.

Neural networks have become shockingly good at generating natural-sounding text, on almost any subject. If I were a student, I'd be thrilled--let a chatbot write that five-page paper on Hamlet's indecision!--but if I were a teacher I'd have mixed feelings. On the one hand, the quality of student essays is about to go through the roof. On the other, what's the point of asking anyone to write anything anymore? Luckily for us, thoughtful people long ago anticipated the rise of artificial intelligence and wrestled with some of the thornier issues.