Cybernetics and Ghosts

In November 1967 Italo Calvino gave a lecture called Cybernetics and Ghosts where he talked about writing machines and the future of literature: ...will we have a machine capable of replacing the poet and the author? Just as we already have machines that can read [...] will we also have machines capable of conceiving and composing poems and novels? I am thinking of a writing machine that would bring to the page all those things that we are accustomed to consider as the most jealously guarded attributes of our psychological life, of our daily experience, our unpredictable changes of mood and inner elations, despairs and moments of illumination. I didn’t expect Calvino (of all folks!) to be comforted by a machine that could write If on Winter’s Night A Traveler, but ok: ...what I instinctively feel is a sense of relief, of security. The same sort of relief and sense of security that I feel every time I discover that a mess of vague and indeterminate lines turns out to be a precise…