Literature and Artificial Intelligence

The essay proposes a “literary” perspective on the history of artificial intelligence. On the one hand, this means a literary-historical retrospective of the decades since the Second World War, but it also emphasizes the basic probabilistic trait of artificial intelligence, which becomes recognizable especially against the background of current technological developments. The space of literature is the horizon of possibility that accompanies what is real for man in early modern times and to which his activity is directed. When “intelligent machines” today turn to their environment in the mode of mathematical conjecture, this marks not only an epistemic, but also an anthropological caesura.