The AI Revolution: Speculations on Authorship, Pedagogy, and the Future of the Profession

In one moment of Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence ([2008] 1920), a casual conversation between three of the characters turns to “the fantastic possibility that they might one day actually converse with each other from street to street, or even—incredible dream!—from one town to another.” The scene is set in the 1880s, just a few years after Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. The idea of a device that can carry the human voice across vast distances still seems to the characters like something out of Jules Verne. We are not made privy to the details of their discussion, but the narrator informs us that they quickly fall into “such platitudes as naturally rise to the lips of the most intelligent when they are talking against time.” The scene is rich with dramatic irony. Wharton's characters cannot see what her narrator and readers know full well: that they are living on borrowed time, that Old New York—the cultural world that sustains their identities and lends meaning to their lives—is about to change in ways they cannot yet foresee or prepare for.