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Calvino and the machines

September 19, 2025

Alexander Lee

Themes: Literature

Italo Calvino's 'literature machine' is a prescient vision of the perils and promise of artificial intelligence.

The Italian writer Italo Calvino. Credit: Lebrecht Music & Arts

In November 1967, Italo Calvino (1923-85) proudly declared that the world no longer needed writers like him. Or any writers, for that matter. Soon enough, he argued, computers would be able to do the job just as well, if not better. So what would be the point?

The people who had come to hear his lecture on ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’ in Turin that day were taken aback. A few were probably even rather shocked. Coming from Calvino – of all people – the very idea seemed perverse. Even though his best-known works – Le città invisibili (1972) and Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (1979) – still lay in the future, he was already one of the leading lights of Italian literature. Over the past few years, he had forsaken realism for fantasy, and from his new home in Paris, he was marking himself out as a pioneer of the ‘unwritten’.  And yet, there he was, predicting his own obsolescence. Bizarrely, he even seemed happy about it, too.

It was typical of Calvino’s humour. He loved to tease people, especially when he was lecturing. It was part of his style. But he had good reason to be cheerful. And now, forty years after his death, it is why his books are more important than ever.

It all comes down to history. Calvino believed that if you want to understand the future of literature, you first have to look at its past. Back in the dim recesses of time, when human beings were just beginning to form stable communities, he argued, language was a simple affair. It consisted of a limited number of rudimentary words, reflecting the habits and lifestyle of the tribe. Since this was obviously quite restrictive, every time the tribe encountered new situations, the rules of their language had to evolve, so that the phrases at their disposal could be adapted to serve unfamiliar purposes. And as time went on, these rules became progressively more complex and malleable.

When the first storytellers came along, they naturally worked with what they had to hand. Given the paucity of concepts, their tales could draw on only a small range of narrative elements – trees, reindeer, fathers, rivers… And there were only a few actions which could be performed. But since the rules governing that language were so flexible, there were still countless ways of combining these components to create stories.

There was a caveat, though. Regardless of how infinitely many combinations it was theoretically possible to construct, the business of putting a story together owed little – if anything – to the free play of imagination. Rather, the narrative choices available to a storyteller were determined by the nature of language itself. Take grammar and syntax. They have a huge effect on what happens in a story. After all, each word, can only be combined meaningfully with a certain number of other words. So does common sense. Odysseus can’t return to Ithaca before he’s left for the Trojan War, any more than you can have a blue sky after the sun has set. So even if the storyteller can still decide which story he wants to tell, the possibilities available are completely independent of him.

For Calvino, this was key. Once you think of a story merely as an assemblage of discreet elements, combined according to logical rules existing outside the author, he realised, then literature becomes like mathematics. And this means that, in theory, ‘electronic brain’ – that is, computers – should be able to write literature just as well as human beings. Indeed, given that they can sort through possible combinations much more efficiently than us, they might be even better. So why would there be any need for authors in the future?

Calvino found this thought unusually appealing. Since breaking with Communism over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he had found the world increasingly disorienting and frightening. Even as he was speaking, Italy was plunging into social unrest. Strikes were spreading; students were turning to violent protest; and the government – long dominated by the Christian Democrats – was beginning to seem worryingly unstable. In dark corners, hushed talk of revolution hung in the air; and everywhere, an atmosphere of tension took hold. Calvino worried that the world had become too unpredictable – and that, as a consequence, it would be impossible to capture lived experiences in his writing. In a strange way, the predictability of language was therefore reassuring. Even if it meant that literature, as a human activity, was doomed, it at least suggested that machines could preserve a deeper sense of order.

Calvino was far from being a voice in the wilderness. Even in 1967, there were plenty of others who held to a similarly...