Benjamin Lindquist

Benjamin Lindquist is a historian of computing and artificial intelligence. His work centers on the replication of human attributes once thought beyond the reach of computation. Emotion, irrationality, and the idiosyncrasies of human language form the heart of that inquiry.

His first book, The Feeling Machine: How Talking Computers Learned Emotion, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. It traces how a global cohort of postwar engineers slowly came to see that computers needed to emulate affect in order to reach the dream of man-computer symbiosis. The trouble was that early attempts to strip synthetic speech down to its information-bearing elements had inadvertently undermined human-computer interaction. In contrast, researchers soon realized that the expressive texture of speech wasn’t noise at all. Instead, qualities like emotion shape the signal that listeners lean on to make sense of spoken language.

His second project, The Irrational Computer, builds on these insights by recovering an overlooked but critical strand in the history of thinking machines. It examines how in the middle of the twentieth century, some computer scientists reached a counterintuitive conclusion: to make computers more “human,” they first needed to become a little less “rational.” Well-known figures flirted with randomness, error, and even careless construction to coax originality out of machines. By the 1950s, these experiments gave rise to the first “random” neural networks, perceptrons chief among them. These forerunners laid the groundwork for today’s large language models. In other words, the so-called hallucinations that now frustrate users were once a feature, not a flaw.

Lindquist’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Critical Inquiry, American Historical Review, Information & Culture, and Material Religion. He previously held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Northwestern University’s Science in Human Culture Program, and his research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Creative Time, and the American Academy in Rome.