PERSON
Thomas De Quincey
The English Romantic essayist who, in 1848, drew a distinction between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power that turns out to be the most precise diagnostic instrument available for evaluating what artificial intelligence can and cannot do to human
consciousness.
Thomas De Quincey is known to most readers, when he is known at all, as the English opium-eater: the author of a 1821 memoir that invented the genre of addiction literature and gave Victorian England its most alarming first-person account of altered consciousness. He was also, in the course of a productive and largely impecunious career as a magazine essayist, one of the most penetrating critics of language the nineteenth century produced. In 1848, in an essay ostensibly about the poetry of Alexander Pope, he drew a distinction between what he called the
literature of knowledge and the
literature of power: the first teaches, delivering information the reader did not previously possess; the second moves, transforming the reader’s capacity for experience in ways that no accumulation of information can replicate. The distinction is simple in its formulation and bottomless in its implications. A textbook of Newtonian mechanics, once mastered, may