The determination of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev that "Azerbaijan should be a leader in the Fourth Industrial Revolution" means the determination of the steps taken towards rapid achievements in electronicization, digitalization, scientific and technical development in our country. The topic of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is on the agenda in the literary and scientific environment of Azerbaijan, including at the Institute of Literature named after Nizami Ganjavi. In addition to conducting research at the level of the electronic information environment and according to its requirements, our literary experts carefully monitor, analyze and research the creative processes occurring in the literary environment. In this aspect, we wanted to share the article of the young poet, essayist Ravan Javid called "Fourth Industrial Revolution and Literature". Ravan Javid appears in periodicals, literary newspapers and magazines, and websites with his poems, essays, and journalistic writings. He received creative education at the "III School of Young Writers", a joint project of the Ministry of Culture of Azerbaijan and the Union of Writers, of which he is a member. Books of poems called "7", "Blue Painted House" and a book of essays called "Absürt menu" were published in Turkey. In 2019, he won the "Success" award of the Azerbaijan Writers' Union. In 2022, he was awarded the "Presidential Scholarship" given by the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan for young writers.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution and literature - writes Ravan Javid
The great industrial revolutions that have taken place so far have not only shaped the economy and politics of countries, but also seriously affected culture, especially literature. Themes, images, even styles have changed. After the Second World War, this process accelerated. As civilization met robots, everything moved from words to numbers. Now it was not words that were considered sacred, but numbers.
The First Industrial Revolution, which took place between 1760 and 1830, promised rosy lives, estates, mansions. After people discovered "inanimate energy" (steam energy), urbanization and civilization began to increase rapidly. The literature of that period was roasted in the trend of realism. Novels and poems talked about human sufferings, sufferings and merits. What about the pink world? There was no. I remember the reasons why Dreiser's "Sister Carrie" was banned in America. At that time, the following sentence was written about the novel in one of the newspapers:
"For his novels full of despairing images of America's future... for depicting the rosy dreams of Americans in gray, dirt and rust..."
Literature looked behind the scenes of the great revolution that took place. Classified societies, workers, disenfranchised peasants, cut down forests, seas and rivers full of oil waste. When Dreiser wrote that novel, the scars and wounds of the First Industrial Revolution were deep. And his country was starting the second great revolution. The world would then be divided into two poles. In literature.
In 1930, the economists of the world's giant firms decided to increase the speed of production by using more electricity, and the period of the Second Industrial Revolution, which lasted until 1970, began. World politics embraced the socialist regime. After 1946, everything would be different. The small world of people would experience the pain of the cold war between the heralds of democracy and the socialist workers.
Literature is experiencing the period of modernism in this revolutionary period. Realism, romanticism turns into an empty dream. Styles become serious and radical. He does not write novels about the sufferings of the post-war working class, but about disabled children, homeless old people, and dictators with fire coming out of their eyes.
In 1970, Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Woznek announced the Third Industrial Revolution. "Apple" and "PLC" companies are established. The world meets robots. Unemployment is rising, the concept of a floating exchange rate is fresh in the headlines of news bulletins.
The postmodern era of literature begins. In the West, of course. Socialist countries at that time still wrote poems about hammer and sickle and glorious pioneer ties. The Old World combined the past and the future with devilish laughter and created a hopeless chaos. There was nothing sacred left for literature. Because everything he taught to the readers, all the moral codes, were torn to pieces between the teeth of the factory machines and thrown into the garbage. It was the era of literature that did not take anything seriously.
In 2011, in Hannover, one of the world's biggest technology festivals held annually in Germany, Henning Katzerman, an accountant from "BOSH" company, presents the "Economic 4" project. In short, the project was that robots do not need to be controlled by humans, artificial intelligence can do the job, that is, a communication program can be developed between two robots. When the calendar turned to 2013, at the same festival, the world's most famous economists announced the fourth industrial revolution, and most of the companies participating in that festival began to increase production levels with artificial intelligence from 2013.
A year before Kacerman's project, in 2010, at a press conference in Madrid, Bill Gates spoke about a paperless and bookless world. Bill felt it necessary to start publishing e-books because he was worried about the cutting of trees. Nobel laureate Llosa's famous essay "A world without literature" was a response to the Madrid conference.
Literature entered the age of metamodern development during the fourth industrial revolution. Unfortunately, Azerbaijani literature is not yet aware of this.
But can artificial intelligence create literature? Will robots that calculate all jobs with 99 percent error-free writing be able to write novels?
Alan Turing's 1950 "Can Machines Think?" The answer to the question was found in a chess game in 1997: Kasparov lost to artificial intelligence. In 2011, mass production of computer games began. It was enough for one person to build the algorithm, all other work was solved by artificial intelligence. And in 2015, a robot named Benjamin wrote a movie script called "Sunspring" and screened it (you can watch it on YouTube). So, artificial intelligence can write novels, make movies, and compose music.
In photo editors, Instagram and other photo-video platforms, we can color and correct our photos to the desired level. At this time, the program's brain memorizes the pixels in our images and uses our pixels in the next editing work. Just one photo is enough to prepare the program, after that every second the program recognizes new facial features, new colors. And so it presents us with different samples of our images than the original. I should note that the contours of the facial features in those examples match the anatomy of domestic animals more than humans.
Aynur Yusifova
