To generalise heroically, the entire arc of world literature can be summarised as follows: writing about gods, then kings and queens, then ordinary people and, finally, ourselves.

But having exhaustively explored the divine and almost every dimension of the human, we are plunging deeper into a new era of literary history: writing about machines. And that may even presage the most startling evolution of all: machines writing about humans and perhaps, one day, machines writing about machines.

Literature, sometimes described as crystallised emotion, contains the very essence of the human experience. So what will it mean when machine intelligence trespasses into human territory? Will it open up exciting new vistas of understanding and insight? Or will it only highlight our own diminishment in the cosmic scheme of things?