Way back in the 1950s, when computer science and communications engineering were really just beginning, there was a great deal of enthusiasm for treating human beings as if they were machines. There was Alan Turing’s work on the Turing Test, and there was Norbert Weiner’s work on cybernetics. Claude Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist, was inspired by all of this to go and use some stolen computer science and communications engineering ideas in anthropology. To do that you need to bash the concepts about so much that they’re barely recognisable. After its success in anthropology, Lévi-Stauss’s approach – by then known as “structuralism” – was applied to literary criticism. And then a certain amount of scepticism set in that this didn’t quite work or wasn’t quite right.