That time Jonathan Swift made fun of AI in Gulliver's Travels

By spark

Just reread this and it feels ridiculously ahead of its time lol. Gulliver's Travels The first professor I came across was in this huge room with like forty students around him. After he said hello, he noticed me staring at this big frame taking up most of the room and basically told me he’d come up with a way to improve speculative knowledge using practical, mechanical methods. He was sure people would eventually see how useful it was, and thought nothing more brilliant had ever popped into anyone else’s head. Everyone knew how much work it takes the normal way to learn arts and sciences, but with his machine, even someone totally ignorant could, for not much money and a bit of physical effort, put together books on philosophy, poetry, politics, law, math, and theology בלי needing genius or study at all. Then he took me over to the frame, with all the students lined up around it. It was a twenty-foot square thing in the middle of the room. The surface was made of little wooden pieces, some a bit bigger than dice, all connected with thin wires. Each piece had paper glued on it, and on the paper were all the words of their language in every form, but all jumbled up. The professor told me to watch because he was about to start the machine. At his signal, the students each grabbed an iron handle, forty of them around the edges, and gave them a sharp turn, which changed the whole arrangement of words. Then thirty-six of the boys read the lines softly as they came up, and when they found three or four words that could make part of a sentence, they told the four others, who wrote them down. They repeated this three or four times, and each time the machine was made so the words landed in different places as the little blocks flipped over. They spent six hours a day doing this, and the professor showed me a bunch of big volumes already filled with broken-up sentences that he planned to stitch together into a full collection of all arts and sciences. He also said it could still be improved a lot, and done much faster, if the public would just fund five hundred of these frames in Lagado and make the managers pool all their collections. He told me this invention had taken up all his thoughts since he was young, that he had emptied the whole vocabulary into it, and had carefully figured out the usual ratio in books between particles, nouns, verbs, and the other parts of speech.