Whoops you’re correct stefano. That thought entered my head but went out the other side quickly.
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Zuckerberg took his turn kissing the dotard’s ring at Mara logo yesterday. Oh joy. Oh happiness.
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Borges’ 1941 story is a variation of the infinite monkey theorem. In an earlier essay, Borges traced the history of this idea from Aristotle and Cicero through Pascal and Swift up to modern times. The earliest recorded use of the typing monkey metaphor was by the French mathematician Émile Borel in 1913.
Borges’ 1939 essay concludes:
One of the habits of the mind is the invention of horrible imaginings. The mind has invented Hell, it has invented predestination to Hell, it has imagined the Platonic ideas, the chimera, the sphinx, abnormal transfinite numbers (whose parts are no smaller than the whole), masks, mirrors, operas, the teratological Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the unresolvable Ghost, articulated into a single organism . . . . I have tried to rescue from oblivion a subaltern horror: the vast, contradictory Library, whose vertical wildernesses of books run the incessant risk of changing into others that affirm, deny, and confuse everything like a delirious god.
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What this article gets wrong is there is more high quality information online and available than ever before AND it is easy to find. The problem is people aren’t looking. They demand to be entertained not educated.
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Brilliant article! Thank you TPM and Roger Kreuz.
The bleakness or “delerious god” is already apparent in digital advertising. Ads are treated as a less-protected form of speech under the law. It’s commercial propaganda, puffery, hucksterism, and now cholesterol for the internet. But it’s also becoming a major climate threat. This stayed under the radar in the Nordic countries until Google decided to set up a 1,400 hectare server farm in eastern Finland. A digital ad is cheap to produce, maybe a couple thousand bucks in the skimpier cases, but that ad and all the reactions and placements have to be overseen by algorithms, with potentially billions of placements and all the housekeeping and tracking that goes with that. One idea is to attach a nuclear power plant to your server farm, but eventually they are not just consuming all the power on the planet, but the solar system, and the galaxy. The carbon footprint of the internet was estimated to be between 2.3-3.7% of global CO2 emissions in 2022. That could reach 9% by the end of the decade. Among the more embarrassing efforts by advertisers to push back is the Green Ad Standard, the usual greenwash to get ahead of the problem. For example, claiming that an ad “campaign” generates 70 tons of carbon. Not that bad, right? I hadn’t thought about it, but carbon emissions are treated as externalities in the Attention Economy, where we pay with attention time rather than money, yet regulate like print advertising if that. In this sense, TPM AF is way ahead of its time. I’m believing all content should cost money, either through subscription or taxes (public information services and libraries). It would at least prevent the situation where some idiot, for the cost of one seat in economy on a transatlantic flight, can generate more carbon than the plane’s total emissions on that flight with zero repercussions.
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That’s really cool!
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A whole lot of food for thought in that article. thanks
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Hmm. Just a few years ago, we were being promised Ray Kurzweil’s “singularity”, the point at which we hand over operations to the machines. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/artificial-intelligence-future-scenarios-180968403/
Today, we’re thinking about how to dig ourselves out from under the mountain of baloney about to bury us. And Volpson’s worry of the impending information catastrophe a couple centuries from now. The deal is that no machine has its own ideas. It requires self-awareness. We have seen this in other species, such as “Alex” the African Gray parrot, who asked “What color am I?”
Alex had a vocabulary of over 100 words,[16] but was exceptional in that he appeared to have understanding of what he said. For example, when Alex was shown an object and asked about its shape, color, or material, he could label it correctly.[14] He could describe a key as a key no matter what its size or color, and could determine how the key was different from others.[6] Looking at a mirror, he said “what color”, and learned the word “grey” after being told “grey” six times.[17] This made him the first non-human animal to have ever asked a question, let alone an existential one (apes who have been trained to use sign-language have so far failed to ever ask a single question).[18]
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In the early days of the Internet, it was for exchanging information, with search algorithms pointed at university collections, or the ability to aggregate content digitally across multiple information sources. This was still the geek-verse and limited to those actively interested in and using computers… a verse that’s still present out there and what’s been scraped by those AIs. Not to be quaint, but that’s when commercial interests caught hold and realized they could attract with online marketing content, or aggregate pools of users doing nothing more than interacting together… the World Wide Web, along with the birth of social media.
Where my mind is going with this, is the information evolutionary process has all been self-driven. We keep searching for ways of someone else doing something for us, in increasingly derogatory ways as AI takes over the process of generic Internet searches we used to enter ourselves, that were a step up from digging through online directories, that themselves were aggregated from original digital collections, and so forth. You can still do this, but it takes the kind of thought and practice our evolution toward Idiocracy keeps trying to smother. We’ve stripped critical thinking from schools, all but guaranteeing the next generation won’t have tools to tell the bullshit from the real thinking.
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Get ready for the next buzzword – “Agentic AI” – where everyone has their own personal AI assistant that can operate other software for you, move the mouse around your computer screen, book your concert tickets, basically be your personal aide for everything. It’s supposed to roll out next year from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Bill Gates has been talking for a while now about how this is how AI will integrate with everyone’s life, not one big Forbin Project overmind, but everyone running their own little personal AI bots.
I predict the result will be a flattening out of the diversity of human experience, a reduction in creativity and individuality. Not to mention the potential for social control if the government gets its fingers in the algorithms. But hey, at least you won’t have to do the grunt work of booking your next concert tickets.
Here’s one person’s take on it, It leans slightly in the positive direction, so who knows, maybe this was written by an AI:
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I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that the great ambition of our civilization is to replace ourselves with, call them “machines,” or artifacts or whatever, that are better at being us than we are. It’s not a coincidence that this ambition seems so obvious that it has not been subjected to serious mainstream scrutiny. You need to go find weirdo philosophers or science-fiction writers for people who’ve thought long and intelligently about it.
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Before the internet, people in the supermarket check out line, saw the headlines on the National Enquirer and knew they were bogus but now those same headlines are on their computers and for some reason they can’t or won’t recognize that they are still bogus.
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Very thought-provoking article. Thanks!
much like an image’s copy and a copy of that copy, and a copy of that copy, will lose fidelity to the original image.
As in inbreeding?
only the wealthy can afford such bespoke services, leaving most of humanity to consume low-quality, noncurated online content.
Twas always so.
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That’s a beauty! Would go great in my MCM home! And it has a feature lacking in many MCM-ish designs, ARM RESTS! Full marks!
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That’s such a favorite story of mine that I named my blog after it - “A Niche in the Library of Babel”. As the endless auto-generated sea of the Internet expands, there need to be some niches of coherence…
Borges had another relevant story for today’s virtual world - “Tlon Uqbar - Orbis Tertius”. It describes an imaginary world first seen in obscure books, and then spreading as it fascinates more and more people. It soon takes over the real world, since it’s much more interesting.
Stephenson’s big prediction, to my mind, was in “Snow Crash”. Gibson and Vinge had imagined that the Web would be a domain of vast institutions sharing inscrutable data. Cyberspace would be like flying among the skyscrapers of corporate and agency data archives. Nah, said Stephenson - it’s going to be the world’s biggest mall - all flashing neon and buy, buy, buy. Huh, called that one.
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Similarly predicted by “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business” (1985) by educator Neil Postman.
Rather that high quality information being controlled and obscured by a 1984 Ministry of Truth, we’re more likely to end up in a future where useful information is lost in a Brave New World-like torrent of irrelevance, Soma, and Orgy-Porgy.
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Hey Sandi, thanks a lot.
Funny story: one day, about 5 years ago, I’m walking in one of the design areas in Toronto. There was a shop there that sold only MCM furniture and artifacts. I look in the window and there’s a roll top desk from the same time as the chair. I thought, is my stuff already vintage. Suddenly I felt old.
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Another day down the tubes
G’nite me peeps
Remember
Speak truth to power
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Whenever I’m in doubt I look it up on Wikipedia…oh wait…
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Borges’ Library of Babel doesn’t have any algorithms, and since it contains all texts it must contain the harmful texts–but intent must lie outside the library.
There is a wonderful little book tucked away somewhere in my library titled The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel, which delves deeply into the mathematics of combinatorics, information theory (as to the existence of catalog of the Library, and why one must exist along with an infinite [albeit countable] number of false catalogs), real analysis, geometry and topology, etc. all as they relate to the Library of Babel. Reading it made me wish that I was a professor again teaching a capstone course or an honors seminar in mathematics.
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