Marginalia – Too Much Information
Jorge Luis Borges, kung fu robots, a classic quote, and a meme.
Welcome to Marginalia. Weekly notes from the margins – things I’ve been reading, noticing, and occasionally laughing at.
The infinite slop machine
In his classic short story The Library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges imagines a library composed of an infinite number of hexagonal rooms, each lined with books. Taken together, the rooms contain every possible text that’s been written or could be written – including every possible combination of letters and punctuation. Somewhere among that infinite text is every novel you’ve ever read, the cure for cancer, and the theory of everything. But there are also infinite variations of each, imperfect and nonsensical, unreadable and false. The odds of finding any coherent works among the babble are practically zero. The inhabitants of the library go mad in their search for meaning, forming cults and heresies as they wander hopelessly from one room to the next.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because we’re living inside the same library today – or rather, we carry it around with us and choose to submerge our attention within it. It’s called the Internet.
Sam Altman recently boasted that ChatGPT produces 100 billion words a day. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly a million novels. The entire literary output of humanity from Homer to Harry Potter probably doesn’t hit a hundred billion words. We’re now producing the same amount of text via AI in the time it takes the Earth to rotate once.
The sheer volume of repackaged, synthetic (plagiarised?) information boggles the mind. Want a 10,000-word report on sustainable fishing practices in the Caribbean? Done. Want a Marxian treatise on the evils of misgendering polar bears written in the style of a LinkedIn article? Just type in the command. Not that anyone would read more than a paragraph of it, if they could read it at all (although it would probably still make more sense than Das Kapital).
But where Borges’s story offers no escape – the library just is the universe – we still have a choice. It starts with recognising that the purpose of writing is never to produce text for its own sake but to help us communicate something useful or interesting. At its best, it helps us see the world afresh.
Borges’s librarians went mad searching for meaning among the nonsense. We’re doing something different – we’re building the Library of Babel in real time, producing nonsense at an industrial scale and giving it legs.
Speaking of robots…
Happy Chinese New World Order!
To celebrate the Lunar New Year, Chinese state media unveiled these kung fu robots. I assume they’re real. If they aren’t, they will be shortly.
Don’t worry, though. If history teaches us anything, it’s that rapidly advancing, state-controlled technology is almost always benign. I’m sure these kickboxing droids will be used primarily for festival choreography and the gentle maintenance of social harmony.
What could possibly go wrong?
Quote of the week
When those robots are deployed first by China and then by Western societies, we’ll be told they’re for our benefit.
“Of all tyrannies, that exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
C. S. Lewis
Meme of the week
Tyrannies come in many forms. All of them think they're above the law.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested last week – the first senior British royal since King Charles I in 1647. The last one lost his head.
In case you missed it
In Sunday’s long-form article, I wrote about what satirist P.J. O’Rourke called the spoiled child – “miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless”.
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Hope you enjoyed this first post in a new series – shorter weekly jottings (free) to pair with the longer (paid) Sunday essays. I'll post one most Wednesdays.
Here's a link I found to a PDF of The Library of Babel. If you're not familiar with Borges's work, this is a good place to start. It's wonderful.
https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Borges-The-Library-of-Babel.pdf
Perhaps apropos of nothing, but that is a fantastic photograph of Borges and his cat.
And AI couldn't create that in a million years.
People strive to be average, in the middle of the pack. AI is for those people.