Gulliver's Travels predicted AI's challenges 300 years ago

Long before the arrival of ChatGPT, Jonathan Swift described in Gulliver's Travels an imaginary device that generated text without the need for knowledge or creativity.

Zoomit: Years before the advent of GPT chat, Jonathan Swift in his novel Gulliver's Travels described an imaginary machine that produced text without the need for knowledge or creativity.

About 300 years ago, before computers and digital technologies, an Irish author described in his famous novel an imaginary machine that could generate text without requiring any knowledge or creativity. The description of this device bears a strange resemblance to today's artificial intelligence chatbots and even reminds some of the problems and criticisms raised about this technology.

The famous novel "Gulliver's Travels" written by Jonathan Swift, which was first published in 1726, is one of the well-known works of English literature that narrates the adventures of a man named Lemuel Gulliver in imaginary lands. Swift has used these strange journeys to criticize political systems, social beliefs and human behavior.

The most famous part of the book is Gulliver's journey to the land of Lilliput; A place where very small people live and are at war with the neighboring country over a seemingly insignificant issue, which is which side to break the egg. This story was actually an allusion to the religious differences between Protestants and Catholics.

But the third part of the book has details that may seem even more strange to today's readers.

In the third part of Gulliver's Travels, the main character visits the great academy of Lagado; A research institute whose scientists and inventors are engaged in strange and mostly useless projects. For example, one group is trying to turn feces back into food, and others are trying to extract sunlight from cucumbers.

According to the inventor, with the help of the inventive device: "Even the most ignorant people can write books on philosophy, poetry, politics, law, mathematics and theology at a reasonable cost and with little effort, without the need for genius or study."

The way the device works is also interesting. A large number of words are placed on wooden pieces and their place changes by turning the handles of the device. Then a group of students examines the created combinations and when several words together have an acceptable meaning, they dictate them to the scribe.

In the story, 40 students are responsible for turning the device and checking the words. Of these, 36 people read the created compositions and the other four people record the parts that can be converted into sentences. This process is repeated many times to form a set of sentences and phrases. The inventor hopes that by collecting them, one day he will be able to prepare a comprehensive collection of all human sciences and arts.

Swift's description of a text generator is in some ways reminiscent of large language models such as GPT chat. These models also produce new texts by processing a huge amount of text data and learning patterns and relationships between words.

Of course, there is an important difference. Swift's imaginary machine merely moved words mechanically and largely randomly, but today's language models use complex neural networks and statistical computations to predict and generate linguistic sequences. Therefore, the device described in Gulliver's Travels cannot be considered a primitive version of artificial intelligence.

However, the main similarity lies in the idea behind the device and the criticisms raised by Swift: Can valuable knowledge be produced by simply putting words together without really understanding the subject?

The strange similarity of the Gulliver's Travels device to today's chatbots revives an old question: Can producing text without understanding its meaning lead to the creation of knowledge?

This question is still raised today in discussions about artificial intelligence. Language models can produce fluent and convincing texts, but sometimes they also provide incorrect information or create sources and details that do not exist externally. This phenomenon is usually called "artificial intelligence illusion".

Another similarity between the story and today's situation is the issue of investment. The inventor of Lagado Academy needs a huge investment to make 500 examples of his device, while the device has not yet been able to produce new and valuable knowledge.

This part of the story reminds us of today's debates about the heavy costs of artificial intelligence development, its economic efficiency and the actual use of some products based on this technology.

In Swift's novel, the machine, for all its constructive claims, produces mostly useless phrases, and ultimately it is humans who must decide which combinations of words are worth recording and investigating.

The text generator isn't the only amazing part of Gulliver's Travels. In the third part of the book, Swift mentions an astronomical discovery that had not yet happened at the time of the novel's publication. In the story, he writes about astronomers who have identified two moons in the orbit of Mars.

The interesting point is that the existence of two moons of Mars was confirmed by Asaph Hall, an American astronomer, in 1877, 151 years after the publication of the book. Today, these two moons are known as Phobos and Deimos. Swift even estimated their period of rotation.

In the novel Gulliver's Travels, the rotation period of the inner moon of Mars was 10 hours and the outer moon was estimated to be 21.5 hours. These numbers are close to the actual values. Phobos, the inner moon of Mars, actually orbits the planet once every 7.66 hours, while Deimos, the outer moon, takes 30.35 hours to complete one revolution.

Of course, Swift had no prophetic powers. He was familiar with Kepler's laws of planetary motion and had done studies on Jupiter's moons. For this reason, he probably included such numbers in the story, using the astronomical knowledge of his time and assumptions about the characteristics of Mars.

Did Jonathan Swift really predict the future of artificial intelligence?

Despite the interesting similarities between Swift's fictional device and today's technologies, the author's goal was not to predict the future. Gulliver's Travels is a satirical and critical work, and the section related to Lagado Academy is more related to the criticism of research methods and scientific activities of the author's time.

In this section, Swift expresses his critical view of some scientific activities and projects related to the intellectual space of the British Royal Society. In particular, he ridicules methods that equate the production of large volumes of information with the acquisition of real knowledge. From the author's point of view, producing text and putting words together, without the ability to evaluate and understand their content, does not necessarily lead to the creation of knowledge.

The point that made the discussed part of the Gulliver's Travels novel to be re-considered after three centuries is this criticism. Even today, despite the impressive capabilities of linguistic models in content production, it is still important to check the accuracy of information, evaluate arguments and detect their possible errors.

In 1726, Swift had no idea that machines would one day be built that could write essays in seconds, answer questions, and even participate in generating programming code. However, the question he satirically posed is still a matter of debate: if a machine can produce text, does this ability alone mean it can produce knowledge?