All There Is. All There Was. All There Ever Willever Be. Read It Here
That could be biblical, but it’s not
By Jerry Constantino
SILENCE PLEASE! This photo represents the pretend library of every book that ever was, is now and ever will be in print in the future. NO TALKING! If your eyes are good you can squint and see books lining shelf after shelf. This pretend library is far, far smaller than the space such a collection would fill. QUIET!
The number of volumes that would actually be, according to the math nerds, is 10 to the power of two million — far too many zeros to list on this page. The premise is that each of those “books” are 410 pages, 3200 characters per page. It would require more digital storage than could fit on this earth, and beyond. Imagine, all this from an alphabet that has only 26 letters to work with.
I was taken by the story in Smithsonian magazine that proposed this premise, based on Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges who, in 1939, wrote an essay, The Total Library. Borges imagined a library that held not just every book ever written, but every book that could be written, every book-length combination of characters in every possible sequence.
With AI coming here, 85 years later that concept today is theoretically possible. The library would contain, along with an almost infinite quantity of gibberish, all of civilizations’ wisdom and somewhere within, true accounts of our past and future.
This, to my blogging delight, includes all the work of the ‘Infinite Number of Monkeys’ theorem (Wikipedia) which in itself, is a circus to imagine.
Borges’ point is that wisdom is useless if it is lost in a sea of nonsense. So AI proves him the most brilliant seer of a most unimaginable future. Not even Michelangelo could hack that.
Take for example all the political rhetoric churning on a 24/7 basis from one election campaign to the next. Ah, now I see what Borges
meant.
The downside: If The Library of Babel existed, all the writers (and monkeys) in the world could take the rest of their lives off. All has already been, or will already have written. Sorry New York Times, ‘All the news that’s fit to print’ already has been.
The upside: Think of all the royalties for those monkeys.
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison
Sorry Toni, too late.
