#lagado

今後は、月1回の営業日となります。

次回の営業日　9月4日(月)　17:00~22:00(21:00ラスト)

In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, he encounters a crazy machine at the Grand Academy of Lagado. The contraption uses a set of swiveling wooden blocks to produce random (often incomprehensible) phrases; ultimately, the intention of the machine was to produce the complete knowledge of the arts and sciences.

This experiment is riddled with mechanical errors from an objective perspective, and it’s unclear whether the blocks are six-sided, or if they’re simply flattened squares that are the same size as a die. Either way, the engineers at Lagado made it work, and the professor in charge was pioneering a finite state machine that would allow any individual to produce work across the arts and sciences by simply turning the levers of the machine. It’s a game of statistical probability; it’s the idea that if you put an infinite number of monkeys in front of an infinite number of typewriters and give them an infinite amount of time, they’ll eventually produce the entire works of Shakespeare.

I think that Swift was getting to some more subtle concerns as well, though. For example, this machine gives everybody the opportunity to be an opinion leader, even when they don’t fully understand the issue which they’re discussing. This perfectly mirrors social media, where anybody can champion opinions regardless of the facts and arguments that support those opinions. Furthermore, the machine produces an endless stream of information, and only some of it is even coherent. While this doesn’t provide a direct parallel to information overload, it does provide a fairly accurate prediction of the amount of noise that humans deal with on a daily basis. Just looking at a newsfeed provides an interesting comparison; sometimes, it really does seem as if words have been randomly strung together, and in the midst of the feed is relevant, poignant, or comical information. On a bright note, of course, he got the idea of crowdsourcing correctly when he talked about distributing the machine, and even when he had the students scribbling information down – or perhaps he was just referring to everyday research assistants?