Essay: Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift as a literary anticipation of AI principles

An essay published on The Conversation points out that the satirist Jonathan Swift, in his 1726 work Gulliver's Travels, described a mechanism that the article's author interprets as a forerunner of the principles behind today's artificial intelligence, specifically LLM-type language models. It concerns the book's third, less well-known voyage, in which Gulliver visits the Academy of Lagado. There, a professor with 40 assistants demonstrates a device measuring 20 by 20 feet with wooden blocks inscribed with words, which are mechanically rearranged into new combinations by turning 40 cranks. Scribes write down meaningful sequences, and according to Swift, the device was meant to allow even "the most ignorant person" to write books on philosophy, poetry, politics, law, mathematics, and theology without any talent or study whatsoever.

The essay's author sees a parallel between this fictional device and modern AI in that the machine mechanically processes language and produces results without genuine understanding, while promising an unlimited increase in productivity and knowledge to anyone who uses it. According to the author, Swift is only missing the ability to input specific queries into the machine — but, in the author's view, much of today's AI also generates content without a specific query, merely by applying tools to accumulated data.

The main point of criticism that the essay's author attributes to Swift is the illusion that randomly generated text will organize itself into a coherent work. The author notes that unlike the Academy of Lagado, where scribes manually discarded nonsensical combinations, today's AI, in the author's view, lacks a comparable mechanism for eliminating hallucinations.

The text is a literary-critical essay, not a report on a specific product, company, or technological event — it provides no details about specific models, prices, or availability dates.