Totalité et infini de la machine à tout dire de Gulliver’s Travels : du programme littéraire au programme informatique

• Main Author: Amélie Derome
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Société d'Etudes Anglo-Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles 2021-12-01
• Series: XVII-XVIII
• Subjects: Gulliver's Travels; Swift; machine; artificial intelligence; neural networks
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/1718/5936

The machine presented in the Academy of Lagado in the third voyage of Gulliver’s Travels exemplifies the fantasy of collecting the entirety of all possible texts. The imaginary device foreshadows major questions raised by mathematics and probabilities as well as the recent progress made by natural language processing with automatic text and translation generators. These real machines, however, appear to dismantle the ideal of infinity which fiction portrayed. Swift’s satire disclosed, in the early 18th century, the danger induced by reasoning on infinity when dealing with finite numbers. Indeed, algorithms do not seem to create the infinity of possibilities which were envisioned, but tend, on the contrary, to unify speech. When machines leave the realm of fiction, the texts which they churn out no longer follow the principle of infinity but that of totality, in Emmanuel Lévinas’ sense of the word. The excerpt’s lack of popularity may thus be linked to the uneasiness it triggers when one is confronted to the new forms of humanism linked with the idea of artificial intelligence conveyed by the Silicon Valley.