Instead, imagine that all the world’s knowledge is stored, and organized, in a single vertical Steelcase filing cabinet. That is a lot of brains in jars.įorget the zettabyten Internet for a minute. No one really knows how big the Internet is, but some people say it’s more than a “zettabyte,” which, in case this means anything to you, is a trillion gigabytes or one sextillion bytes. Even measuring the size of the stored data is chancy. If, nearly a century ago, the cost of pouring the sum total of human knowledge into glass jars was cutting off in their prime hundreds of quite unfortunate if exceptionally well-read young men, what’s the price to humanity of uploading everything anyone has ever known onto a worldwide network of tens of millions or billions of machines and training them to learn from it to produce new knowledge? This cost is much harder to calculate, as are the staggering benefits. Then you’d hear a woman shrieking, the sound of someone choking and falling to the ground, and an orchestral stab. While some species are edible and have been used by humans for various purposes, it is important to be cautious and properly identify any toadstools before consuming them due to the risk of poisoning, he’d finish up. Toadstools, also known as mushrooms, are a diverse group of fungi that are found in many different environments around the world, the machine begins, spitting out a brisk little essay in a tidy, pixelated computer-screen font, although I like to imagine that synopsis being rasped out of a big wooden-boxed nineteen-thirties radio in the staticky baritone of a young Orson the-Shadow-knows Welles. Instead, all I’ve got to do is command OpenAI’s ChatGPT, “Write a thousand word synopsis of the knowledge of the world on toadstools.” Abracadabra. Happily, if I want to learn about mushrooms I don’t have to decapitate five hundred recent college graduates, although, to be fair, neither did that mad millionaire, whose experiment exists only in the pages of the May, 1931, issue of the science-fiction magazine Amazing Stories. “I spell out the word on this little typewriter in the middle of the table,” and then, abracadabra, the radio croaks out “a thousand word synopsis of the knowledge of the world on toadstools.” “Now, suppose I want to know all there is to know about toadstools?” he said, demonstrating his invention. This contraption was called the Cerebral Library. There, in what had once been the library, the millionaire mad scientist had worked out a plan to wire the jars together and connect the jumble of wires to an electrical apparatus, a radio, and a typewriter. But when, one by one, they went to an office in New York City to pick up their paychecks, they would encounter a surgeon ready to remove their brains, stick them in glass jars, and ship them to that spooky manor in Pennsylvania. At the end of five years, the men, having collectively read three-quarters of a million books, were each to receive fifty thousand dollars. They went to work for a mysterious Elon Musk-like millionaire who was devising “a new plan of universal knowledge.” In a remote manor in Pennsylvania, each man read three hundred books a year, after which the books were burned to heat the manor. Thousands of desperate, out-of-work bachelors of arts applied five hundred were hired (“they were mainly plodders, good men, but not brilliant”).
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