This website can predict what you’re going to do next...

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0:11 Every sentence you've ever thought or said.

0:13 Every visual you've ever seen, photographed,

0:16 filmed or animated in the world or in your head

0:19 in some very real sense already existed.

0:22 The sentences were already there and the images were already fixed.

0:26 Not only that, but every sentence and image you've never thought of or seen,

0:30 but that have been by someone else, these two already existed.

0:34 The most powerful lines ever written in books, uttered in speeches,

0:37 and thought of in the most genius of minds.

0:39 The most remarkable all-striking photos, artworks, and scenes in films.

0:44 The most world-changing ideas, blueprints, and instructions.

0:47 These all existed prior to their human origins.

0:50 In fact, everything that's never been said or seen,

0:53 but can or will exist right now.

0:56 the description and images of the first human.

0:58 Every moment of your life moving forward,

1:00 everything you or anyone will ever see or say,

1:04 the story and image of the future of the planet,

1:06 the solar system, and the cosmos are all here right now.

1:11 If you're not already familiar

1:12 with the concepts and technologies behind these claims,

1:15 this all likely sounds impossible, like a science fiction premise.

1:19 But in a specific, albeit limited sense, it is true.

1:23 There is an algorithm on a website right

1:25 now that through a fixed and predetermined set

1:27 of parameters contains every sentence and image that has

1:30 ever and could ever be written and seen.

1:35 In 1941, the Argentine short story writer and essaist Jorge

1:39 Luis Bourhees published a short story titled The Library of Babel.

1:44 In the story, there is a seemingly infinite library

1:46 with hexagonal floors going up and down without any apparent end.

1:50 On each floor, there are shelves of books.

1:52 Inside all the books appears to be gibberish, random letters and punctuations.

1:57 The characters in the story initially have no

1:59 idea what the books are or what they mean.

2:01 To them, they mean nothing other than perhaps confusion,

2:04 intrigue, or wasted space.

2:07 Eventually, however, the characters come to a realization.

2:10 The books contain every possible combination of the letters of the alphabet,

2:13 a space, a comma, and a period.

2:16 Amidst all the gibberish is also every complete comprehensible

2:19 work that has ever and could ever be written.

2:23 At first the characters are overjoyed.

2:25 The narrator of the story says all men felt

2:28 themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure.

2:31 There was no personal problem, no world problem whose eloquent solution

2:34 did not exist somewhere in some hexagon.

2:37 The universe was justified.

2:39 The universe suddenly became congruent with the unlimited

2:41 width and breadth of humankind's hope.

2:45 Quickly, however, this joy turns to madness

2:47 and despair as the discovery amounts to very little.

2:50 The characters soon realize they will likely never find anything of meaning.

2:54 The narrator continues,

2:55 "The certainty that some bookshelf and some hexagon contain precious books,

2:59 yet that those precious books were forever out of reach was almost unbearable.

3:04 The library is simply too vast and meaning too sparse.

3:08 And so, it becomes a prison of certainty,

3:10 forever guarded by futility." Bourhees's short story

3:15 is essentially a literary expression of a thought

3:18 experiment in mathematical probability that would come

3:20 to be known as the infinite monkey theorem.

3:23 Essentially, the thought experiment goes as follows.

3:25 If a monkey were given a typewriter and an infinite amount of time,

3:28 hitting keys independently and at random,

3:31 it would almost certainly produce any and every possible text

3:34 from the Bible to the Odyssey to the complete works of Shakespeare.

3:38 From a philosophical point of view,

3:39 this mirrors a modal principle where over an infinite time scale,

3:43 anything with a nonzero probability of occurring will occur with certainty.

3:48 There are, of course, numerous critiques of the infinite monkey theorem.

3:51 Most critiques, however, seem to miss the point.

3:54 Firstly, it's a thought experiment.

3:56 Secondly, it's a thought experiment designed

3:58 to demonstrate the probability and concept of infinity,

4:00 not a way of making practical predictions.

4:03 Trying to map out intuitions or smaller scale assessments and predictions

4:07 onto an infinite scale is a failing mission from the start.

4:10 But of course, that isn't to say people haven't tried.

4:13 In 2003 at Payton Zoo in England,

4:16 six Makox were given a computer with the keyboard.

4:18 The aim was to replicate a small scale version

4:20 of the infinite monkey theorem and see what they would produce.

4:23 After about a month, the Makox generated five pages in total.

4:27 Each page was mostly filled with the letter S.

4:30 Then the Makox destroyed the computer.

4:33 In that same year, with the onset of more powerful software programs,

4:36 the thought experiment was also attempted with virtual monkeys through

4:39 an independent web project known as the monkey Shakespeare simulator.

4:43 Running a program designed to simulate the same

4:45 sort of random typing of real monkeys.

4:47 The experiment generated a partial line from Shakespeare's Henry IV part two.

4:52 In 2004, a separate program developed by Dan Oliver generated

4:56 a 19 character sequence from Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Arona.

5:00 Estimation suggested that this sequence would

5:02 have taken somewhere around 4.2* 10 28th power in years or 42 bill162,500,000

5:12 billion billion years to accomplish in reality.

5:16 What these experiments seem to actually reveal is that infinity cannot

5:20 be tested or experimented in a finite system with finite constraints.

5:24 Nor can it be fathomemed by the human mind.

5:26 This is important because it helps us make a little bit

5:28 better sense of the absurdity of what was alluded to earlier.

5:32 The real world version of Bourhees's Library of Babel.

5:36 In 2015, writer and programmer Jonathan Basile

5:40 created a website directly inspired by Bourhees's story.

5:43 In Basile's words, the website is an attempt

5:45 to faithfully render Bourhees's vision of the total library.

5:49 The website accomplishes this by using

5:51 a deterministic reversible algorithm that generates, locates,

5:55 and displays all possible 3200 character combinations of the 26 English letters,

6:00 a space, a period, and a comma.

6:03 In doing so, each available page on the website replicates a complete

6:07 page of a book that might be found in Bourhees's Library of Babel.

6:10 And just like in the story, every page which is organized into books

6:14 appears to be random gibberish, but it isn't.

6:18 Everything is deterministically defined within

6:20 the algorithm encoded to ensure that every

6:22 possible combination exists and that every page is tied to a unique number,

6:26 that the algorithm always translates into a consistent string of characters,

6:29 guaranteeing the pages and books never change.

6:32 And so also like in the story,

6:34 amidst all the nonsense is also every complete comprehensible

6:38 work that has ever been and could ever be written.

6:42 Of course, this doesn't mean the website literally stores all these pages

6:46 since that would require more memory than the entire universe can hold.

6:49 But the algorithm simply ensures that every possible page is predetermined,

6:53 fixed, and retrievable on demand.

6:55 In an instant, by searching it directly,

6:58 you can find where the last sentence you thought,

7:00 said, read, or heard exists in the library on its specific page,

7:04 volume, shelf, wall, and hexagon.

7:06 If that wasn't unsettling enough,

7:08 there's also another section of the website known as the Babel Image Archives.

7:13 This section does a similar thing with the comparable algorithm,

7:16 but does it with images.

7:17 It generates every combination of 4,96 different

7:20 color pixels in a 640x 416 pixel canvas.

7:24 The resulting archive contains 10^ the 961,755th power images in total.

7:31 To get a better sense of size,

7:33 you could fit all of the universe's atoms 10 to the 80th power

7:36 inside the Library of Babel roughly 10 to the 4597th power times over.

7:42 And you could fit the entire library of Babel

7:44 inside the Babel image archives 10^ the 957,78th power times.

7:51 In other words, it's very big.

7:55 Together, this means that right now on this website,

7:58 not only are there literal written descriptions of your birth and death,

8:02 the origins and end of humanity,

8:03 Earth and the cosmos, the answers to life's greatest questions and paradoxes,

8:08 the cures to diseases and instructions to build the most advanced technologies.

8:12 But there are also images of all these things, technically just one click away.

8:17 In fact, there are images that if put together in just the right order,

8:21 would produce videos of these moments of all possible moments,

8:25 past, present, and future.

8:28 If every line that has ever been written or could ever be written,

8:31 and if every visual that has or could

8:33 ever be seen or made by humans currently exists, what does that mean for us?

8:38 What does it mean about us?

8:41 If these things technically already exist as potential before

8:44 the website and as literal instantiations within the website.

8:47 Are we creating or discovering these things when we think,

8:50 write, do, or perceive them for the first time?

8:53 What does it mean to see, experience, think, say, do,

8:57 or create, if not to simply come across a particular pixel,

9:01 image, sentence, or page in the infinite library of the universe,

9:04 a predetermined pre-existing realm of potentiality.

9:08 Of course, from our perspective,

9:10 there is a meaningful difference between creation and discovery.

9:13 What we create feels different from what we discover.

9:17 This difference can vary, of course,

9:18 as both creation and discovery always exist on a constantly shifting spectrum.

9:22 But there is no doubt that discovering a great

9:24 book or tool feels very different from creating one.

9:27 And naturally, we treat these things differently, as we should.

9:31 But if we zoom out, if the human brain is merely a product

9:34 of the arbitrary ordering of material

9:36 in the universe interacting with other material,

9:39 creation is at bottom merely a form

9:41 of interaction of information collection and discovery.

9:45 It is only that when this involves

9:46 a conscious sense of agency and internal transmutation, we call it creation.

9:52 In a world that is now infused with artificial intelligence,

9:55 the implications of the Library of Babel are more significant than ever.

9:59 The sorts of questions it raises about creativity, discovery,

10:02 potential, and algorithms have never been more literal yet uncertain.

10:06 If something else can create what we create, faster or better,

10:10 does that change the meaning of what we create?

10:13 Does it change the meaning of creation itself?

10:16 Perhaps artificial intelligence is like a hyper

10:18 advanced robotic librarian in Bourhees's library,

10:21 able to scan the floors, halls, and shelves faster than any human ever could.

10:26 But speed is not meaning.

10:27 Just because words or pixels can be or have been put together does

10:31 not mean they are or have been put together in a way that matters.

10:34 And just because they could be put together faster

10:36 or more vastly does not necessarily mean they matter more.

10:40 In a universe of babble, perhaps what matters,

10:43 what's meaningful solely depends on those who read, who can read.

10:49 Arguably, it will never not be impressive when a human across

10:52 the entire infinite library of the cosmos finds and shares a poignant phrase,

10:57 a moving visual, some detailed instructions for an innovation,

11:00 or a paradigm shifting idea,

11:02 whatever creation or discovery might mean, and however it might be carried out.

11:06 How we get to these intonations and moments matters

11:09 so much less than that we get to them.

11:12 For whatever reason, our consciousness seems uniquely able to make

11:15 the cosmic randomness and impossibility accessible, ordered, and intentional.

11:20 The chaos and irrationality seem to us to be the exception.

11:24 But in truth, it is the norm.

11:26 Rationality, meaning, and order, we are the exception.

11:31 Infidel's claim that the rule in the library is not sense but nonsense

11:35 and that rationality even humble pure coherence

11:38 is an almost miraculous exception writes Bourhees.

11:43 Maybe at true bottom everything in the universe is babble

11:46 and we merely get better at turning it into meaning over time.

11:49 A sort of alchemy of necessity.

11:52 We're like stranded librarians with access to the library of everything

11:55 but no way of ever objectively penetrating the sheath of infinity.

11:58 And so perhaps our best bet isn't to find everything,

12:02 but to make everything everything.

12:05 As humans, we find it hard to imagine

12:07 something like a monkey producing the works of Shakespeare,

12:10 even if given an infinite amount of time.

12:12 But is it not infinitely more impressive that any one person could write

12:16 all the works of Shakespeare with awareness and intention in just 52 years?

12:22 So many humans in history, in the present, and surely in the future,

12:25 have and will accomplish similar feats to Shakespeare that would otherwise seem

12:29 impossible across infinite time scales for any

12:31 other being and any other scenario.

12:34 And yet, here we are continually forging through the babble.

12:39 In the words of the physicist Brian Cox, "If the universe is infinite,

12:42 which it may well be,

12:44 if it's in accord with the laws of physics, then it can happen.

12:47 And everything that can happen in an infinite universe will happen.

12:51 I contend that even the most unlikely possibility must happen.

12:55 In fact, formerly an infinite number of times.

12:58 So maybe Shakespeare was actually just lucky.

13:02 Surely Shakespeare was lucky.

13:04 But in this sense, so were all of us.

13:07 The absurdity of our position in the archive of the cosmos as a line on a page

13:11 or a pixel in an image that possesses not only

13:13 life but the capacity to know of and realize itself.

13:16 To see the babble and the meaning and know the difference.

13:19 To forge discovery or invention.

13:21 To consider or create concepts like infinity and explore them through art,

13:25 thought, and technology.

13:27 This is all nothing short of the perfect book pull or the perfect

13:30 click at just the right time in just the right place.

13:35 Another thing that people can search

13:42 for and find online is your personal information.

13:46 Your name, social security number, login credentials, home address, and so on.

13:50 Only in this case, it's easy.

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14:00 the internet becomes like a library of babel.

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14:06 you'll likely be both surprised and unsettled by what comes up.

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15:22 And of course, as always,

15:23 thank you so much for watching in general, and see you next video.

15:28 [Music] [Music]