Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

There’s a Simpsons episode from years ago where Mr. Burns gives a tour of his mansion to Homer, and at one point he opens a door to reveal a room filled with monkeys sitting typing away madly at typewriters. Burns explains this as a real version of the old theory that if you put enough monkeys at enough typewriters, and give them enough time, eventually their random typing and flailing away will produce Hamlet. At any rate, Burns grabs a sheet of paper from one of the typewriters and reads aloud: “It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.” So close; but not literature.

I thought of this as I read a story from The New York Times on Monday by Noam Cohen entitled “He Wrote 200,000 Books.” The story is about Philip Parker, a science professor who has “written” more than 200,000 books (that’s almost as many as Isaac Asimov). But Parker doesn’t really write the books; instead he has invented a series of “computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject — broad or obscure — and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.”

Is this what we’re really coming to? Books written by computers? True, these aren’t novels per se; no one would compare a study of bathmats in India with A Passage to India. And yet, as sad as this is, it’s part of an ongoing trend. Put bluntly, computers have been fooling us for a long time. Many of the “acoustic” sounds you hear in music these days are actually computer samples. Not to mention that pretty much every special effect you see in a movie nowadays has been computer generated.

Still, just because the rats in Ratatouille are computer generated, the idea and the story and the dialogue weren’t computer generated. Computers are increasingly helping us be more creative but, in the end, that’s all they’re doing: helping. In bands like Daft Punk (not to mention Kraftwerk), humans are only pretending to be computers in order to make art. I find it hard to believe that the opposite will one day come true: computers pretending to be humans.