a tale of a tub (13. 788)

Taken by academics as an over the top invictum against academia itself and an attack on the Royal Society and Enlightenment science of Newton and an afford to decency—even more so than “A Modest Proposal”—Jonathan Swift’s 1726 visit of Lemuel Gulliver to the levitating island of Laputa and its earth-bound territories speak to our current embrace of artificial intelligence as a short-cut and a short-circuit of critical thinking in the classroom and beyond. Resonant across three-centuries, our traveller’s audience with the regent and court magisters find him on a flying landmass (like contemporary tech utopias like the abandoned project NEOM), though with a limited range of six league (thirty kilometres) due to the specific geological properties, rare Earth elements, needed to support them aloft. Philosophers were so preoccupied with speculative thought that they needed prodding by dedicated retainers to get them to listen to anyone or social engage in any form. Most scientific advances remained in the realm of the abstract and theoretical, failing to work in practise, like extracting sunlight from cucumbers, but one device does, despite enormous effort and inefficiencies does work, a very labour-intensive wooden contraption that allows even the most ignorant and ungifted persons to participate in poetry, politics, mathematics and theology without study—neither reading nor writing—the gears of word calculator rotated by forty men into position, forming words and sentence fragments to be assembled by scribes, predicting the underclass supporting the energy-guzzling, autocomplete nature of ChatGPT. Laputa is an expansion of Swift’s earliest prose parody of the title, the allegory generally understood to be an attack on internecine Christianity but chiefly a lament on what passed for scholarship, rote memorisation and for those who embraced this new learning without caution or criticism. It is fitting that after departing this innovation-hub, Gulliver travels to his final destination to the equine society of the Houyhnhnms and their human work-horses, mute and brute, weeks spent in the company of the masters, trying to learn their language and copy their gait in order to avoid remaining just another yahoo in their eyes.