Page 40 - The Revolution Will Be Automated

Call me Ishmael. Or Jehovah. Or Buddha. Or Siddhartha.

Or Rama. Or Larry. Or The Big Kahuna. Or Skinny Pete.

Or Badger. Or Heisenberg. Oh, I could go on, and on, ...

Arthur C. Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names of God

We tend not to value the products of mere generation, or to

respect the process enough to call any output “creative”.

Consider Arthur C. Clarke’s short story The Nine Billion

Names of God, in which a sect of monks hires a mainframe

and some programmers to enumerate all possible nine

billion names of God in their unique mystical alphabet.

The monks believe the world will end when all 9 billion permutations

have been generated. The programmers scoff at this belief, seeing no

good reason why the universe should be responsive to mere generation.

The story is humorous because the monks turn out to be right: the stars

in the sky begin to disappear when all 9 billion names are generated!