Who Needs Shakespeare When We Have 1,000 Monkeys

You very likely, by now, have heard the Monkey Typewriter Hypothesis. Take 1,000 monkeys (or 1 million monkeys, or 10 Republicans), 1,000 typewriters/computers, and given an infinite amount of time there is a chance that those monkeys will type out the equivalent of one of Shakespeare's plays. Granted that chance is about as slim as Hillary Clinton ever accepting a Vice Presidency, but there's still that possibility. Or so they say.

Well apparently one man decided he didn't want to wait for those monkeys to come up with something, even if it only looks like an article from the New Yorker. Instead he's written a program that does its own research and will then write a book.

It writes a book. You heard me correctly, true believers. The future is now, my friends.

The video is long, tedious and boring - but if your curiosity has the death of thousands of cats on its hands, by all means check out the vid here:


The short story. The man in this picture (he's not in a corner slowly going insane. I think., Philip M. Parker, has written over 200,000 books with the help of this poor slave of a computer program that he, himself created (there ARE child labor laws in this country, pal!). And that number is real, folks; pull yourself a search on Amazon, and you'll find his self-made publishing company that he uses to sell his books, and there you'll find an insane number of books he's authorized.

Parker Posey there lets his fingers do the cyber-walking; he's developed computer algorithms that collect publicly (i.e., on the internet) 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.

He's the king of the plagerizers, you might say, and you might have a point. Except the info is public domain, and his 1,000 cybermonkeys aren't writing Shakespeare. More like, How To books on writing Shakespeare.

As a writer...this frightens me, somewhat. I'm still of the opinion that I have nothing to fear from a motherboard, in terms of phasing out human writers - but what if there's a Big Blue out there, it's robotic arm grasping eagerly for a Pilot pen, it's relays firing with anticipation as it begins to pen the Great Cyberamerican Novel?

Books as we know them are a dying art. People on the whole are drifting away from printed media, at least the ones that don't have pretty pictures or can't summarize everything in 100 words or less. Why read a newspaper when you can catch the news on your Yahoo! personal portal? Who needs a book, when they have audio books on CD - or better yet, let's just wait until the movie comes out!

Even as I sit here typing this blog, I'm fully aware of my own hypocricy as I lament over the endangered species known as the Hardcover Book, but I could give a flying fig and I'm going to cry in my milk if i want to, so there. Nyehhh.

Anyway. The point is this: books are already dying...and now there's the spectre of this evil machine out there, slowing growing in knowledge and power and ready to begin its slow takeover of the world via the might of the publishing universe. Book.net is real, folks, it's out there...I know it! And one day, in the distant future, an android will be sent back in time to destroy some poor, young librarian, ensuring that PDAs and eBooks will one day reign supreme!

I know. I sound insane. And I very well may be. But is that any reason not to believe me?

:)