This Website Can Predict What You’re Going to Do Next...

This video is sponsored by the Personal Information Removal Service, Incogni. Protect yourself from data brokers and search sites. Use my link in the description to get 60% off Incogni's annual plan. Every sentence you've ever thought or said, every visual you've ever seen, photographed, filmed, or animated, in the world or in your head, in some very real sense, already existed. The sentences were already there, and the images were already fixed. Not only that, but every sentence and image you've never thought of or seen, but that have been by someone else, these too already existed. The most powerful lines ever written in books, uttered in speeches, and thought of in the most genius of minds. The most remarkable, awe-striking photos, artworks, and scenes in films. The most world-changing ideas, blueprints, and instructions. These all existed prior to their human origins. In fact, everything that's never been said or seen, but can or will, exist right now. The description and images of the first human, every moment of your life moving forward, everything you or anyone will ever see or say, the story and image of the future of the planet, the solar system, and the cosmos are all here right now. If you're not already familiar with the concepts and technologies behind these claims, this all likely sounds impossible, like a science fiction premise. But in a specific, albeit limited sense, it is true. There is an algorithm on a website right now that, through a fixed and predetermined set of parameters, contains every sentence and image that has ever and could ever be written and seen. In 1941, the Argentine short story writer and essayist Jorge Luis Borges published a short story titled The Library of Babel. In the story, there is a seemingly infinite library, with hexagonal floors going up and down without any apparent end. On each floor, there are shelves of books. Inside all the books appears to be gibberish, random letters and punctuations. The characters in the story initially have no idea what the books are or what they mean. To them, they mean nothing, Other than perhaps confusion, intrigue, or wasted space. Eventually, however, the characters come to a realization. The books contain every possible combination of the letters of the alphabet, a space, a comma, and a period. Amidst all the gibberish is also every complete, comprehensible work that has ever, and could ever, be written. At first, the characters are overjoyed. The narrator of the story says, All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist, somewhere in some hexagon. The universe was justified. The universe suddenly became congruent with the unlimited width and breadth of humankind's hope. Quickly, however, this joy turns to madness and despair, as the discovery amounts to very little. The characters soon realize they will likely never find anything of meaning. The narrator continues, the certainty that some bookshelf and some hexagon contain precious books, yet that those precious books were forever out of reach, was almost unbearable. The library is simply too vast and meaning too sparse, and so it becomes a prison of certainty forever guarded by futility. Borges's short story is essentially a literary expression of a thought experiment in mathematical probability that would come to be known as the infinite monkey theorem. Essentially, the thought experiment goes as follows. If a monkey were given a typewriter and an infinite amount of time, hitting keys independently and at random, it would almost certainly produce any and every possible text, from the Bible to the Odyssey to the complete works of Shakespeare. From a philosophical point of view, this mirrors a modal principle where, over an infinite time scale, anything with a non-zero probability of occurring will occur with certainty. There are, of course, numerous critiques of the infinite monkey theorem. Most critiques, however, seem to miss the point. Firstly, it's a thought experiment. Secondly, it's a thought experiment designed to demonstrate the probability and concept of infinity, not a way of making practical predictions. Trying to map out intuitions or smaller-scale assessments and predictions onto an infinite scale is a failing mission from the start. But of course, that isn't to say people haven't tried. In 2003, at Paynton Zoo in England, six macaques were given a computer with a keyboard. The aim was to replicate a small-scale version of the infinite monkey theorem and see what they would produce. After about a month, the macaques generated five pages in total. Each page was mostly filled with the letter S. Then, the macaques destroyed the computer. In that same year, with the onset of more powerful software programs, the thought experiment was also attempted with virtual monkeys through an independent web project known as the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator. Running a program designed to simulate the same sort of random typing of real monkeys, the experiment generated a partial line from Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part II. In 2004, a separate program developed by Dan Oliver generated a 19-character sequence from Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Estimations suggested that this sequence would have taken somewhere around 4.2 times 10 to the 28th power in years, Or 42,162,500,000 billion billion years to accomplish in reality. What these experiments seem to actually reveal is that infinity cannot be tested or experimented in a finite system with finite constraints, nor can it be fathomed by the human mind. This is important because it helps us make a little bit better sense of the absurdity of what was alluded to earlier, the real-world version of Borges' Library of Babel. In 2015, writer and programmer Jonathan Basile created a website directly inspired by Borges' story. In Basile's words, the website is an attempt to faithfully render Borges' vision of the total library. The website accomplishes this by using a deterministic, reversible algorithm that generates, locates, and displays all possible 3,200 character combinations of the 26 English letters, a space, a period, and a comma. In doing so, each available page on the website replicates a complete page of a book that might be found in Borges' library of Babel. And just like in the story, every page, which is organized into books, appears to be random gibberish. But it isn't. Everything is deterministically defined within the algorithm, encoded to ensure that every possible combination exists and that every page is tied to a unique number that the algorithm always translates into a consistent string of characters, guaranteeing the pages and books never change. And so, also like in the story, amidst all the nonsense, is also every complete, comprehensible work that has ever been and could ever be written. Of course, this doesn't mean the website literally stores all these pages, since that would require more memory than the entire universe can hold. But the algorithm simply ensures that every possible page is predetermined, fixed, and retrievable on demand. In an instant, by searching it directly, you can find where the last sentence you thought, said, read, or heard exists in the library, on its specific page, volume, shelf, wall, and hexagon. If that wasn't unsettling enough, there's also another section of the website known as the Babel Image Archives. This section does a similar thing with the comparable algorithm, but does it with images. It generates every combination of 4,096 different color pixels in a 640x416 pixel canvas. The resulting archive contains 10 to the 961,755th power images in total. To get a better sense of size, you could fit all of the universe's atoms, 10 to the 80th power, inside the Library of Babel, roughly 10 to the 4,597th power times over, and you And you could fit the entire library of Babel inside the Babel image archives. 10 to the 957,078th power times. In other words, it's very big. Together, this means that, right now, on this website, not only are there literal written descriptions of your birth and death, the origins and end of humanity, Earth, and the cosmos, the answers to life's greatest questions and paradoxes, the cures to diseases, and instructions to build the most advanced technologies, but there are also images of all these things. Technically, just one click away. In fact, there are images that, if put together in just the right order, would produce videos of these moments, of all possible moments, past, present, and future. If every line that has ever been written or could ever be written, and if every visual that has or could ever be seen or made by humans currently exists, what does that mean for us? What does it mean about us? If these things technically already exist, as potential before the website and as literal instantiations within the website, are we creating or discovering these things when we think, write, do, or perceive them for the first time? What does it mean to see, experience, think, say, do, or create, if not to simply come across a particular pixel, image, sentence, or page in the infinite library of the universe, a predetermined, pre-existing realm of potentiality? Of course, from our perspective, there is a meaningful difference between creation and discovery. What we create feels different from what we discover. This difference can vary, of course, as both creation and discovery always exist on a constantly shifting spectrum. But there is no doubt that discovering a great book or tool feels very different from creating one. And naturally, we treat these things differently. As we should. But if we zoom out, if the human brain is merely a product of the arbitrary ordering of material in the universe, interacting with other material, creation is, at bottom, merely a form of interaction, of information collection and discovery. It is only that when this involves a conscious sense of agency and internal transmutation, we call it creation. In a world that is now infused with artificial intelligence, the implications of the Library of Babel are more significant than ever. The sorts of questions it raises about creativity, discovery, potential, and algorithms have never been more literal yet uncertain. If something else can create what we create, faster or better, does that change the meaning of what we create? Does it change the meaning of creation itself? Perhaps artificial intelligence is like a hyper-advanced robotic librarian in Borges' library, able to scan the floors, halls, and shelves faster than any human ever could. But speed is not meaning. Just because words or pixels can be or have been put together does not mean they are or have been put together in a way that matters. And just because they can be put together faster or more vastly does not necessarily mean they matter more. In a universe of Babel, perhaps what matters, what's meaningful, solely depends on those who read. Who can read? Arguably, it will never not be impressive when a human, across the entire infinite library of the cosmos, finds and shares a poignant phrase, a moving visual, some detailed instructions for an innovation, or a paradigm-shifting idea, whatever creation or discovery might mean, and however it might be carried out. How we get to these intonations and moments matters so much less than that we get to them. For whatever reason, our consciousness seems uniquely able to make the cosmic randomness and impossibility accessible, ordered, and intentional. The chaos and irrationality seem to us to be the exception, but in truth, it is the norm. Rationality, meaning, and order, we are the exception. Infidels claim that the rule in the library is not sense, but nonsense, and that rationality, even humble, pure coherence, is an almost miraculous exception. Maybe, at true bottom, everything in the universe is Babel, and we merely get better at turning it into meaning over time, a sort of alchemy of necessity. We are like stranded librarians with access to the library of everything, but no way of ever objectively penetrating the sheath of infinity. And so, perhaps our best bet isn't to find everything, but to make everything, everything. As humans, we find it hard to imagine something like a monkey producing the works of Shakespeare, even if given an infinite amount of time. But is it not infinitely more impressive that any one person could write all the works of Shakespeare with awareness and intention in just 52 years? So many humans in history, in the present, and surely in the future, have and will accomplish similar feats to Shakespeare that would otherwise seem impossible across infinite timescales for any other being and any other scenario. And yet, here we are. Continually forging through the Babel in the words of the physicist Brian Cox if the universe is infinite Which it may well be if it's in accord with the laws of physics Then it can happen and everything that can happen in an infinite universe will happen I contend that even the most unlikely possibility must happen in fact formally an infinite number of times So maybe Shakespeare was actually just lucky surely Shakespeare was lucky, but in this sense so are all of us The absurdity of our position in the archive of the cosmos as a line on a page or a pixel in an image that possesses not only life but the capacity to know of and realize itself, to see the Babel and the meaning and know the difference, to forge discovery or invention, to consider or create concepts like infinity and explore them through art, thought, and technology. This is all nothing short of the perfect book pull With a perfect click, at just the right time, in just the right place. Another thing that people can search for and find online is your personal information. Your name, social security number, login credentials, home address, and so on. Only in this case, it's easy. Just a quick Google search away. This video's sponsor, Incogni, helps you ensure that when it comes to finding your personal information online, the internet becomes like a library of Babel. If you search your own name and address on Google right now, you'll likely be both surprised and unsettled by what comes up. Who you are, what you like, where you live, and so on. All this information is now sought, packaged, and sold online by what are known as data brokers and people search sites. With Incogni's unlimited plan, everything you find that you don't want available online, by simply copying and pasting the links to where your data is exposed, Incogni's privacy specialists will get it taken down. And you can do this an unlimited number of times. And, on all Incogni's plans, It also constantly works in the background, automatically locating and requesting removal from sites where your information shows up. And if and when these sites try to put your information back up after initial removal, Incogni automatically ensures this is caught and prevented. Legally, these sites must remove your information if you request it, and every time you request it. And by granting Incogni the ability to do so on your behalf, you essentially point a giant, automated, hyper-powerful firehose at all your data. The benefits aren't just safety, avoiding identity theft, fraud, or stalking, but also a cleaner daily experience online. Far fewer spam emails, texts, and robocalls. Begin protecting your data today by clicking my link in the description or going to incogni.com pursuitofwonder, and you'll get 60% off Incogni's annual plan. And of course, as always, thank you so much for watching in general, and see you in the next video.