Column: Blame the Dog

If Monkeys Could If Monkeys Could If Monkeys Could If Monkeys Could Type, They’d Type, They’d Type, They’d Type, They’d Have Their Own Have Their Own Have Their Own Have Their Own ChatroomChatroomChatroomChatroom

Mike Ferrentino has a keen eye on that there internet and he knows that its denizens could whip up a decent bike given half a chance.

There’s the oft-bandied-about probability theorem regarding an infi nite number of monkeys and typewriters, or a sole immortal monkey and one typewriter, which postulates that, given enough time, said monkey or monkeys would by pure random chance eventually type out all the books in the Royal Library. Or the complete works of Shakespeare, or Hamlet, depending upon who is arguing the point – Arthur Eddington or Douglas Adams. In a less than serious attempt to prove the theorem, students at Plymouth University in 2003 “left a computer in the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo in southwest England, home to six Sulawesi crested macaques” according to an AP story at the time. “Then, they waited. At fi rst, said Phillips, ‘the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it. Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard,’ added Phillips, who runs the university’s Institute of Digital Arts and Technologies.” A BBC story from the same time added that during the month the computer stayed with the monkeys, when not beating it with rocks or using it as a lavatory, they mostly typed the letter ‘s’. I’ve been wondering a lot about the infi nite monkey theorem lately, especially when I’m snooping around on the internet in an attempt to gauge what the people who wield powerful computers are saying about the bikes I represent when they should probably be working. Usually, I come away from these investigations feeling kind of hopeless about the fate of mankind. Two million years of evolution capped by a period of blazing technological progress that saw us go from digging with sticks to walking on the moon in the space of about 300 years, into an age where global communication is instantaneous and effortless and we have at our

fi ngertips powers and abilities that would have been totally inconceivable a generation ago. And what do we do with those powers? We forget how to spell, and we bicker about our bikes. Darwin weeps for us. The monkeys might be onto something with the rocks and the pissing. Another phrase that gets bandied about a lot in these times, far moreso than ‘the infi nite monkey theorem,’ is ‘collective intelligence’. Collective intelligence at its most effective would be something akin to the manner in which ant colonies get things done, or could be characterized by the fi ctional Borg of Star Trek, The Next Generation repute (it embarrasses me a little to cop to any knowledge whatsoever regarding Star Trek, The Next Generation, but there you have it. I can also recall far more than I care to admit about Middle Earth, and have almost photographic recollection of every lyric and video from Duran Duran’s fi rst album. Sad. Probably could have used some of that space for useful knowledge...). Collective intelligence and the internet are close friends. My older brother is a huge believer in the power of the collective intellect. To him, it represents an opportunity to harness all the accumulated knowledge that humankind has amassed and use it in a way that can only continue to improve our lot on this earth by leaps and bounds. Mistakes can be avoided. The pitfalls and painful lessons of history easily sidestepped. The learning process fed through a turbocharger. I cannot help but admire my brother’s faith and optimism. Yet at the same time, I am reminded of the monkeys, and fi nd some very eerie Escher-esque patterns of half-truths and gibberish echoed throughout the world wide web in such a manner as to be woven into the fabric of our collective intellect as fact. And nowhere do these electro-metaphoric crows come home to roost more surely than internet forums and that

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