The infinite monkey theorem is often stated as, “if you give an infinite amount of monkeys an infinite number of time, one of them will eventually write Hamlet.” This is very off. I assume most people think it’s off because they know monkeys can’t write (which misses the point). I think it’s off in the other direction; it misunderstands what happens when you multiply infinite x infinite. You won’t just get one Hamlet; you’d get a whole lot more.
Let’s start with a single infinite: a monkey with infinite time. Imagine putting said monkey in a magic bubble that gives him immortality, endless focus to type random characters, and the ability to survive the death of all universes, quantum foam, or whatever. This monkey has a lot of time. Endless time. He won’t just write Hamlet once, he’ll write it many times. Actually, infinite times. Sometimes the monkey will go several million/billion/trillion years without writing Hamlet, but that’s okay because he’s on adderall, can’t die, and has only one job.
Now imagine there are infinite monkeys, too. In every frame of reality (assume this an Unreal Engine monkey simulator running at 120 FPS), the Creator can spawn monkey bubbles, 2 or 2 trillion bubbles, or however many bubbles are necessary for one of them to begin writing Hamlet in that moment. Then in the next frame (0.0083 seconds later), more monkeys are spawned until one of them starts Hamlet too. Over and over. (What we do with all the unsuccessful monkeys is a different problem.) Since all of these monkeys have internet, there are 432,000 Hamlet uploads every hour. And if these infinite monkeys started at the dawn of our universe, they would have written Hamlet 2.18×10^20 times.
The big idea is that when you multiply infinite x infinite, not only does the unlikely thing happen, but it becomes the new grammar of reality.
This thought experiment feels prescient now, because, of course, AI. While agents can replicate & work at radical speeds, it’s not literally infinite. Even if some monkey virus infected every computer on Earth, and did a years worth of work in a day, that’s still finite. But even if you multiply an astronomical x an astronomical, or even just a very big x very big, a similar effect happens: the unlikely thing becomes omnipresent.
I first started to notice this in the Sora app (which I haven’t heard about in months BTW). If you’re familiar with the “Wazzup” 1999 Budweiser commercial, you might remember that it involves two guys yelling “ZUUUUP” into a phone, with the video rapidly cutting back and forth between them. Now, you can prompt anyone into that meme. And so you can just swipe right and find the LOTR cast going “ZUUUUP,” and all the American presidents going “ZUUUUP,” and every member of the animal and pokemon kingdom going “ZUUUUP,” and everyone in your phonebook who uploaded their likeness to the app going “ZUUUUUUP,” as if every conceivable piece of media, IP, and matter just collapsed into this singular point, an arbitrarily selected commercial from 25 years ago.
Now this is a simple, harmless example. But it gets weirder when you imagine a single person’s intentions leveraged to such an extraordinary degree that they become the entirety of the Internet. It would be like, after I publish this note, all the comments came from fake accounts based on real people I know, but they each post a link to a version of Hamlet where all the characters are monkeys. And then I go to Reddit, or check my email, or listen to my voicemail, and it’s just monkey Hamlet everywhere. This is an exaggeration, but I’m trying to make a point that is something like an offshoot of the dead Internet theory. It won’t just be fake AI stuff that tries to blend in, but an assault of the bizzare, a thousand oddly specific info-viruses that we won’t be able to escape, orchestrated towards various ends that we won’t be able to wrap our heads around.
I generally don’t think the open Internet, as it’s designed today, will be able to stand it. I also don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, because the web today has ossified and enshittified and is probably due for a shakeup. I do think there will be some chaos/danger ahead, and we’ll have to each figure out how to navigate that safely, but I imagine we’ll reassemble into smaller communities, sheltered from the near-infinite, where you trust/know the 15-150 people involved, within the Dunbar limit. From this disaggregation, I think there’s a slow path of building back better and bot-resistant, and it’ll possibly be a much better place than the before-infinite-monkey times.