by Rebecca Baumgartner
Carpets…chairs…shoes…bricks…crockery…anything you like to mention – they’re all made by machinery now. The quality may be inferior, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the cost of production that counts. And stories – well – they’re just another product, like carpets and chairs, and no one cares how you produce them so long as you deliver the goods.
So goes one of the more biting sections in the delightfully mordant 1953 short story by Roald Dahl called The Great Automatic Grammatizator. The story focuses on a man who we’d refer to as a computer scientist today. He’s just finished developing a “great automatic computing engine,” at the request of the government, but he’s unsatisfied. You see, Adolph Knipe has always wanted to be a writer. The only problem is, he’s terrible at it. Publishers keep turning him down, and it’s no surprise when we read that his current novel begins with “The night was dark and stormy, the wind whistled in the trees, the rain poured down like cats and dogs…”
However, Knipe has an epiphany one night. He’s already successfully built a computing engine that can solve any calculation by reducing it down to the fundamental operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Why couldn’t he do the same with stories? All he’d have to do is teach the machine English grammar, program the parameters of each major publication’s style, and the machine would write the stories for him!
Thus begins his invention of the Great Automatic Grammatizator, a machine that can produce a story in the style of all the best publications at the press of a button. Knipe works like a madman to build a prototype and goes back to work to show it to his boss. After hearing how the machine works, his boss (a Mr. Bohlen) says, “This is all very interesting, but what’s the point of it?” Knipe explains how it could be used as a money-making tool, but the boss still isn’t convinced, knowing how expensive it would be to make and run such a machine. Knipe spells it out: Read more »