Gulliver’s Travels at 300: Did Jonathan Swift predict AI?

Jonathan Swift was nothing if not cross. August 1725 was a miserable, wet month, and the Dean of St Patrick’s was at the house of his friend Thomas Sheridan at Quilca, Co Cavan. Occupied in “overseeing and ranting at Irish labourers” on Sheridan’s estate, Swift deplored Quilca’s “scanty lodging, want of victuals, and … thievish race of people", an insufficiency of books and an oversupply of the poor: it was a place of “a million of wants”. Swift was then finishing a book that savagely satirises humanity in general while also taking precise aim at local targets. Published in London in October 1726 as Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts (1726), and commonly called Gulliver’s Travels, it was an instant sensation and has secured a lasting place among works of world literature. Its hero, Lemuel Gulliver, an English man of science and a ship’s captain, embarks on a sequence of voyages (supposedly undertaken between 1699 and 1715) that make up the four parts of the Travels. Shipwrecked near Tasmania, Gulliver is chained to a wooden frame by a race of tiny people 12 times smaller than himself. Among other adventures there, he saves their palace of Lilliput from fire by pissing a torrent of water from his giant height, earning the gratitude of the emperor and the displeasure of the fastidious empress.Gulliver returns to England only to set sail once more, this time arriving in Brobdingnag where the people, now 12 times his size, are as tall as church steeples and he becomes the terrified prey of rats and wasps. The Brobdingnagians love to see and touch him and Gulliver is driven to disgust when some giant noble women go so far as to strip him naked and place him on their breasts. Women’s bodies provoke particular disgust in Gulliver’s Travels: Swift’s misogynism was but a subset of his disdain for mankind. READ MORENext, Gulliver travels to Laputa and on to Balnibarbi, places devoted to scientific advancement and populated by frenetic schemers and projectors. Although located in southeast Asia, the floating island of Laputa might be thought of as Ireland, a kingdom and a colony long and painfully subject to the half-baked plans of improvers. The final book takes in the country of the Houyhnhnms, where the Englishman finds he occupies a place somewhere between the gracious and civilised class of horses and their underlings, the human-like but hairy and savage Yahoos. If Gulliver seems to learn little across these voyages, the conclusion strikes a notably bleak note with the sea captain miserable and back at home, barely able to tolerate the company of those “English Yahoos”, his wife and neighbours.[ Subscriber Only Books This is a library where the books won’t be read until 2114Opens in new window ]The noted critic Samuel Johnson, always keen to knock a reputation off its perch, remarked to his friend Dr Boswell: “When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.”But how easy was it for Swift to think up his stories of “big men and little men”? A Co Cavan story claims that he got the idea there, working on the tale while sitting on a pier overlooking Mullagh lake. In the late 1930s, John Lynch, a 55-year-old farmer in Rantavan, told James Drury, a teacher collecting stories for the Irish Folklore Commission’s Schools’ Project, that some of Sheridan’s workmen (also named Sheridan) had been large men (“of gigantic size”) and the learned doctor had a habit of “parading them occasionally before his visitors”. Meanwhile, Sheridan’s neighbours, the Brookes of Rantavan, Mullagh, employed workers named Bradley who “happened to be the smallest men in the whole district, being almost dwarfs”. “Their descendants who live in Rantavan still are of very small stature,” said Lynch. To amuse his friend Swift, Sheridan supposedly showed him the working men as they brought in the harvest, inviting the Dean to enjoy the spectacle of “seeing the giant Sheridans lift up the dwarf Bradleys in their hands and place them like dolls on the haycocks” – it is a short distance from this story to Gulliver’s Travels. A first edition of Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift If the big book came from a small place, it came too from a curious cultural moment. At the start of the 18th century, with Ireland now secured, Ascendancy writers took an interest in the culture of the vanquished – its language and literature, music and monuments – and began to fashion a new Anglo-Irish literature. The Sheridans and the Brookes were involved in literary coteries that cultivated this new writing, along with Swift and his friends.An exhibition in Trinity College Dublin’s (TCD) Long Room returns Gulliver’s Travels to its Irish roots and reminds us of how the question of scale has occupied the attention of readers across three centuries. The story’s shifts of size and perception have been irresistible to illustrators, abridgers and adaptors since the book’s first publication and it is a delight to encounter versions from Enid Blyton, Padraic Colum and Marvel Comics. [ Bookshops are lovely places, but they do create this one hazardOpens in new window ]According to Aileen Douglas, co-curator of the exhibition: “The first readers of Gulliver’s Travels were very taken with its satire of prominent political figures and the machinations of power. For readers today, fearful of being displaced by AI, Swift’s profound satire of human nature, especially pride in rationality and progress, resonates strongly.”Her reference to artificial intelligence points to the third part of Gulliver’s Travels which sees our hero descend from the floating island to the continent of Balnibarbi below, to visit the Academy of Lagado. Seeking funding for their highly idiosyncratic research projects, the Academy’s scholars aim to extract “Sun-Beams out of Cucumbers” and develop a scheme to build houses from the roof downwards. The specific attack is on the Royal Society of Swift’s own day, founded in London in 1660. But the chapter stands as a serviceable satire on both the “projectification” of research in modern universities and the illusions of the current AI boom. One of the Academy’s professors has developed a language “Engine” that bears an uncanny similarity to the Large Language Models (LLMs). Here, Swift mocks the fantasy that knowledge can be acquired without effort. Occupying its own room and operated by 40 young students, the engine comprises a large frame strung with slender wires and interchangeable squares covered with pieces of paper featuring “all the words of their Language in their several Moods, Tenses, and Declensions”. The students operate the machine’s iron handles and each turn creates new linguistic arrangements. Accordingly, boasts the Professor, “the most ignorant Person, at a reasonable Charge, with a little Bodily labour, may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politics, Laws, Mathematics, and Theology, without the least Assistance from Genius or Study”. All that is needed to realise this dream of automatically generated knowledge is a greater supply of books to feed the machine and public funding to advance the experiment. The case hits so close to home that University College Cork’s Mary O’Connell is currently asking English literature students to engage with Swift’s satire in the service of a “thoughtful rejection of gen AI tools” in their own work.Jonathan Swift the Anglo-Irish poet, satirist and clergyman. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images But in addition to its satirical treatment of an instrumental and token-based treatment of language, Gulliver’s Travels added new and indispensable words to the creative and critical lexicon. How might we conceive of miniaturisation without Lilliput? And, in media studies, the term “Gulliverisation” has been adopted to describe a shifting screen landscape, where we find ourselves turning from mobile phones to jumbotrons [large, high-resolution video screens]. In 1980, a computer scientist seeking to conceptualise the storage architecture of computers, hit on the terms “big-endian” and “little-endian” to describe the order in which bytes are stored. The words come from Swift’s classic, where a row erupts between the great empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu when a king, breaking open an egg from the big end in the ancient and approved practice, cuts his finger with the spoon. There follows “an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs” and war wages for years. The conflict looks very like the English split from Rome during the Reformation but language leaps across the centuries.[ John McGahern, A Writing Life: Biography of literary giant who understood the human conditionOpens in new window ]Written at the very dawn of party politics in England and Ireland, with its focus intently trained on its contemporary moment, Gulliver’s Travels retains the capacity to address our own time. Even the book’s long life across three centuries might cause us to speculate on the experiments in life extension beloved of the billionaire class. On the topic of reverse ageing, Gulliver’s Travels once more has something to say. The book’s third part ends in the Kingdom of Luggnagg, where Gulliver meets a tiny population of immortals known as the Struldbruggs and realises the horrifying price that they pay for eternity: an endless lifetime of sickness and decline. Weary of living on, the Struldbruggs resent the young, distort the past and lose their ability to communicate with the world. The great man himself died in 1745, aged 77, suffering from memory loss and senile dementia. On a final visit to Cavan in 1735, he reported on staying in “the dirtiest place I ever saw, with the worst wife and daughter, and the most cursed sluts and servants, on this side Scotland”. Dirty and disagreeable as he found it, Ireland fuelled Swift’s indignation at the world at large. But he was a satirist and not a prophet and we should feel under no compulsion to make his dark visions come true.Claire Connolly is the author of Irish Romanticism (Cambridge University Press). Gulliver at 300 is curated by Stephanie Breen, Aileen Douglas and Ian Campbell Ross and is on display in TCD’s Long Room until the end of December 2026.