It takes a rare genius to write a satire that is still read 300 years after its publication. Most satire dwells on the peccadilloes of soon-to-be forgotten politicians. And it takes a unique genius to write a satire that is more relevant today than it was in the days of powdered wigs and knee breeches. That is exactly what Jonathan Swift achieved when he published on Oct. 28, 1726.

The third part of Swift’s masterpiece focused on “remote regions of the world” under the sway of scientists, technologists and “projectors.”When Swift wrote, these technicians were an isolated species. The Royal Society, the object of his particular wrath, was only founded in 1660 and was powerless compared with the Anglican Church, which provided Swift with his living. But today these scientists, technologists and “projectors” rule the world and control the future, in effect transforming a satire of a slice of 18th-century English society into a dissection of the AI-dominated world that we are busy creating.

The first place Gulliver visits, in his third voyage, is a flying island, Laputa, inhabited by people who would be described, in today’s jargon, as “on the spectrum,” philosophers who are obsessed with abstract thought, particularly about mathematics, astronomy and music, but can’t cope with the practical world. These philosophers are so devoted to abstract reflection that they employ “flappers” to shake them out of their philosophical reveries by slapping them with a blown bladder full of tiny peas or pebbles. Devoted to intellectual purity, they are incapable of dealing with the mundane practicalities of life.

These abstracted types now constitute an important part of the world’s ruling class. One of tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s big obsessions has been “sea-steading” — creating offshore floating communities that would be free from the petty regulations of the mainland and inhabited by fellow geniuses. Mark Zuckerberg has built a compound in Hawaii, complete with its own underground bunker, where he relaxes with electronic toys such as hoverboards. The world’s great universities, the engines of the knowledge economy, compete to hire mathematical and scientific geniuses who float above mundane tasks. Teaching assistants play the role of “flappers” who shake the geniuses out of their reveries and translate their thoughts into a language that can be understood by regular students.

Gulliver’s next destination is one of Laputa’s client kingdoms, Balnibarbi, where he is treated to a tour of the Grand Academy. Here he encounters a vast army of scientists and their hangers-on who are engaged in attempts to improve the world: extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, softening marble to use as pillows, learning how to mix paint by smell and recycling excrement back into food. The Academicians have even invented a vast writing machine that allows anyone to write a book on anything under the sun “without the least assistance from genius or study”: just turn a crank and the machine automatically generates combinations of words that, with luck, make coherent sentences.

It would be churlish to argue that today’s tech revolution is nothing more than a giant exercise in extracting sunbeams from cucumbers. Yet the tech industry has already spent hundreds of billions on projects that have yet to survive contact with reality: Google glasses that allow you to consult the internet while walking down the street; giant Meta headsets that allow you to wander around a virtual universe that is in every way inferior to the real world; and a hyper-loop that promises to revolutionize ground transportation by putting people in a steel tube and then propelling them at 600 mph through a near vacuum with magnets.

These schemes are getting more expensive as well as crazier. Zuckerberg spent at least $70 billion building a virtual universe that few wanted to inhabit. Elon Musk is spending many times that attempting to one day colonize Mars despite the red planet’s long list of negatives: deadly radiation, no breathable air, temperatures of minus 120 and poisonous soil.

Gulliver’s next trip is to the island of Luggnagg where the most privileged citizens, the Struldbrugs, have achieved the eternal human dream of immortality. The Struldbrugs have got one thing wrong however: Rather than enjoying the gift of eternal youth, they suffer from the burden of eternal old age, afflicted by diseases that never abate but never quite kill them. Society is so overburdened with these bad-tempered old people (“opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection”) that, once they hit 80, they are shunted to one side and “looked on as dead in law.”

Here Swift has distilled in a few acid pages the downside of the immortality movement that animates so much of tech culture: a movement that has tech billionaires employing “blood boys,” taking hundreds of pills a day, dousing themselves in ice baths, following extreme diets and investing fortunes into faddish longevity schemes, all blind to the fact that what they are extending is old age rather than youth.

Most of us regard the world of “blood boys” as a freakish irrelevance. But none of us can escape the algorithms that our new overlords invent. In one of the most striking passages in Gulliver’s visit to Laputa, the king, “observing how ill I was clad,” sends a tailor to make him a suit. The tailor “first took my altitude by a quadrant, and then, with a rule and compasses, described the dimensions and outlines of my whole body, all of which he entered upon paper.”

Six days later he “brought my clothes very ill made, and quite out of shape, by happening to mistake a figure in the calculation.”Such mismeasurement is now our daily lot. The world of metrics contains many traps: They often measure the wrong things and yet, because of the glamour of precision, nevertheless compel people to change their behavior to hit the numbers. One of the themes of , one of the finest TV series in recent decades, is the way that the Baltimore police are obsessed with hitting the numbers, routinely “juking the statistics,” even though they all know that hitting the numbers is distracting them from addressing the bigger causes of the crime epidemic.

The logician Carveth Read was wiser when he said that “it’s better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong.”But the rapid spread of algorithms will make Gulliver’s problem with his very ill-made suit universal. Algorithms possess two characteristics that turn mere humans into dumb servants: spurious precision and mindless determination. Algorithms now determine what news we get or TV shows we watch, our career prospects by sifting through CVs or regulating promotion and increasingly, the medical treatment we receive.

Not a day passes by without us being fitted for a suit “very ill made and quite out of shape.”Swift earned a reputation as the towering misanthrope of English letters, a reputation that he capped with his modest proposal for Irish peasants to sell their one-year-old children as food to English aristocrats. Yet the only fault with his description of a science- and technology-ruled world is that it is too benign.

We spend our working hours staring at glass screens only to relax after work by staring at other glass screens. (Where are those Laputan flappers when you need them?) We struggle with 14-digit passwords and two-factor authentication codes. Yet all the while algorithm-driven destruction haunts us. Dozens of Laputans have warned us that AI could bring the end of our species if we do not pause for a moment and regulate it better. But we continue to invest billions in making AI more powerful while dithering over even the most rudimentary regulations. That prospect might have proved too dark even for Swift.