(RNS) — This week the White House debuted a humanoid robot that walks and talks, and — according to Melania Trump, who introduced the machine — is a prototype for a “teacher” named Plato who will always be “patient and available” in offering the entire corpus of human knowledge in the comfort of your own home. Three hundred years ago, Jonathan Swift satirized such chimerical and anti-humanistic applications of human knowledge in “Gulliver’s Travels.” Among the places Gulliver visits is a scientific academy where a giant machine containing the inventor’s entire vocabulary is spun and turned to create phrases and sentences: basically a large language model for its time. Elsewhere in the book, Gulliver witnesses the uses of instruments that kill, rather than heal, their subjects, and encounters a race of creatures who achieve the foolish human goal of immortality, to disastrous results. An Anglo-Irish clergyman, dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and author of volumes of wry poetry, political pamphlets and witty satire, Swift wasn’t only a satirist, but one whose ends and means were …