the singularity of babel
The accumulation of all knowledge and its eventual descent in meaninglessness.
Which is not the same as saying Life is Without Meaning. Because it abounds with meaning. You might even say we're infused with that very meaning, but not having the ability to ever put our grubby mortal fingers fully on it.
There used to be a kind of guy, usually a weird uncle or terminal bachelor type, mostly harmless, who was a tier 1 level bull-shitter. Not in a bad way. They would know facts, have opinions, chime in on nearly any topic. They would pass on tidbits they heard in passing as if they knew it intimately and had wrestled with its implications their entire adult life. This was the guy who could spout off about why flamingos turn pink (they're naturally white, it's their heavy shrimp diet rich in iodine that turns them pink), or what the implications of Schrödinger’s Cat are. The attendant anomalies that coalesce around the outer edges of quantum mechanics and relativity were probably very fertile grounds to till in for these guys.
Sadly, and I truly mean sadly, the internet killed that guy. Some blanked faced millennial who grew up with the internet, and without a personality, upon hearing the catalogues of wonder put forth at the Thanksgiving table, summoned up google on his 2007 Apple iPhone and ended the happy Falstaff of the early 90's. We had hard facts now. Endless, non-exhausting facts, filling up databases, and servers. And now we have so many facts, those same vacant joy-kills, sitting on their mountains of cash, want nuclear reactors to power those servers, that hold all those facts.
The Bull-shitters, if they still existed, would tell say the last guy to actually know everything that really was to be known was John Milton (Paradise Lost). Just about at that point, on the cusp of the enlightenment, the universe of known and available facts, equations, languages, philosophies, all began to metastasize. The last remaining frontiers, once shrouded in the mists of the unknown had the curtains pulled back, and the sheer volume of what became possible to know skyrocketed. Newton sent us spiraling on whole new orbits (nearly quite literally).
Now those blank-faced giant slayers want AI. They talk about things like the singularity. They promise the entire world of known, unknown, and potential knowledge to be at the tips of our fingerprints. It's the infinite circular volume theory within The Library of Babel. The infinite library that does contain all facts, all sources, all versions, all meaning. The infinite circular book, that contains all that is contained in the library is the narrator’s version of GOD, the same way the singularity is our modern tech overlord’s version of GOD. The people who spend their lives, and generations within the library seek meaning, seek the pattern that will make it make sense, will give the library its meaning. While, unlike the kid with iPhone, they don't want to replace GOD, they do want to KNOW him.
The problem is, there are infinite meanings. No matter what humans achieve, what frontiers they cross, we only have so long to live. We only have so much space to keep things. We lose facts as fast as we find them. Even with everything accessible at the tips of your fingers, you could never know everything. You could never know if it was the right fact, the right page, the right version. Was it true, was it a lie, was it entirely made up, and repeated? Have we just created a cosmic sized bull-shitter with no sense of joy in the bullshitting? Infinite beings, and infinite things maybe are all fated to be something lost in translation to us. We don't have the right equipment.
The tower of babel, built in long gone Shinar*, when all humanity spoke one language, was built to reach the heavens. The people wanted to find themselves on the same level as GOD. They would seek a name for themselves. An immortality even. Seeing what they were doing, God scattered them and gave them disparate languages. They could no longer understand each-other, and so were scattered across the world, without finishing the tower. Infinite knowledge in the Library of Babel works the same. To seek it often leads to self-destruction. Ultimately it will lead to our extinction. Until then we can only truly know ourselves, and be comforted that somewhere amongst the infinite volumes, the ultimate meaning does exist…we can't comprehend it though. Its infinite. We're not.
*Babylon most likely.