The whole thing reminds me of one Arthur C. Clarke short story, probably from the 1950s, where a group of Tibetan monks has purchased a computer to generate "all the one billion possible names of God". Before the computer, the monks had been doing the work by hand for centuries.

An American computer engineer is sent to install the machine. He chuckles at the monks' superstition: they claim that generating the billion gibberish strings is a task from God and the fundamental purpose of the universe.