PERSON
Jorge Luis Borges
The Argentine writer who, decades before artificial intelligence existed, built in fiction the precise conceptual machines that model its deepest problems—the infinite library, the man who could not forget, the author who reproduced another’s text and made it mean something new, the invented world that overwrote the real one.
Jorge Luis Borges went blind slowly, over decades, until by the time he directed Argentina’s National Library he presided over nine hundred thousand books he could no longer read. He called this God’s splendid irony—to grant him at once the books and the darkness. The image describes our own situation more exactly than any forecast: we have built systems trained on a substantial fraction of everything humans have written, and we cannot read what is inside them. The knowledge is total and the access is blind. We query the dark and receive answers, never quite certain whether we are reading the books or reading our own reflection. Borges (1899–1986) did not study computers; he arrived at the problems AI would instantiate by the route of metaphysics, theology, and a lifelong obsession with infinity and identity, while the engineers arrived at the same problems by the route
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