Did Jorge Luis Borges foresee a future crafted by Artificial Intelligence?
Hear me out. Two weeks ago we had a Google rep come to our workplace to demo some of Gemini’s agentic capabilities. She gave us links to some sales data, inventory stats, a code block, and a prompt.
Everything was precooked, and I entered it in the sequence she prescribed…and my results were completely different from hers.
I mean, the facts were the same. All the sales numbers, costs, and inventory figures were the same. But the sections were formatted differently, the tables were set up differently. They weren’t the same document.
This generation of variant texts is exactly what happens in Jorge Luis Borges story, the Library of Babel. The library is a vast network of honeycombed cells, filled with books containing all the world’s recorded knowledge, along with an infinite number of variations. In fact, every possible combination of every letter and word, exists somewhere within the library’s structure.
Borges never says how the infinite texts are generated, just that their nature causes deep problems for people who want answers.
For librarians searching for the “truth” on any topic, these variations soon cancel each other out.
Its bookshelves contain all possible combinations of the twenty-two orthographic symbols (a number which, though unimaginably vast, is not infinite)-that is, all that is able to be expressed, in every language. All-the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books, the treatise Bede could have written (but did not) on the mythology of the Saxon people, the lost books of Tacitus.
When Borges published this in 1941, it was hyperbole. Yes the academic pursuit of knowledge seemed to be producing contradictory texts in approximately equal proportions. But it wasn’t until Google Gemini came along long that we could produce the lost books of Tacitus with the simple press of a button.
