Ai

In the prologue to The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), the first half of what became Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges wrote that composing vast books is “a laborious and impoverishing madness”: setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be told perfectly well in a few minutes. “The better course of procedure,” he went on, “is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a résumé, a commentary.” Several of the stories that follow do exactly that. They review novels nobody wrote, annotate encyclopedias that were never printed, and give a bibliography for an author who never lived. …

For years, learning English meant having words and sentences arrive before their meanings did. I could recognize kernel and shell as parts of an operating system, and switch, gateway, and bridge as pieces of a network. The same words belonged to ordinary life, but that second world did not come with them. A sentence could be grammatically sound and still feel like a building whose rooms I had never entered. …

On Monday, January 27, 2025, Nvidia lost close to six hundred billion dollars of market value in a single session, the largest one-day loss any company had ever recorded. The cause was not a failed product or a scandal. It was good news about efficiency: a Chinese laboratory, DeepSeek, had published a model that matched the frontier while reporting a fraction of the usual training compute. If intelligence could be had for less hardware, the reasoning went, the world would need less hardware. Within hours Satya Nadella, whose company was spending tens of billions a year on GPUs, had posted a two-word diagnosis with a nineteenth-century name attached: “Jevons paradox strikes again!” …

Somewhere in most houses there is a frame with a document in it. It has a seal, a signature, a name spelled correctly at last, and a phrase in a dead or ceremonial language certifying that the bearer has completed a course of study. Nobody looks at it. It was not made to be looked at. It was made to be shown once, to an employer or a relative, and then to hang as proof that something happened during those years, something the frame calls education. …

In the Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story about the Egyptian god Theuth, inventor of writing, who brings his gift to King Thamus and asks him to distribute it to the people. Thamus refuses to be impressed. Writing, he says, will not improve memory but replace it: people will stop exercising the internal discipline of recollection and instead rely on external marks made by someone else’s hand. They will seem wise without being wise, “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” It is, as far as the historical record goes, the oldest surviving complaint against a technology for knowing things — and it is aimed, with uncanny precision, at exactly the anxiety now circulating about large language models. …

Gabriel García Márquez read Jorge Luis Borges the way a student reads a master: closely, gratefully, for years. Borges, by most accounts, did not return the favor. He found García Márquez’s prose baggy where his own was compressed, sentimental where his own was cold. The debt ran one direction only. That asymmetry is not a footnote in Latin American letters. It is a small, uncomfortable model of how culture actually works, and it is the model we need if we are going to talk honestly about AI slop. …

Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story about a young man named Ireneo Funes who, after a fall from a horse, could forget nothing. Every leaf on every tree, every cloud he had ever seen, every sentence spoken in his presence, remained available to him in total, permanent, unbearable detail. Borges’s point in “Funes the Memorious” was not that perfect memory is a gift. It is that a mind which cannot forget cannot think, because thinking requires generalization, and generalization requires the discipline of throwing most of the world away. Human memory works precisely because it is lossy, associative, and biased toward what mattered emotionally rather than what happened exactly. …

Some ideas are the wrong size for the forms available to hold them. A poem compresses too hard — you sketch the frame of a house you will never build. A book demands the opposite problem: not craft but infrastructure, a publisher, a grant, a sabbatical, a spouse able to carry the mortgage while you argue with chapter seven for two years. Montaigne solved this exact problem in the sixteenth century by inventing a form for it — the essai, literally an “attempt,” sized for an idea bigger than a stanza and smaller than a treatise, published in no particular order, revised across editions, admitting on the page that the writer had not finished thinking. It is, on paper, the perfect container for someone whose ideas don’t fit neatly anywhere else. …

Picture the same elevator bank across three renovations, spread over fifteen years, though the elevator itself never seems to age: 1943, then 1949, then 1958. Nobody posts a sign explaining which era’s dispatch panel is running behind the doors, and for a stretch, riding it, you genuinely couldn’t tell. That’s the detail worth sitting with. A system that behaves intelligently doesn’t announce what kind of intelligence it has. You only find out what’s inside once it’s wrong, and you watch what it does next. …

“Ask your doctor if it’s right for you.” Anyone who has watched American television knows the sentence by heart. It sounds like caution, but read it slowly and it’s a script: here is a feeling you may not have noticed, here is a product that addresses it, and here is a professional whose role in the transaction is to ratify or veto a decision you have already half-made. The ad doesn’t sell a drug. It sells a diagnosis and rents a doctor’s authority to close the deal. …