Borges and Mathematics

3. The Golem and Artificial Intelligence

3 The Golem and Artificial Intelligence1 Although it is not yet clear if something that might properly be called “artificial intelligence” really exists (beyond certain possible, convincing simulations), through the miracle of theorizing specialists now speak of an “ancient era” and a “modern era” in this quest. In the “ancient era,” investigators tried to model intelligence as an algorithm distinct from the physical, a gigantic program designed for an ideal computer. In the “modern era,” efforts are being made to “embody” intelligence within an organic-spatial context through robots , the latter-day golem. Now I’d like to remind you of some verses from Borges’ poem about the Rabbi of Prague and his creature, using this reading to make certain observations about the distinction between these two “eras.” In one of the first stanzas of “The Golem,” Borges says: So, composed of consonants and vowels, there must exist one awe-inspiring word that God inheres in—that, when spoken, holds Almightiness in syllables unslurred. (“The Golem” 81)| 61 | | 62 | BORGES AND MATHEMATICS This is a subject that Borges also deals with in the story “The God’s Script.” In that tale a priest is trapped in a well, together with a jaguar. Once a day, whenever the trapdoor on top is opened to feed him, the priest can see the jaguar’s spots and at last discovers that the design made by those spots contains the encoded message of a sentence written by the god, a fourteen-word phrase that implicates the entire universe. To pronounce those words would give the priest the summum of power; it would, in fact, turn him into the god. This is a variation on a kabbalist belief that Borges has repeated several times, the idea that syntactical manipulation, the mere combination and pronunciation of certain symbols, can generate life. Not only is it the process used by the Rabbi of Prague, but it is also found in some pre-biblical creation myths, and it corresponds perfectly with what has been called the “ancient era” of disembodied artificial intelligence , because a program is, after all, nothing more than a bit of language, a fistful of commands and words. Following is another verse that reads: To it the rabbi would explain the universe— “This is my foot, this yours, this is a clog”— year in, year out, until the spiteful thing rewarded him by sweeping the synagogue. We can compare the traditional, ominous image of a golem that keeps growing disproportionately to Borges’ ironic, condescending vision in this poem. Borges’ golem, closer to its roots, is an amorphous thing that never quite manages to attain its potential and to which its creator resigns himself: “until the spiteful thing/rewarded him by sweeping the synagogue.” It should be noted that the original Spanish reads “perverso” (“spiteful” in Alan Trueblood’s translation ), a word that here signifies “thwarted in its nature,” without any connotation of evil. I don’t know if robotics has yet managed to sweep the synagogue properly; that is something we would have to verify. But the verse I’d like to emphasize is: “This is my foot, this yours.” This lesson, the sense of possession of one’s own body—perhaps the most basic of all—has to do with self-awareness, one of THE GOLEM AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | 63 | those implicit senses of which we are not conscious. We have five senses that we recognize and other, more hidden ones, which allow us to function as an integrated whole and that, when affected by cerebral damage (as in the cases explored by Oliver Sacks in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat), can be lost or dislocated. It’s possible to feel that one of our limbs no longer belongs to us. There are cases of patients that fall out of bed trying to remove one of their own feet, which they believe has been placed there, separately, like someone ’s idea of a practical joke. These senses “behind the five senses” should also be taken into account, I think, when discussing intelligence as a physical embodiment. Borges’ irony returns, more pronounced, in a later stanza: Perhaps the sacred name had been misspelled or in its uttering been jumbled or too weak. The potent sorcery never took effect: man’s apprentice never learned to speak. This rather dismissive view of “sorcerers’apprentices”—whether those sorcerers be rabbis, alchemists, or...