When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI

One reason I became a historian is the joy of encountering moments in the past that are foreign, yet also oddly familiar. These moments seem to ripple outward, lapping up against the present in unexpected ways. Lately, I have been deeply dispirited by the current attack on academia here in the US — the deportation of graduate students and researchers, the dismantling of a huge range of important projects via funding cuts to NIH and elsewhere. And I’ve been reflecting on one of these moments of contact with the past. It happened in Buenos Aires in 1970. What I love about this exchange is that it takes place across the supposed “two cultures” of science and the humanities, jumping in a remarkably freewheeling way between literature, philosophy, and the fields of AI and machine learning, which were at the time barely even born. The participants were Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine writer, and Herbert A. Simon, an economist, psychologist, and pioneer of artificial intelligence. Th ... Read full article.