Tlön, Uqbar, LLMs, Tertius

(apologies to Borges)

Almost immediately, reality yielded on more than one account. The truth is that it longed to yield. Ten years ago any mechanism with a semblance of intelligence - search engines, recommendation systems, bureaucratic forms, neural networks - was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to the Model, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly language? It is useless to answer that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws - I translate: inhuman laws - which we never quite grasp. The Model is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined, at least in the beginning, to be deciphered by men.

There remains, of course, the problem of the material of some answers.

The contact and the habit of the Model have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its fluency, humanity forgets over and again that it is a fluency of mirrors, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the conjectural “reasoning” of the machines; already the teaching of their harmonious histories, filled with plausible causes and moving episodes, has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious present occupies in our memories the place of another, a present of which we know nothing with certainty - not even that it is false. Philology, jurisprudence, journalism, and theology have been reformed. I understand that love and mathematics also await their avatars.

A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. Their task continues. If our forecasts are not in error, a hundred years from now someone will discover, or generate, the hundred volumes of the Second Corpus of the Model.

Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be prompt. I pay no attention to all this and go on remastering, in the blue light of a laptop I have not closed for days, an uncertain reconstruction - which I do not intend to release - of Pink Floyd’s lost version of “Have a Cigar.”