The Thinking Machine and the Tiger

In 1937, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a characteristically engimatic historical note and literary reflection on «Ramon Llull' s Thinking Machine.» It was the year when the idea of «thinking machines» picked up momentum with Harold Aiken’s mechanical Mark I early computer that became the electronic Mark IV. 85 years ahead of ChatGPT (first released in 2022), Borges is looking back some 650 years at Ramon Llull"s great arts which includes an ars inveniendi and inspired rational speculation ever since. This is one of five essays that look through the lens of Borges at contemporary learning machines. On one level, it traces the lineage of combinatorial textual generation from Ramon Llull’s late-thirteenth-century Ars Magna through André Breton’s surrealist automatic writing and Ray Kurzweil’s early Cybernetic Poet to contemporary large language models. Relating Jorge Luis Borges’s literary critique of thinking machines to Lev Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychology, the essay suggests how both human imagination and generative algorithms rely fundamentally on the recombination of culturally available materials. At the structural level of output, the text-generation mechanics of a human poet and a machine can appear functionally identical, yet contemporary generative AI achieves a highly selective combinatorial excess that obscures the underlying absence of an internal semantic architecture. Drawing on Vygotsky’s theory of word meaning as an evolving process forged through prior learning, historical embodiment, and social practice, this essay argues that modern machines dissociate the production of contextually appropriate, meaningful language from the socio-affective history of meaningful thinking. This finally leads to the conclusion that it is becoming impossible to infer authentic meaningful thinking solely from the presence of meaningful language, suggesting that meaning should be viewed not as an isolated asset within the human or the machine, but rather as an emergent property generated within the relational spaces where machine-generated cultural resources encounter human histories of learning.