Preface: This blog is part of a series of blogs based on short essays compiled in the book “The Minds I” by Douglas R Hofstadter and Daniel C Dennett 1981 ( DH and DC)
The short essay called “ Borges and I ” ( really short, just one page ) is written by Jorge Luis Borges ( 1899 – 1896) from Argentina. He wrote this article in 1962. More than 60 years ago.
Borges became very famous in the literary circles globally with his publications translated in many languages and this created a very strange effect on him. He saw his public personality and private personality as two different persons. When he talks about himself he uses third-person language He thinks little by little everything from the private person is going into the public person and soon the private person will be nothing. He even concludes his essay with this statement, “I do not know which of us has written this essay”.
In the reflection section, DH and DC, discuss the first person /third person issues. They give the example of you waiting in a departmental store line and seeing CCTV cameras all around. You notice a person getting his pockets picked up in the CCTV image. As you raise your hand in astonishment seeing the act, you see the CCTV victim also raising his hand and suddenly you realize that the person whose pocket is getting picked is you. The event has changed from a third person to the first person.
They also talk about a Robot called Shakey built by SRI International in California. Shakey can move about in the room avoiding obstacles and a computer program is controlling the robot and has the current coordinates of the robot. Shakey reaches the middle of the room and you are asked to translate into English the computer program’s representation of Shakey’s co-ordinates. What will you say? “Shakey is in the middle of the room” or “I am in the middle of the room”.
Such profound thoughts and deep questions in a few pages.
Let us see if we can relate these ideas and thoughts to our AGI journey of 2025. All of us present a different personality in various roles we play. Our workspace personality is different; our religious personality when visiting worship places; our parental personality, our romantic personality with spouse/partners, our football game buddies and poker buddies’ personality and last but not the least our social media personality. These days we can also add your “Avtar” personality.
What do we say on social media? Who do you follow? How much do you post? What blogs do you write? what causes you support? Almost all the personalization techniques using AI assume that there is one personality of you i.e. your public pronouncements in social media, as they do not have access to your brain to extract the other personality traits. So, they take what they can i.e. social media personality and create a AGI model of you. Will the model ever be perfect in representing you, even if use the biggest LLM AGI models? How is the AGI model built on this premise better than the fictitious Avtar models created by each of us voluntarily? A very valid question for all of us to ponder after 6 decades of “ Borges and I”.
Regarding the Shakey the robot question, this is at the root of the Human Robot relationship. There are many essays in the book which deal with this problem and we will be discussing these in much greater detail in future blogs. For now, I will leave you with a few thoughts to keep your interest flowing
The first answer “ Shakey is in the middle of the room” assumes that we think, Shakey is not a person with human skills but a machine with human-like skills and Shakey came to the middle of the room only due to someone giving the command for it to come to the spot via the computer program.
The second answer “ I am in the middle of the room” assumes that Shakey is an individual as much like you and I and he/she decided to come to this middle spot Many robots of today find the best spot in the room for maximum light, maximum coverage view, etc. and find their own optimum spots like any of us. In this case, shall we vote for the answer no 2?
Hope the first story generated some interest in this fascinating topic and we will continue to interact through this series of Blogs.