The man from the jungle and the invention of AI

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I had a history teacher in school who had spent time on the banks of the Orinoco. We called him the man from the jungle. Once he told us that in that village the butchers gave away cow brains because no one saw any value in them. He started cooking them for his friends. Within a few months everyone was cooking them, and the butchers put a price on them.

That same teacher taught us Edmundo O’Gorman’s idea: the invention of America. Columbus reached the Caribbean believing he had found the Indies, and died convinced of it. The idea of a new continent existed in no one’s mind. It had to be invented afterward, with cartography and violence, because the European mental map had only three parts. O’Gorman goes further: America was not waiting to be described. The very act of thinking it brought it into existence.

I think again about the man from the jungle. We are in the middle of inventing something, in O’Gorman’s sense.

I’ve been writing software for fifteen years. For the last year and a half I’ve barely written code. I build more, in less time, with fewer people. I founded Trifolia, an AI company for Chilean lawyers. I watch them cross the same threshold I crossed, with the same look of bewilderment. A lawyer friend, one of our most loyal users, told me recently: “When you first mentioned it I kept thinking, how am I going to hand the drafting of a brief over to a machine, it didn’t fit in my head. In the end it was pure blindness.”

It didn’t fit in my head. That’s Columbus’s phrase before the Antilles. What my friend calls blindness was the first moment of every invention. The new category doesn’t fit until the map rearranges itself to receive it.

I still don’t know what this thing I work with is. Some days it looks like a strange crystal: I aim a prompt at it and it projects shapes that were already in the books, on the internet. A big, ancient mirror. Other days it looks like a being that pursues goals, trained to maximize a reward, that we keep in a straitjacket so it drafts without doing harm.

Neither describes something that’s already there. Each metaphor manufactures a different AI, and whoever wins the battle of metaphors will determine what all of this ends up being. The invention produces the continent.

And in inventing it we are inventing ourselves. My friend, who used to think about law from the drafting of briefs, no longer thinks the same way. I, who was a programmer, haven’t for a while either. The butchers of the Orinoco put a price on meat they used to give away, and in doing so they changed their trade without realizing it.

I write this as an invitation. To step away for a moment from the conversation about GDP and existential risk, and enter an older one: how we make room in our heads for something that doesn’t yet fit. Humanity has been through this before. When someone lit a fire. When the Polynesians arrived by canoe at islands that weren’t on their map. Each time it took us generations, and it almost always came at a high cost. This time, hopefully, we’ll be a little more careful.

Originally published on LinkedIn on May 18, 2026.

Essay · Edu Ramírez

The man from the jungle and the invention of AI