Sorting through Sorcerers

Sorcery is a magical word.

No, I mean literally: it means magic or great supernatural power that’s generally not fully controlled or understood by the person doing it.

Remember Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice? This short film from Fantasia perfectly encapsulates a classic cautionary tale around sorcery, as Mickey is overwhelmed by the power he can’t control, all in the quest to make life easier for himself:

The warning is obvious, and I bet I don’t need to spell out the parallels to you today. We’ve got AI agents now that actually work, as

Daniel Nest

over at

Why Try AI

has pointed out this week. I’m not talking about the ability for you to generate images or video with a prompt—I’m talking about being able to tell a bot to go do a specific task for you.

The word sorcery traces back to Old French, where it was sorcerie. The Old French meaning of the word was similar to the way we use the word sorcery in English today, and it was derived from the word for a person who used this sort of magic: a sorcier. You might think it would be the other way around, but a sorcier was once called a sortiarius, and this word goes all the way back to Ancient Rome.

Sortiarius itself originates from the word sors, a noun which meant an item you would use in order to make a decision. It might be a die, or it might be a straw, but this inanimate lot would ultimately allow whatever you were unsure of to be in the hands of the gods.

Sortarii were considered to be close to the gods, and so they channeled some power that was beyond their comprehension whenever they cast lots to make a decision.

You can probably see how this word ultimately became sorcery, but that’s not the only word sors gives us. That’s because those lots you would cast represented a person’s fate or fortune? You had to sort through the physical totems in order to figure out what the gods really wanted. You had to see which straw was shorter, or you had to read the dice.

This began to be called sorting only by the time of Modern English, but by the time of Middle English, two new words with distinct meanings had branched off of the original sors. Now, we had something that would eventually mean casting magic, and something that meant the routine act of putting things into specific piles by category.

Today’s sorcery takes place through the medium of silicon. In goes your question, and out comes an answer, or an image, or a video, or an agent going out into the world and doing things on your behalf.

AI fulfills the original double meaning of sors: it certainly seems like magic, and the actual practice involves sorting. Ones go to one side, and zeros go to the other.