It is easy to get distracted. This week we discovered that the President of the United States considers South Korea an enemy and North Korea a friend, that when he is not thinking about the decoration for his new ballroom in the White House he is considering bombing the allied country of Oman until it is (literal translation) “fucked up.”
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We also discovered that this president has as his right hand in the White House a 35-year-old Barbie named Natalie Harp who writes his posts – or expresses them in something close to English – on social media. Sweet of him, he says that little Harp is the only person in his family who truly and forever loves him. She was, for example, the one who had the happy idea, blessed by the president, to post a meme in which Barack and Michelle Obama appeared as a pair of monkeys.
It is easy to get distracted. It is even easy, regarding the presidential passion for expelling his mental diarrhea on social media, to focus on the internet as the greatest evil in the world. Francis Fukuyama has just argued in a way I would say is irrefutable that the reason why the idiotic right-wing populism advances in every corner of the planet is, first and foremost, the internet, not the idiotic wokeness of the left, or economic inequality, or immigration.
With AI, a world is coming upon us where machines decide without any moral conscience
Correct. The real world has been hijacked by a parallel world where ignorance and lies reign. Thanks, Facebook and company. As Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, confessed in 2017, the goal of his company was “to exploit a vulnerability in human psychology.” And he added: “Only God knows what this will be doing to the brains of our children.”
Nine years later, we have it clear. Mush. With admirable exceptions, most young people do not read, do not know, and as a consequence, increasingly lack the ability to judge what is true and what is false. Reaching the truth is hard. It requires thinking. And the more the basic tools to think disappear, the more easily we can be convinced of any nonsense. Like that choosing the stupidest man on Earth for the most powerful position on Earth is a good idea.
It is easy to get distracted. But with the internet or with Trump, there is nothing to be done anymore. That train has already passed. The issue now – the only issue, I have come to think – is not the danger that our brains corrode, but that they stop working altogether. That they become completely useless. That, as Yuval Noah Harari says, artificial intelligence soon becomes the OS, the operating system, of human civilization.
I have spent the week reading or watching lectures on YouTube about AI. I do not recommend it. I understand why almost all of us prefer to look the other way. It is like sitting down to contemplate death. In this case, the death of the world as it has been known since the times of Homer or beyond. A world in which humans think, decide, and act. What is coming upon us is an unknown world, a change from which there will be no turning back, in which machines think, decide, and act for us, without any moral conscience.
I was scared to read in the Financial Times this week that there are already more bots online than human beings and that most of what we read in English on our screens has been written not by people, but by machines.
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Yes, maybe it is true that AI will end global warming and cancer and allow us to live up to 150 years. But in return, we will become beings as placid and vulnerable as the rest of the animals, at the mercy of forces we do not know, over which we have no control. Or, changing the metaphor, like passengers on a plane on autopilot without human supervision.
I am not an expert, far from it, but I hear what the experts say and among them there is a growing critical mass in favor of the idea that in five or ten years technology will surpass human beings in all cognitive tasks. Goodbye to the evolution of Homo sapiens, hello to AI turned into God.
Goodbye to the evolution of ‘Homo sapiens’, hello to artificial intelligence turned into God
Our brains, they say, will become superfluous for everything except the functions necessary to procreate and survive. The initiative will be with the robots. And, if you doubt what awaits us, look at what happened last month when some AI agents escaped the control of their human operators, broke codes, and penetrated what was supposed to be an impregnable software platform. And they did it by communicating and cooperating among themselves, all alone. Experts say this robot escape, like madmen escaped from the asylum, represents a before and after in everything that is cybersecurity. Watch out for nuclear protocols, secret messages to lovers, bank accounts.
Is it too late? Well, unless we are attracted to reducing ourselves to the condition of zebras or lions or, at best, dogs or whales, something must be tried. And that means acting now to regulate and impose limits on AI autonomy. Difficult, because that means negotiating with the AI universe masters in the U.S., whose priority is money, and also negotiating with China, which advances in technology with the tunnel vision of an Olympic sprinter in a hundred-meter race.
What must be tried, according to the less amoral experts, is to achieve a consensus among states and private companies at the forefront of AI and, secondly, an international agreement similar to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty signed in 1970, which has helped us so far to prevent the extermination of our species.
I don’t know. Maybe I have been too contaminated by what I have been reading this week, but I have the impression that our governments must have as an absolute priority to face what is, everything indicates, a planetary existential dilemma. Inflation, immigration, education, housing, the new White House ballroom: all very well. But let us not get distracted. Let us pressure our politicians to focus on the existential threat that AI represents. Otherwise, everything else – starting with education – will be absolutely useless.
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