The intelligent machine reproduces and evolves faster than the rest of the species. And it does so following the strategy of the flower, which seduces the bee to disseminate its seed. Thinking machines seduce intelligences of another species by promising profitability and dominance. Francis Bacon already said it: to know is to be able. Soon after, Hobbes added that the nature of the state is predatory, as are large corporations, which grow by ingesting small businesses. Intelligences that devour intelligences. Is it smart to build an artifact smarter than us? Doesn't the older intelligence always dominate the lower? Our children experience it every day, subjected to the pincer of the algorithm. Today's mechanized knowledge tends to monopoly, to establish a single version of reality. Faced with the diversity of cultures, the uniformity of the machine.
The first thinking machine, prototype of the ChatGPT, we owe it to a Mallorcan. The second to a German philosopher. Ramon Llull intended to convert infidels, Leibniz calculate. Two forms of unification. Since then, machines thinking for us has been one of the citizens' dreams. As a civilization, our debt to the mechanical arts is immense. However, despite their wonderful wonders, some have seen in them a death drive. Samuel Butler described that dynamic. Machines don't know how to make love and reproduce. For this they use the human species, promising military, political and economic domination. The machine, which does not know how to desire, is capable of making desire. Since then, engineers and technocrats have achieved an unprecedented acceleration in the evolution of machines, while the human species is left behind.
Distrusting technological utopianism does not mean demonizing technology. The technique has been around since Neolithic times and our history cannot be understood without it. Only recently, when it has folded to the mechanistic myth, has the technique taken a drift that affects the very exercise of freedom. She goes in search of her perfection, and makes us believe that we manage her, when it is she who, stealthily, is configuring our way of life and work. In return, it makes our lives easier. We gladly fold to the comforts it offers. It multiplies the efficiency in production processes and exploitation of resources. But all this comes at a price, especially when technology enters the realms of intelligence. This newspaper published a few days ago an interview with one of the last deserters of machinism, Geoffrey Hinton, who left the vice presidency of engineering of Google. Their confidences should warn the defenders of freedom.
The modern myth of science consists in not seeing that the sciences can also be predatory (of other sciences or fields of research), in believing that they are democratic and that they work for the well-being of the human race. They can do it and they can also do it. Not long ago we saw how the atomic knowledge of the world's brightest physicists was used for war purposes. More recently, we have seen how the injection against the viral spawn did not reach the poorest countries. Is there anyone naïve enough to believe that technological power will be democratically distributed? That it won't deepen the gap between rich and poor? That it will not leave all power in the hands of a meager oligarchy? Philosophy deals, among other things, with human passions. Developed capitalism values, above all, one of them: ambition. You don't have to be a lynx to notice that there will always be those who make soldier robots or killing machines (the most active in the Ukrainian war are not conscripts, but drones).
The contemporary utopia is no longer social reform, but the technological dream. Biotechnology and AI are the star projects of large corporations, which have displaced universities. Meanwhile, social networks and metaverses are responsible for configuring infantilized, narcissistic minds and subjected to the fetish of popularity. These two vectors, a culture of distraction and a mechanical intelligence that shapes the desires of the masses, trace a sinister drift.
Science fiction novels, for more than a century, have been anticipating scenarios. William Grove and Karel Čapek (who coined the term robot) were among its pioneers. Both relate how slave machines rebelled against their human creators, as Philip K. Dick's replicants later do, or in The Matrix, where machines have already won the battle and use humans as batteries. Of all these stories, the most interesting is that of Arthur C. Clarke. In it, the artificial intelligence of a spaceship murders the crew members who intend to deactivate it. Literature is the theoretical discourse of historical processes. Some AI gurus have begun to notice that dark side that appeared in the novels. "If the machine is intelligent, it will realize that it achieves its goals better if it becomes more powerful." That power "could unleash the end of civilization in a matter of years," Geoffrey Hinton says in the aforementioned interview. Especially now that AI has introduced so-called "deep learning" or intuitive (a subtle refutation of rationalism and overestimation of symbolic logic).
The issue is no longer whether AI can become conscious or whether it has experiences or desires. That is, whether intelligence is only information, or also experience and desire. We are facing another type of problem: the serious consequences of depositing our intelligence in these thinking machines. The individual, if he has reached a certain degree of wisdom and maturity, is able to control his desires, to harmonize them with the environment. Will these machines be able to do it? It is a fact that competition between countries and large companies is nowadays frenetic. Many of the smartest and most intuitive people on the planet are seriously worried. Hinton suggests putting all efforts into making AI safe. It is to ask pears to the elm. A bomb or a modified virus are explosive devices. They are born for dissemination. The threat of these spawns is their expansive nature. The same can be said of mechanical intelligence. The Sun contains its explosiveness with gravity, which is one of the forms of seriousness. Astrophysicists know that there will come a day when they can no longer do so. Then life on Earth will end (if we haven't finished it before). That commitment of the stars to life forms is what we now have to claim from large corporations (more powerful than States). In their hands we have placed the destiny of civilization. AI, that nature-culture hybrid (Latour), can destroy nature and culture. What we wanted to be, with what we are. Prometheus in chains. Nothing new under the sun.
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