Fears of artificial intelligence have obsessed humanity since the dawn of the computer age. Until now these fears focused on machines using physical means to kill, enslave or replace people. However, in the last two years, new artificial intelligence tools have appeared that threaten the survival of human civilization from an unexpected side. Artificial intelligence has acquired remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate language, be it words, sounds or images. And, in this way, it has hacked the operating system of our civilization.
Language is the stuff of which almost all human culture is made. Human rights, for example, are not inscribed in our DNA. They are, rather, cultural artifacts that we created by constructing stories and writing laws. Gods are not physical realities. Rather, they are cultural artifacts that we create by inventing myths and composing sacred scriptures.
Money is also a cultural artifact. Banknotes are nothing more than pieces of colored paper; currently, more than 90% of money is not even banknotes, just digital information stored on computers. What gives value to money are the stories told to us by bankers, finance ministers and cryptocurrency gurus. Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, and Bernie Madoff weren’t particularly good at creating real value, but they were all storytellers of extraordinary ability.
What will happen when a non-human intelligence is better than the average human at telling stories, composing melodies, drawing pictures, and writing laws and scriptures? When we think of ChatGPT and other similar tools, we think of schoolchildren who turn to artificial intelligence to compose their essays. What will happen to the school system when young people do this? This kind of question actually misses the big picture. Let’s forget about school newsrooms. Let’s think about the upcoming US presidential election in 2024 and try to imagine the impact that artificial intelligence tools will have on it, which are likely to be used to mass-produce political content, fake news and scriptures for new cults.
In recent years, the QAnon cult has gathered on the web around anonymous messages known as “Q pills”. His followers collect, venerate and interpret these “tablets” as if they were a sacred text. As far as we know, all previous “Q pills” have been created by humans and bots have only spread them, but in the future we could see the first cults in history with revered texts that will have been written by a non-human intelligence. Religions throughout history have claimed that their holy books came from a non-human source. This could soon be a reality.
On a more prosaic level, we could soon find ourselves debating at length online about abortion, climate change, or the Russian invasion of Ukraine with entities we think are human beings, but are actually artificial intelligences. The problem is that it is completely pointless for us to spend time trying to change the opinions of an AI bot, and instead AI can so precisely refine the messages it will have many possibilities to influence us.
Thanks to their mastery of language, artificial intelligences could even establish very close relationships with people and use the power provided by this proximity to modify our opinions and views of the world. While there is no indication that AIs will have consciousness or feelings of their own, it will be enough to get humans to feel emotionally attached to them to foster a false intimacy with us. In June 2022, Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google, announced that the artificial intelligence chatbot LaMDA, which he was working on, had acquired consciousness. The controversial claim cost him his job. The most interesting thing about that episode was not Lemoine’s claim, which was probably false. It was, rather, the willingness he showed to risk his lucrative job to defend the artificial intelligence chatbot. If artificial intelligence can influence people and make them put their jobs at risk, what else can it induce us to do?
In a political battle for minds and hearts, intimacy is the most effective weapon, and artificial intelligence has just achieved the ability to massively establish very close relationships with millions of people. We all know that over the last decade social networks have become a battleground for the control of human attention. With the new generation of artificial intelligence, the battlefront is moving from attention to privacy. What will happen to human society and psychology when artificial intelligence fights artificial intelligence in a battle to feign very close relationships with us, relationships that can then be used to convince us to vote for certain politicians or do we buy certain products?
Even without creating a “false intimacy”, new artificial intelligence tools will have an immense influence on our opinions and conceptions of the world. People could come to use a single AI advisor as an omniscient universal oracle. No wonder Google is terrified. Why should I waste my time looking when I can ask the oracle? The journalism and advertising sectors should also be terrified. Why read a newspaper when I can ask the oracle to tell me what the latest news is? And what’s the use of ads if I can ask the oracle to tell me what to buy?
In any case, not even these scenarios manage to offer the vision of the whole. What we are actually talking about is the possible end of human history. Not the end of the story, just the end of the human-dominated part of it. History is the interaction between biology and culture; between biological needs and desires for things like food and sex, and cultural creations like religions and laws. History is the process by which laws and religions shape food and sex.
What will happen to the course of history when artificial intelligence takes over culture and begins to produce stories, melodies, laws and religions? Earlier tools such as the printing press and the radio helped spread the cultural ideas of humans, but they never created cultural ideas of their own. Artificial intelligence is totally different. Artificial intelligence can create completely new ideas, a completely new culture.
At first he is likely to imitate the human prototypes with which he was trained in his childhood. However, as the years go by, the culture of artificial intelligence will dare to venture into terrains never trodden by humans. For millennia, humans have lived in the dreams of other humans. In the coming decades, we could be living in the dreams of a xenointelligence.
The fear of artificial intelligence has only been obsessing humanity for a few decades. However, humans have been obsessed with a much deeper fear for millennia. We have always appreciated the power of stories and images to manipulate the mind and create illusions. For this reason, since ancient times, humans have feared being immersed in a world of illusions.
In the 17th century René Descartes feared that perhaps a malicious demon had him immersed in a world of illusions and that he created everything he saw and felt. In ancient Greece, Plato told the famous allegory of the cave, in which a group of people spend their whole lives chained inside a cave in front of a hollow wall. A screen On that screen they see various shadows projected. Prisoners confuse the illusions they see on the screen with reality.
In ancient India the sages of Buddhism and Hinduism affirmed that human beings lived under maya, the world of illusions. Often what we tend to take for reality are nothing more than fictions of our own minds. People can wage wars, kill other people, and be willing to be killed by belief in any illusion.
The artificial intelligence revolution confronts us with Descartes’ demon, Plato’s cave, Maya. If we are not careful, we could be immersed in a veil of illusions that we would be unable to tear away…even to realize its existence.
Of course, the new power of artificial intelligence can also be used for positive purposes. I will not insist on this aspect, because those who develop artificial intelligence already talk a lot about it. It is the task of historians and philosophers like me to point out the dangers. However, there is no doubt that artificial intelligence can help us in many ways, from finding new cures for cancer to discovering solutions to the ecological crisis. The question we face is how to ensure that the new tools of artificial intelligence are used for good and not for evil. Therefore, we must first understand the true capabilities of these tools.
Since 1945, we have known that nuclear technology could generate cheap energy for our benefit; but also that it could physically destroy our civilization. Therefore, we have completely reformed the international order in order to protect humanity and ensure that nuclear technology is used primarily for good. We still have time to regulate the new tools of artificial intelligence, but we must act quickly. Nuclear weapons cannot invent more powerful nuclear weapons, but artificial intelligence can create exponentially more powerful artificial intelligence. The crucial first step is to require rigorous security controls before powerful AI tools are released into the public domain. Just as a pharmaceutical company cannot release drugs without first testing their short-term and long-term side effects, technology companies should not release artificial intelligence tools without first making sure they are harmless. In the case of new technologies, we need an equivalent of the US Food and Drug Administration, and we have needed it for some time.
Won’t curbing the public deployment of artificial intelligence cause democracies to lose ground against less scrupulous authoritarian regimes? Quite the opposite. It is the unregulated deployments of artificial intelligence that will create social chaos that will benefit autocrats and destroy democracies. Democracy is a conversation, and conversations are based on language. If artificial intelligence hacks language it will destroy our ability to have meaningful conversations, thereby destroying democracy.
We have just come face to face with a xenointelligence, here on Earth. We don’t know much about this AI, except that it could destroy our civilization. We must stop the irresponsible deployment of artificial intelligence tools in the public sphere, regulate AI before it regulates us. And the first regulation that I suggest is mandatory is that an artificial intelligence discloses that it is an artificial intelligence. If I have a conversation with someone and I can’t tell if it’s a human or an artificial intelligence, democracy will end.
This text has been generated by a human.
Or maybe not?
