When Pasqual Maragall delivered his speech resigning from the position of mayor in order to stand in the regional elections during the 1997 Mercè festivities, he improvised a witty allusion to the whistles of protest that the subway workers were giving him : “We appreciate this music that has so much accompanied the construction of the new Barcelona”.
Undoubtedly, fine irony has gone down in certain hemicycles. Especially in a century in which politicians have been hijacked by forced correction or by this mediocrity that prevents them from distinguishing between biting sarcasm and simple insult. However, this wit and the complicit ability to recognize it and enjoy it remain essential in the intelligence indices of the human species. Something that ChatGPT is far, but very far, from being able to deploy.
And since artificial intelligence (AI) will be an immediate part of our lives – like the brother-in-law who, no matter how good he is, won the lottery – it would be pertinent that Bill Gates and his counterparts in the Earth to respond to the potential loss of dialectal acuity and ironic ability of the population. Because in these times they are a refuge from the inconvenient truth and, therefore, great allies of good journalism. And of all social progress that wants to evade patriarchy. Let these activists of power know that, if necessary, humanity would be ready to declare “species in extinction” the intellectual capacities that the mechanical brain cannot reproduce. Or “threatened language”. Or “essential bacterium of the food chain”.
Otherwise, it is not difficult to glimpse a future like that described by Jack Finney in The Invasion of the Body Thieves: microorganisms arrived from another planet invading humans until reducing them to servants without emotions or personality. The cinema made several adaptations. The most devastating, Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Ultrabodies, with Donald Sutherland making that terrible screech to betray a colleague who, like him until then, was only trying to survive by pretending to be dehumanized. And it wasn’t irony, just metaphor.
