Everyone is a geek, that is: devotee of technological innovations. We have seen it again with Mobile. Faced with the irrepressible dependence created by the smartphone in children, teenagers and adults, it is customary to say that it is necessary to distinguish between science and technology. Science would be good, but technology can have perverse purposes and uses. Now, if digital technoscience proves one thing, it’s that every scientific look always has a technological starting point, like what happens to a furniture manufacturer when he visits a forest. Western culture has lacked Greek restraint. Prometheus is punished because he offers fire to humans, with which they were able to manipulate metals and make instruments. Prometheus’ fault? Disputing the gods for supremacy.
Umberto Galimberti recalls in I miti del nostro tempo two great contributions of Hegel. Wealth does not depend on goods but on instruments. In this sense, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a determining instrument of economic, social and cultural life. An invisible power. Hegel’s second contribution goes like this: when a phenomenon grows from a quantitative point of view, not only an increase in quantity occurs, but a radical qualitative variation. If there was an earthquake of magnitude 1 or 2 (Richter scale) now, we wouldn’t even notice it, but if it’s magnitude 8 or 9, our cities will collapse. An AI present in all phones and computers is a historic earthquake. If the controller has an interest in the AI ??moving in a direction, won’t it go there? What ethics will condition the evolution of AI, if there are so many gains to be made with it?
If there was a universal ethic, we would already have found solutions to hunger and minority diseases. If there were a universal ethic, we wouldn’t be merrily marching towards the third world war. There are ethics in artificial intelligence, yes. But it is governed by algorithms. They have the ability to intoxicate public opinion in an irrefutable way, since the manipulated are convinced that they are absolutely free. For example: queer culture is spread like it’s some great liberating transgression, but it’s actually pushed and encouraged by the gender-fluidity-biased algorithms built into ChatGPT (like all, absolutely all of its competitors). AI’s ability to poison and manipulate will be endless. He will have a power over mankind never before seen in history. Going back to Prometheus, some humans have found a way to impersonate god: they are the ones who control the algorithms.
To combat techno-pessimism, it is customary to say that technology can be used for good and bad. What would we do without dynamite or nuclear power? Dynamite has certainly helped build many roads that cross mountains. It is certain that nuclear energy has lit up and heated entire cities. But Mr. Nobel created the prizes with a sense of guilt and Mr. Oppenheimer, considered the father of the atomic bomb and now topical for a movie, said: “I have become death, the destroyer of worlds”; and spent the rest of his life with regrets. We are giving all the power to new digital technologies. We happily let ourselves be bound by their chains. Until humanity can no longer free itself from it, like the frog in the pot of water that is being heated on the stove that is killing it. With a difference: now the frog gets into the pot enamored, dazzled, passionately.
