The history of civilizations is, almost always, a sum of infinite events that are not exciting, it is never a Tolkien novel. Another thing is the narrative, which prioritizes dramatic events, such as cavalry charges, or telling logical stories with a beginning and an end. In general, the most widely read history avoids delving into the slow evolutionary processes that often generate change. Nobody wants to watch a tree grow. So, for example, four thousand years ago the Mesopotamians invented an amazing technology, it was a slow and accidental process that is little talked about: they invented a time machine.
The technology they created allows knowledge to be teleported across time and space and it does so absurdly cheaply. The time machine is, of course, writing. With this and despite the fact that we are separated by thousands of years, we know exactly and directly what Plato, Thucydides, Livy and other Pleiadians transmitted to us, at least as far as their mastery of this technology allowed them.
Writing well is not easy, the writer is a sprinter who dedicates years of effort to run five-minute races. It also has its mysteries: to write a good book there are three rules, the problem is that no one knows what they are.
The great essayist George Orwell compiled the rules for good writing: eliminating superfluous words, using only new metaphors and tropes (i.e. unexpected guests are the ones we remember), not using reflexives and favoring short sentences. By triangulating the circle, Orwell did not comply with his rules in the exposition of his rules.
All this is important when you want to convey information or ideas. When you want to agree on ideas that are not so much, it is often more useful to use terms that allow the parties to understand what they prefer and then develop the meanings according to events, forces and needs. This is the case in the first great democratic Constitution, the American one, and in a multitude of subsequent documents including religious texts, axioms, business purposes and commercial slogans.
Recently, a technology has been created that writes surprisingly well, at least in English, Spanish, Catalan and various code languages, it is generative artificial intelligence (AI). It is a brontosaurus: to live it must ingest immense amounts of data and energy. It will generate changes that are difficult to anticipate. We remember that the emergence of writing served to record trade agreements, establish laws, record inventories, and create prose, poetry, and letters, and was eventually the rail that led us to science, diplomacy, states and armies.
Where will AI take us? It’s hard to know. Let’s remember that you shouldn’t be afraid of new ideas, you should fear the old ones. It doesn’t seem like it should affect politics, at least not directly, since political writings are meeting points, not database summaries. Yes, it will impact the world of security. AI, generative or not, will eventually and slowly allow the construction of drones, armored vehicles, ships and robots that operate intelligently, coordinated and autonomously, without the need for humans. If so, the most technologically advanced countries, like the West today, will be much more powerful than the rest. Faced with all this complexity, can we be sure that this will be the case? Well, it should be said that: I refuse to answer the question because I don’t know the answer. To meet her you would have to travel back in time.
