When Pasqual Maragall gave his mayoral resignation speech at La Mercè in 1997 to stand in the regional elections, he made a sparkling allusion to the protest beeps dedicated to him by subway workers: “We are grateful for that music that has accompanied the construction of the the new Barcelona”, he improvised.
Undoubtedly, fine irony has diminished in certain chambers. Especially in a century in which politicians have been kidnapped by the forced correction or by that mediocrity that prevents them from distinguishing between scathing sarcasm and mere insult. However, that ingenuity and the complicit ability to recognize and enjoy it continue to be essential in the intelligence indices of the human species. Something that ChatGPT is far, very far from being able to deploy.
And since artificial intelligence (AI) is going to be an immediate part of our lives – like that brother-in-law who, for all the good things he has, has won you a raffle – it would be appropriate for Bill Gates and his counterparts on Earth to respond to the potential loss of dialectal acuity and ironic ability of the population. Well, in these times they are a refuge from the inconvenient truth and, therefore, great allies of good journalism, without going any further. And of those social advances that have to manage to outwit the patriarchy. Let those activists in power know that, if necessary, humanity would be willing to declare "endangered species" those intellectual capacities that the mechanical brain cannot reproduce. Or “threatened language”. Or “essential bacteria of the trophic chain”.
Otherwise, it is not difficult to glimpse a future like the one Jack Finney described in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with microorganisms from another planet to infiltrate humans until they are reduced to officiants without emotions or personality. The cinema made several adaptations. The most terrifying was Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Ultracorps, with Donald Sutherland emitting that terrible scream to give away a colleague who was only trying to survive by posing as dehumanized. And it wasn't irony, just metaphor.
