Artificial intelligence is shaking up the future of our societies. Their advances call into question jobs but also, warns José María Lassalle (Santander, 1966), who will end up being the master and the slave in our world, with an AI that will become increasingly stronger and is not unlikely to reach singularity. And we left him. Lassalle publishes Artificial Civilization (Harpa), an attack on the current development of AI, which he sees as nihilistic. A double nihilism, that of the neoliberal technolibertarians of Silicon Valley and that of Chinese digital Confucianism, who star in a race for hegemony in the face of which he believes that Europe must bet on a new technological humanism.
He emphasizes that since its origins there has been a nihilistic evolution of AI. In what sense?
There has not been a purpose that accompanied its development despite being a technology that is not simply a facilitator but is born with the vocation to generate power, a power of change. That utopian power that is inserted in your DNA. Imitate ourselves without imperfections. Since it has no purpose or a systemically ethical configuration, it is nihilistic. Power for power's sake. It is the debate that since Roman republicanism has worried democratic politics. How to control the tendency towards hegemony of power when it develops without regulation or limits.
Replicate ourselves without defects, he says, is the idea with which AI was born with Alan Turing.
Seek to replicate. It is in Turing's aspirational vocation: the impact of a friend's death leads him to tell his parents that he is going to replicate the intelligence of his son so that he remains alive. This spiritualized logic of a replica that replaces what was lost connects us with the almost founding myth of Western civilization. There is a prophetic element in AI that we do not identify because it has been logically systematized. In the apotheosis of artificial intelligence is magic, the seductive power of the magical.
And in this idea of replicating a brain devoid of the defects that lead human beings to make mistakes, because their organic and cultural complexity makes them make wrong decisions that do not make use of a statistical logical intelligence that confuses precision with truth, we have to recognize that in the DNA of AI is the corrective utopia of human error. And establish an idea of justice based on overcoming all human imperfections. And there, without the technologists intuiting it precisely, there is a totalitarian current. Breaking boundaries is at the heart of AI. There are no borders. And where there are no borders or limits, there are no ethics.
He assures that the advances in AI are already causing an increase in inequality that undermines the middle classes and democracy.
The steam engine and the industrial revolution founded the emergence of the middle classes, capable of collaborating with that revolution with their intellectual work. The work of the lawyer, the engineer, the architect, the creative, is what AI undermines. Intellectual human labor is worth less.
Is the social contract of the 20th century blown up?
We should be discussing this while inequality grows due to intensive use of digital transformation, with AI as the protagonist that displaces human intelligence from jobs that have supported the expertise of post-industrial capitalism and now cognitive capitalism. A capitalism that generates capital gains around knowledge, but no longer human, but rather one mediated by machines.
The social pact that supported the welfare state is broken to configure a design where capital is in the hegemonic hands of the owner of the algorithm, who also does not pay taxes for it, and work in the hands of machines, platforms, artificial intelligence. This explains the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few and the loss of purchasing power of the middle classes and their anger that fuels populism. There is a misalignment of the middle class with respect to democracy that is straining our societies.
And it also does not rule out that AI reaches singularity.
Great technologists see the cognitive click as possible. And to that we add that in our capitalist system the bottom line matters. The machine already contributes more value to the Internet of Things through its data than the data that human beings generate. And if machines provide more value unconsciously, what would they not contribute consciously? In capitalist logic, it is the prelude to its search.
The possibility of living in the Matrix is not so remote.
No. The problem today is not misinformation, a problem for liberal democracies, it is inauthenticity, that AI is capable of creating, based on the information it has about me, a conversation like the one we are having, radically different but credible. And an informed subject doubts, so the control mechanisms end up in another AI. This destroys democracy and our civilization, it attacks the epistemic structure that has founded knowledge and truth. When Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition reflects on the authenticity of humanity in the world, it is not eating an organic product, it is feeling that you are touching reality. And that can disappear before our eyes without us knowing.
What is the biggest risk we face?
In 20 years' time, we will face someone with whom we cannot dialogue based on reliability and a friendly, reciprocal status, but with someone else who projects a synthetic gaze on us, who does not understand us and sees us as a threat. We are not generating capacities in that otherness to have the possibility of building democracy, which is a civilized conversation.
What is Europe doing in the midst of the fight between the US and China?
The European AI regulation is trying, in a logic of political realism, to put emphasis on being able to develop European intelligence, which competes with both. And it is very complicated, unless we work on a humanistic dimension that does not think in terms of capacity power, but rather qualitative power. The human being has to provide the machine with the consciousness that he will not have. And that awareness implies not only an ethical code, but a moral code. And creating an artificial otherness has an impact on us. We must think about what level to put that someone on. We are creating a titan, and it is at stake that a deified man will stand on his shoulders to see further or turn the titan into a god that rules dwarf human beings.
