The train is modernized, it swallows up distances at higher speed, but we keep its cultural repertoire intact in the imagination. On a trip to Madrid, I distract myself by thinking that the plain of Lleida is the landscape that the architect of Estranys contemplates on a train. As in Highsmith's novel, it seems that behind the glass the fields move like an immense sheet shaken by someone. Here I stop rambling, in case a stranger sits in the front seat and proposes to me to take care of some murky matter.
At a time when much of the global conversation revolves around the reach of artificial intelligence (AI), we are particularly intrigued by its negative implications. Every invention brings its disaster, which is often revealed only with time: nuclear power / Chernobyl disaster; Airbnb / real estate gentrification; social networks / monetization of privacy.
Now, while we are still debating the psychological impact of online digital consumption for teenagers, a gigantic wave is coming upon us with the power to sweep everything away. For now, we know that AI opens a new front for democracies. Although artificial intelligence already has undeniably valuable uses, technology luminaries tend to prioritize the positive aspects over its darker side.
While ChatGPT generates consistent responses based on algorithms, data and the reliability of statistics about which word is most likely to follow another, the inner monologue of the passengers in my carriage is built from their memories, emotions, experiences and perceptions accumulated according to another kind of algorithm, which is unique and indecipherable. By letting your gaze wander over the undulating landscape, the ideas take on another texture and depth.
I listen to an acquaintance's jazz recommendations and explore the similarities between the improvisational nature of this genre and our mental processes: layers of sound remind me of our ruminating loops. Each passenger composes his own themes in his head, with a wide variety of chords and arrangements, some with more swing and harmonic progression, but far from the order of a symphony.
The musicologist and translator Luis Gago was waiting for me at the March Foundation to talk about Shostakovich as part of a cycle of his works. As I chatted with this great popularizer of classical music, I thought about the gulf between listening to an expert of his stature, imparting knowledge with passion and character, and reading one of those bland texts generated by ChatGPT about music , in which there are no juicy anecdotes, humor or unexpected connections.
Then we went together to the Teatro Real to see the opera The Nose by the Russian composer, based on the story of the same name by Gogol. I am sorry for those who suffer from amusia, the inability to appreciate music. Nabokov admitted to being tone deaf, so even if he admired Gogol, he would not have gone to the show. The protagonist of one of his stories says that music is like chatter in a foreign language, an indistinguishable noise in which everything slips and mixes. AI's inability to produce text, music and images portends, I fear, an age of chronic tone deafness.
One of the co-authors of the libretto of The Nose was Yevgueni Zamiatin, an engineer by training who, in his dystopia We, imagined a society that a century later continues to amaze for its visionary character. In this world, mathematics and control over private life rule. There is even an artifact that produces several sonatas per hour, without the need for what the ancients called inspiration: "an unknown form of epilepsy."
Can the new technological tools at the service of composition move us in the same way as Shostakovich in The Leningrad Symphony? Will a machine translate the experience of war as it is experienced in one's own flesh? Perhaps the most relevant thing about AI is that it forces us to rethink what is art, creation and this "epilepsy" that Zamiatin was referring to. But also to recognize that, to guide us in the future, the humanities continue to be the best foundation for critical thinking and the ability to analyze. Today the drama, as in Gogol's story, is losing your nose. Without a good sense of smell, without acute intuition, how could we distinguish that the image of Pope Francis, wrapped in a Balenciaga coat, is a deepfake? The need for deception is a shadow that haunts us since we walk upright.
