Opinion Sur
The alleged threat of artificial intelligence is a smokescreen that obscures the true causes of social unrest and exculpates the beneficiaries of an unjust and cruel system.
In recent months, both many mass media and certain specialized publications aimed at a better-informed public have echoed several “authoritative” opinions on the possible perverse and catastrophic consequences of artificial intelligence. It is a concern directed from the top down, that is, from some elites (industrial, financial, and academic) towards civil society that is generally indifferent or distracted and sometimes towards the State that generally turns a deaf ear to these warnings.
The call for regulation – state and inter-state – of artificial intelligence by these actors reminds me of the chapter of the Odyssey in which the cunning Ulysses decides to pass his ship through the dangerous strait that separates the cliffs of Scylla and the whirlpool of Charybdis. Ulysses knows that the sailors who sail there are shipwrecked guided by the song and charm of the sirens of Scylla that lead them to the sharp rocks, or to the voracious suction of the whirlpool. To avoid this, he makes his rowers cover their ears with wax and tie him to the mast of the boat so he can hear the fateful song and go crazy to the screams without anyone paying attention to him. That way you can have it all, which is like having the cake and eating it. It’s doing something dangerous and pretending to be a prudent actor at the same time.
What worries these elites? In short: the loss of control of “macro” processes that they themselves have produced and of which until now they have been the main beneficiaries. In areas such as computer technology, finance, and war, they fear being surpassed in intelligence and speed by intelligent machines that learn from their own mistakes and could turn against their creators. The theme was anticipated long ago by literature. It goes back to the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea[1], to the sorcerer’s apprentice in a poem by Goethe, and to the unhappy creature of Dr. Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s novel, without citing countless works of science fiction.
The alarm bells sounded today by both power elites and high-tech gurus work in two ways. On the one hand, they point to some real risks and new dangers. On the other hand, they are red herrings that confuse people (they have other daily urgencies) and address the states (which have other political priorities at the moment), and serve to exculpate themselves in advance of some coming catastrophes.
If the issue is not new, neither is the concern. Every major technological innovation has given rise to fears and protests, from English Luddite artisans who, in the 19th century, protested against the machines of the Industrial Revolution, to alarms about a possible nuclear holocaust in the 20th century. Using some old concepts of historical materialism, whose most notorious nineteenth-century figure was Karl Marx and whose influence was notable throughout the 20th century, we can say that there was always a conflicting relationship – or if you prefer dialectic – between what that thinker called “the forces of production” and the “relations of production” (especially the ownership of the means of production). The former were seen as the main engines of economic development which the latter facilitated to a certain extent but later tried to curb if their vested interests were threatened by further technical and productive development. In that case, and after many struggles, other social groups interested in the new productive forces displaced the previous ones and took the lead[2].
Such was the economistic vision of the philosophy of progress inherited from the Enlightenment. In the long run, this vision led to an idyllic landscape in which in the end the division of classes ended and the whole of society decided in a democratic way the future direction of the forces of production. Social progress would be made through mature discussions and without polarization. Needless to say, such vision was never realized. Rather, it was shelved as a series of ideas and proposals out of place, or with no place at all (ou topos, I mean utopia). What happened instead? The forces of production continued their vertiginous advance: industrialization, post-industrialization, hyper-communication, cybernetic control, automation and finally artificial intelligence. New and powerful groups emerged that with some displacements and overlaps controlled every advance of the productive forces, but always and with variations in a pyramidal structure of classes and concentration of economic surplus in high spheres (enormous inequality with or without some social welfare). No mass groups emerged with egalitarian, democratic, and alternative proposals, authors of a strong vision of the future and capable of replacing the alienation first of work, and then of human intelligence. This last one is more nefarious and insidious than labor exploitation. Thus, civilization reached a threshold not foreseen by any previous theory, namely: the autonomy of the productive forces (which have become intelligent) with majority exclusion and the possibility of an also elitist exclusion. The specter haunting the world is not social revolution but the automatic transformation of the forces of production into forces of mass destruction.
Let’s go back now to our steps and review The Republic of Plato. In this foundational work of Western thought (in particular Book VI and the following), Socrates exposes his arguments on why the ideal State should be governed by philosophers. In Book VII, the philosopher talks about the importance of the education of the philosopher-king (enlightened elite). Here, he expounds the myth of the cave in order to explain the importance of the philosopher as a guide for people to extract them from ignorance and direct them towards knowledge. Socrates (played by Plato) could not imagine that 2,393 years later the philosopher-king would be replaced by a super-intelligent machine that would guide people on a wide walk through the cave but without directing them towards knowledge outside it, much less a Socratic discussion about justice and happiness.
In our time, some authoritarian political systems, in their inveterate search for the ideal state, have approached the Platonic model of the philosopher-king (ideally a technocratic, meritocratic, and collegial elitism) with some artificial intelligence biases that for now has not threatened them, but without knowing for how much longer[3]. I think of the organizational chart of the Chinese Communist Party. (With more than 90 million members it has become one of the largest political organizations in the world.) For the moment, in today’s world, and before reaching the announced nightmare of Artificial Intelligence in total political and social control, democratic systems are sliding towards an authoritarian destiny (USA, Italy, Poland, Hungary) and the current authoritarian systems already established (collegial and semi-platonic) such as China slide simply towards a tyranny (Russia), more or less as Socrates argued in Books VIII and IX of The Republic of Plato. The State has never been sufficient counterweight to control the forces of production, and society, far from dominating and shaping them, does nothing but grant them more and more autonomy.
It is sad to place human destiny on an intelligent robot and misguided the attempt to blame it for destructive behaviors prior to its invention. The antidote to this poison lies in changing mentalities as a prelude to a massive, independent, and egalitarian social mobilization. So far that has failed, but it is not without its appeal. We have to get out of Plato’s cave and not continue to decorate it with the help of robots. If we do not review and update the supposed “utopias” of the past two centuries, in this century we are living we are not going anywhere (ou topos).
[1] The negative Pygmalion effect or Golem effect (in Hebrew folklore) causes the subject’s self-esteem to decrease and that the aspect on which he acts decreases or even disappears.
[2] The best-known historical case was the displacement of the landed feudal aristocracy by the industrial and financial bourgeoisie.
[3] Until today the most advanced experiment of control of a billion people has been the disciplining of the Chinese population during the Covid pandemic. This totalitarian practice far exceeded the model of panoptic control presented by Michel Foucault in his book Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (1975).
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Brilliant and imginatve