Opinion Sur
In times of artificial intelligence
Illustration from the book Go East by Going West, by Pedro Cuperman and Izhar Patkin, 1989
What does literature have to do with our geopolitical and scientific situation? Patience reader: the deranged humanity is at stake. A great novel can help us. Let’s see where we have come since the publication of Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605) to the present day.
Don Quixote is the great novel – first and definitive – in the history of our literature. In its first part we meet the characters who, as Jorge Luis Borges said, more than admirable and admired are friends. Alonso Quijano el Bueno and his cronies: the barber, the bachelor, the dukes, are familiar to us and could be found in any dusty and boring town of the many we know. When Quijano goes crazy – by reading too many books of chivalry that nobody reads anymore – the identity he adopts (knight of the sad figure) as Don Quixote de la Mancha, he is an endearing character who decides to go out into the world as a brave warrior errant, to do justice, or as he says “to undo wrongs.” In other words, Quijano and Don Quixote are crazy cute, worthy of our friendship and a ballad by Astor Piazzola[1]. Even the round Sancho Panza (who appears a little later as his faithful companion, on the second outing) with his ignorant and peasant bonhomie, is sympathetic to us – something like a Galician uncle I had in Buenos Aires, Don Pepe Chouza, who came not from the arid Mancha but from the wet low estuaries, and also from Avellaneda.
The second part of Cervantine novel is more complex and advanced. The characters have already read the first part of the book, supposedly written by a Muslim historian. They even play into the hands of the crazy cute Quijano/Quixote pretending to be part of their world and their fantasy. (They remind us of Luigi Pirandello.) Here, Don Quixote returns with his crazy adventures that many people already know. It is his third and final outing and occupies the entire second part of the novel. And remember that to complicate matters Cervantes hides behind a fictional writer: Cide Hamete Benengeli from whose pen, he says, the story came.
Cervantes never wrote another return of Don Quixote or a third part of the novel, because it would have exceeded the social development of his time. Instead, he concluded the novel (with a lot of nostalgia for his characters) when Alonso Quijano is cured of his madness, returns to the real world, flat and every day, and in the end gets sick and expires. Cervantes then says “he who, between the compassions and tears of those who were there, gave his spirit, I mean that he died.”
And something curious happens, as often happens with great literature. Man dies and myth is born. Alonso Quijano el Bueno dies in the novel and Miguel de Cervantes in Madrid (Cervantes’ death coincides with that of Shakespeare), but Don Quixote survives in the inveterate loyalty of the readers, generation after generation, just like Othello, Romeo, Emma Bovary, Hamlet, Rodion Raskolnikov and so many other characters. The reason for such survival is a mystery,[2] but perhaps it has to do with the fact that Don Quixote improves the world; he gives it imagination and fantasy, love and thirst for justice – and all this against all odds. It is the world of good books that inspire us, before Wikipedia (badly) fulfilled the prophecy of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé: “Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre” (the world was made to end in a beautiful book).
A new return of Don Quixote, at whose doors we are, would not only be more complex than the previous ones, but much more disturbing. Moreover, it seems to me that it would be or will be sinister. Neither Don Quixote would be the good madness of the character Quijano, nor would the novel be the work of an author of flesh and blood. The fantastic world will have loosened the moorings of all ancient reality to become a phantasmagorical invention without morals, without love, without justice – a varied and perverse product of “thinking” (or delusional) machines. Human beings would become apes remotely controlled by an artificial intelligence that surpasses them in calculation and imagination, but is incapable of mercy and good judgment. As the essayist Thomas Friedman states, “we will be able to split the Red Sea but we will have forgotten the Ten Commandments.”[3]
The machine makes human-beings disposable dolls and plays with them as the ancient gods played with the Greeks: just because. Quijano and Don Quixote: it does not matter who is who because the two will be empty dolls, and so is the author, who ceased to be an author, and the readers, who are hopelessly confused. Everything is a contrived simulation, as in Adolfo Bioy Casares’ novel The Invention of Morel. The readers are read by the machines and start ruminating on the computer bolus that they themselves delivered in their little screens of the cell phone so widespread: the dreamers are dreamed, the news they receive are inventions. What is false and what is true? There is no longer any illusion or ideology, which presuppose a reality that contrasts them. Here everything is pure invention, with no way out. Post-human beings are digitized puppets, but by which puppeteer? The owners of Google, the executives of Meta and Facebook, the playful billionaire who bought Twitter, or those who built Tik Tok? No: they too will be outclassed. That is why these “kings of the universe” are also worried. The real and the novelesque will be inextricably confused. And don’t think that his would be a submissive and orderly world as a leader in Beijing or Pyongyang would pretend. In the world of Artificial Intelligence, humanity shaped like an organized hive (the dream of the communist party of any people’s republic) is nothing more than a Chinese tale. The destination is not dictatorship or democracy but disorder and anarchy. That same Artificial Intelligence could experiment, that is, play, with a humanity in which everyone hates everyone and launches into a tenacious mutual destruction. Why not? if everything is the same, give it that goes, as in the tango of Enrique Santos Discépolo. In terms of classical philosophy (already lost), when the evolution of humanity reaches the absolute spirit (Hegel) through the Internet, it turns out that its phenomenology ends in a bad joke.
The leading figures among the “owners of the universe” (including Elon Musk) have signed a document calling for a pause in the crazy development of A.I., worried that the laboratories where it takes place enter into an uncontrolled race to develop and launch powerful systems that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or control. Having left the humanities and social sciences far behind, today engineers are ahead of the scientists themselves, and launch inventions on the market without anyone knowing the consequences.
What is at stake is the loss of control, even on the part of the most powerful elites. Biotechnology and algorithms in computers will produce a radical division in human society, much stronger than the venerable class division. They will produce “bodies, brains, and mentalities” that only a few engineers will know how to manipulate for a while, and no one else, and in the end, none. Those left behind will be the first to become extinct, and the rest will follow. This is the opinion of those who have so far reflected on the matter, in particular the thinker Yuval Harari (Homo Deus). But not only media intellectuals or recognized opinion popes but also scientists are alarmed.
Dismayed by the advances and especially by the applications that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could have, a group of renowned scientists met not long ago to analyze the risks in A.I. research, which could result in a loss of human control over machines and lead humanity to a disaster. One of the participants in the meeting, Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher and president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAIA), said: “The development of artificial intelligence should be actively controlled before we have super-intelligent machines running around (and eventually shooting) around.” (As always, the first users are the military and criminals.) According to these concerned scientists, humanity may be lost in a desert, where the only answer to “reality” will come from the degraded environment, which is to take vengeance viciously on our species. Technology is capable of replacing humans[4], and then nature will have the last word with unappealable catastrophes, in the face of the stupor of crowds that will be at the same time intelligent and idiotic.
What do you think of all this? To say something like Sic transit gloria mundi (this is how the glory of the world goes) or more simply, sic transit humanitas, that is: this is how the human adventure can end, is not enough. It is a bad omen. Bad times will run and if we do not stop them, there will be no comfort for the afflicted. Don Quixote’s windmills will be real monsters produced not by the feverish imagination of a pretty madman but in a laboratory in China, Russia, or the Pentagon, in the open or in secret.
How to stop this infernal process that is coming upon us? Who dares at this late hour to straighten out the new wrongs? Who rattles the cat? I would begin by reinforcing (through mass education) some ancient values, drawn from our religions, from our libraries[5], from exemplary teachers – all that life that has given us so much. And for educating engineers, massively.[6] Artificial Intelligence can help us improve health and take care of the planet, but only on condition that we urgently save the humanities. May they help us to live, like Don Quixote, in the following way:
“Do you see, Panza friend,” said Don Quixote, “what a beautiful and even healthy occupation is this that I exercise and in which you follow me as a satellite? We go all day fading grievances, straightening wrongs, aiding widows, cleansing the earth of giants and thugs; we repair our strength with frugal food under the trees and boulders; we drink water drawn from the limpid currents; we talk with shepherds, as if from time to time we would pass through the most happy Arcadia; we sleep well and at a stretch all night, and we go out at dawn again, exhilarated, receiving pure air our lungs, clear light our eyes, songs of larks our ears, perfumes of thyme and marjoram our smell, health our body and strength our spirit. “
So be it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7VbmmAtVxo The lyrics of this tango by the Uruguayan Horacio Ferrer.
[2] Foreseeing this mysterious fate, the text gives the last word to the pen of the fictional author Cide Hamete, who suggests that Cervantes is the forger posing as an author.
[3] The New York Times, May 3, 2023.
[4] See the interviews with philosopher Harari especially his talk with Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes.” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-yuval-noah-harari-2021-10-31/
[5] A disturbing fact: some American universities are closing libraries (especially those of humanities and social sciences) with budgetary pretexts in favor of screens and student preference for technical and richer occupations. Read as an example the article “An Old School Library Sit-In Is a Fight for Humanities in an A.I. Age,” The New York Times, May 3, 2023.
[6] It is worth rereading and rethinking the articles of Thorstein Veblen collected in the book The Engineers and the Price System (1919).
If you like this text, by filling up the form that appears in this page you can subscribe to receive once a month a brief summary of Opinion Sur English edition
