Project Vision 21

Recently, a leading global technology company made a presentation to publicize the capacity of its new artificial intelligence. Basically, a video was shown of someone giving instructions to the artificial intelligence and the almost instantaneous correct responses that were generated. There was only one drawback: the interaction was fake.

As it became known later, as commented by renowned experts on the subject, the responses displayed as proof of the ability of the new artificial intelligence were not the initial responses, but those obtained after several interactions.

Furthermore, not only had the video been altered but it was also not a live video, as had been announced.
If a large multinational company with almost no rivals can easily deceive (at least initially) experts on the subject, there is no doubt that deceiving us, simple consumers of technology, is much easier. Furthermore, this deception will surely be permanent.
 

It should be clear that I am not talking about any conspiracy theory or proposing a pathological distrust of everything and everyone around us. But it should also be clear that a well-known company intentionally decided to “cheat” regarding what the new intelligence can do. So, that is hardly their only “trap” or deception.
 

In this context, with generative artificial intelligence in increasing and almost disproportionate growth (to the point that artificial intelligence refuses to comply with what is requested), what other traps are hidden in plain sight that take us away from reality, Or, rather, do they divert our attention from what could be called true reality?
 

Obviously, if all we know is illusion, then for us that illusion is the whole reality. This topic is so old that Plato already analyzed it in his well-known Allegory of the Cave, in his book Republic. But in that allegory, those with a limited and distorted perception of reality were the prisoners. So, are we also prisoners?
 

If we only see a portion of what is real, but believe that it is the whole, we are prisoners of our own limitations. If for us everything is reduced to a single point of view, a perspective or, worse still, a mere opinion, and that is what we consider all reality, then we have built our own cell for our own life sentence.
 

We assume everything we see on social media is true. We cry for the death of a movie character, but not for the death of real humans. 
 

Unfortunately, such is the era in which we live, where appearances, even if they are deceptive, are worth more than authenticity and where the simulation of living is more important than life itself. Superficiality, triviality, and banality boast and strut in almost any popular human expression these days.
 

Meanwhile, the emergencies of the future are increasingly urgent. But instead of facing and resolving them, we create more and more layers of illusion, deception, manipulation and, ultimately, unreality. We bow down to our own creation without even recognizing that it is our creation. So, nothing is real anymore.