Project Vision 21

I still remember a time (actually, not that long ago) when these weekly commentaries were mostly based on topics that emerged from everyday events and experiences, such as a funny misunderstanding between two people because their cars looked almost identical, or a serious neighborhood mobilization supporting environmental justice.

Obviously, back then (again, not so long ago), neither discourse nor reality had to conform to the rules of algorithms or be filtered and approved by the many flavors of artificial intelligence. One simply wrote whatever came from the mind and the heart, with complete freedom and with all the mistakes included, without chasing “likes” or optimizing the text for search engines.

These reflections do not propose a nostalgia that solves little or nothing. I do not want to return to the past. But I must admit that I miss that spontaneity of inner dialogue that sought, often unsuccessfully, to express in words what thought itself had not yet been able to properly articulate.

People wrote the text itself, not the prompts for AI to write the text. And people wrote about what they saw and felt, not about whatever artificiality allows us to see and forces us to feel. Was it a better world? I do not think so. But people clearly thought differently, and communication was different. Not everything was monopolized by AI and by whatever wars happened to dominate the headlines.

Again, I am not against AI or technological progress, but I have serious doubts about the impact of that “progress” (quotation marks intentional) on our identity as human beings and on our capacity to create and think. It sometimes seems that the rise of AI is accompanied by the decline of humanity. I do not know if that is really the case, but many experts believe so.

This raises many questions: What is the point of “humanizing” a text created by AI if AI does not suffer, does not feel anguish, and does not (as far as we know) anticipate its own death? Why not instead reread The Epic of Gilgamesh (the oldest book yet discovered), where humanity’s existential struggles are vividly reflected?

There is little value in “humanizing” AI if what we are actually doing is dehumanizing our own human anguish by allowing the system to choose the topic. In other words, we want to live a life without friction or inconvenience (and certainly without sacrifice), when the reality of the human condition is precisely a life filled with friction, inconvenience, and sacrifice.

I am not proposing, even for a moment, that we should return to the past, much less embrace the idea that “the old days were always better.” Nor do I want the present to become permanent. What I propose instead is that when systems decide the topics (of conversation, debate, and analysis), those topics become reduced and, as a consequence, the future closes itself off and disappears.

Spanish thinker Enrique Santín used to say that “the past is remembered, the present is lived, and the future is thought.” Therefore, if we stop thinking about the future, we stop thinking altogether.