Project Vision 21

The rapid advance of artificial intelligence (created by us, it is worth remembering), added to the constant evidence of our inability to live in harmony with the planet and with others, have motivated a growing number of people to insist that AI must make important decisions about our future and perhaps even govern our lives.

The new situation has been cataloged by Dr. John Vervaeke, neuroscientist and philosopher at the University of Toronto, as the arrival of the “silicon sage.” For his part, the Spanish scientific popularizer Ignacio Crespo describes the new trend as the arrival of the “binary augur” (an excellent description without a doubt).

Regardless of the name used, it is clear that in the face of our own evident inability as humans to solve our own problems, many people (how many people are unknown) assume that it would be better for AI to make the decisions. And, when it comes to political decisions, there are plenty of reasons and examples that indicate that it would be better for politicians not to decide.

But where are we humans? I mean: what good is it for us to be human if we can no longer or do not want to decide for ourselves? In other words, what have we become (or are we about to become) if we even have to delegate, or intend to delegate, our most important decisions to AI?

It seems that it is not enough for us that algorithms decide what we should buy online or what movie we should watch or what message on social media is or is not for us. It seems that it is not enough for us that AI monitors our emails or generates texts and images (almost) at the level of human creators. Now we want to leave our entire lives in the hands of AI.

This situation, this tendency, has little progress and much regression because it seems to grant the binary augur, the silicon sage, a level of wisdom and justice above any human being and, therefore, it is considered appropriate and even necessary to deposit all our trust (and bet our future) on the decisions made by AI, that is, our own creation.

Where then were the great traditions of wisdom that for millennia have been transmitted, written and rethought in almost all cultures around the world? I dare say that they were trapped (that is, devalued and distorted) within countless “videos” published on social networks, mostly by those who know nothing about these great traditions.

I'm not suggesting either going back in time or turning off AI. But, at the same time, I dislike the idea that humanity reaches the point of surrendering to its own creation, of abandoning all ability to remember, live and think. In fact, that situation terrifies me.

As Dante said in Canto 1 of Inferno, those who enter hell are those who forgot the benefits of the intellect, those who stopped thinking.