The Promises of Artificial Intelligence
The argument is not about the technology adopted but about the promises of this technology.
Developers want to convince us that Artificial Intelligence is moral. That it will eradicate diseases. That it will resolve conflicts. That it is to our advantage. That it’s a good thing. It is liberating. That it will abolish slavery and bring social justice. Its an old promises that doesn’t make the difference between myth and reality. Between science and faith. Between Church and State.
It is first and foremost an ideology. It is about Good Artificial Intelligence vs Destructive Artificial Intelligence, but we do not know how to reach such conclusions since we cannot think of an intelligence without humanizing it, without thinking it through our limits. It’s just that this philosophy is problematic. Because presents it as a theology of liberation. An idealism that has more in common with religion than with technology itself or science. Science develops technique, but it cannot say how it will influence or function in society. It is the same problem that preceded the Industrial Revolution.
Karl Marx used the same argument when he told us that we can trust the promises of technology that will ultimately lead to a balanced, equal, perfect society. It led to the bloodiest regime, from Stalin to Ceausescu. Because it gave the means of production an idological power. Because it did not separate the powers in the state we would say in more plastic words, that is, the ideology of reality, the utopia of politics, religion has become a secular state religion, a belief in tehnology. While the means (technological, production, financial) have their own historical determinism.
The difference from 1900 is that now we really have the means to implement a world not as communism was, Utopian, but a Dystopian-Egalitarian-World. A World that is possible, but that will have a degree of automatism and artificiality that we can think today. Dystopia means a world that has a high degree of simulation of reality. Anyway, it’s a fact. But if poverty is called equality, then I accept.
We are in the age when the born of AI promies us 1000 years of peace and prosperity like a new prophecy of new born KING Jesus.
Is same old myth about Paradise! How is that possible? Because reason has become blind. When reason no longer takes into account affect, when reason has taken out of reason those symbols specific to man as freedom of thought, as freedom of movement and other symbolic freedoms(see the post Images of Power), it happens that the dreams become ideology, the means become religion. After all, we were never free, but at least we felt free inside ourselves. Only in this way can man survive as Homo Sapiens.
The idea that progressivism promises to take our sins upon it. And the need to create new myths of sacrifice. We won’t have to kill to eat. There will be no need for anyone to die for us to live, we will no longer have to work to eat, we will no longer have to pollute to breathe. We no longer have to sacrifice the Lamb. Artificial Intelligence will do it for us.
The new Corporate Socialism and the promises of AI
Karl Marx was right. But those who applied communism were wrong. The revolution is not made by man but by the means of production. Ideology must not take precedence over means. Today, the means are given by the new technological revolution. That was the industrial revolution. But communist countries did not yet have capitalist means of production.
In other words, the great changes were brought not by man, but by those technological revolutions. From the Stone Age to the Bronze Age to the present day. Starting from the use of tools (bow, arrow, hoe, plow), as Bergson observed, until today’s technological revolution. Communism was not successful because it was not implemented at the right time. It had to be implemented in the most industrialized countries. Marx hopes it will be adopted for the first time in England.
The new socialism will be imposed by the means of production, but not by the people. And here I mean the digital revolution that we are beginning to become more and more aware of. Which will create a welfare society. Dependents of authority. By the means of production that are owned by several corporations.
The status quo will be much harder to change. Socialism also comes with powerness. Depending on the authority. The French Revolution was made possible precisely because of the bourgeois class that had capital. Only through Capital can something change.
So the new social order is dangerous because it will be almost impossible to change. We will have no means. Without capital there was no power. The bourgeoisie was able to question the Monarchy because of capital and the means of production. We will not own either. The middle class, the petty bourgeoisie will disappear. This trend is already visible in Western countries. Technology is too complex to be “democratized.” AI robots are not built in the basement of the house or in the garage as SF movies romanticize. Technology needs enormous financial means.
Those who own the funds will be a few corporations. The big digital companies are in the top 10, the media being an essential thing. These are quantum AI robots that will soon surpass collective intelligence. They will be super gods. I see socialism as a threat to individual freedoms. Precisely because equality does not provide real power to the individual, but dependence on authority. Because the crowds through egalitarianism will be deprived of power of attorney, of representative authority.
Economically we will have everything. And maybe even the illusion of elections. As on the shelf, many packages from the same company. But from the point of view of freedoms we will enter a dark era. One in which we will ask the Gods what we can do, what we can hope for, with whom we are compatible and what to do today so that we do not get bored. The body will become a collective good. Your health must be monitored because it is no longer yours, it is everyone’s. Privacy. The street. House. And so on…
The impossible happens in nature, or what Nassim Taleb called the Black Swan. That is the new paradigm. A new way of being and imagining. Until then, let’s be proud to be poor, as Robert De Niro says: We can walk, exercise, reduce the risk of obesity and diabetes, increase life expectancy and ultimately even happiness, because only the poor do not have so many worries, how to feed employees or more recently social assistance. And let’s wait for a Black Swan, an error to change something in this perfect order.
