Anagrama Award for a warning cry about the privatization of knowledge and the trap of AI

Barcelona“There are essays that begin with the burst of a force that does not fade, and this one by Xavier Nueno, which is magnificent, is aware of it: as it progresses, the excitement and intrigue grow to end up discovering the origin of the simulacrum of knowledge that is artificial intelligence, and where all this gigantic scam comes from, at least for the humanities,” explains Jordi Gracia, one of the six members of the jury for the Anagrama Essay Prize, endowed with 10,000 euros, which has gone to La revuelta de los copistas, which will go on sale on October 21.

This is the second essay by the writer and researcher Xavier Nueno (Barcelona, 1990), a doctor in Film and Visual Studies from Harvard University, who has specialized in studying the history of knowledge in both its scientific and artistic, sensory, and technological aspects. Three years after El arte del saber ligero (Siruela, 2023), where he examined how cultural actors and society managed the excess of information until the development of the printing press, Nueno has now focused on “how knowledge has ended up losing its way” based on a hot topic of current interest: the privatization of knowledge and its conversion into a commodity. “Technology companies have stolen the immense intellectual and creative legacy that libraries guarded,” he explains. “Now they want to sell it back to us through subscriptions, with the promise that it is new knowledge, when in reality it belongs to all of us.” The protagonists of the essay are the workforce that has classified information for centuries, from copyists to librarians, archivists, and programmers. “Since this task became a lucrative business, a voracious industry has hijacked all this accumulated knowledge and turned the library into the most profitable monetization machinery of the present,” he continues. La revuelta de los copistas examines the development of artificial intelligence “with originality and in an incisive and humorous way,” in the words of the publisher, which adds that the essay “moves away from the apocalyptic prophecies launched by the same technological oligarchs and their boards of directors”.

“Nueno exposes the limits of a science based solely on big data, challenges the value of the algorithm as a form of knowledge, and reveals how harmful it is that we have turned statistics into our fetish —explains Pau Luque, one of the other members of the Anagrama Essay Prize jury—. The value of La revuelta de los copistas resides in its cry of warning. With the latest artificial intelligence models, we have been hasty when we exclaimed: "Eureka!"”