Artificial intelligence and everything that can come from it is a topic that worries me. It makes me a little anxious to admit it, because it makes me feel older and out of place. I still remember when I took the first courses to introduce myself to the world of the internet and search engines, and I often had that same feeling.
But if experts say we're on the brink of the most important revolution in human history since the Neolithic, perhaps there are reasons to be concerned: about whether we'll know how to adapt and whether the changes we'll have to experience will definitively and radically change the world as we know it.
I've read that in a few decades—just a few—we won't need a computer at all, because our own brains will be able to connect directly to the cloud, and we'll have access to all knowledge without having to search for it. The question is obvious: who will want to dedicate time and effort to studying then?
Right now we already admit without shame that we wouldn't know how to do a square root, but the calculator already does it, or that we don't know the territory because to get around we just program the GPS and let ourselves go.
And when we have direct access to knowledge without going through study, will we know how to relate concepts, reflect, analyze, apply our critical sense?
Regarding all these issues, something has happened to me in the last few days that, although it is silly, has brought me a little peace of mind in the most absurd way. I have seen a reel An Instagram post about a father and daughter experimenting with a new app. The father is young, and the girl must be about ten years old. Holding their phones, they watch as the app progressively ages the father's face on the screen. First, there are signs of expression, hair loss, deeper wrinkles, sagging skin... The man gradually goes from looking in his forties to his sixties, with a very realistic image. Father and daughter laugh at the man's changing appearance until finally, the young father already has the appearance of a venerable grandfather. Seventy years old, eighty... a little old man appears on the screen. And suddenly, the girl's expression changes, she forgets her smile, and begins to dream. Finally, she begins to cry, with great emotion, and hugs her father, sobbing.
The father puts down his phone and hugs him, moved. The scene has provoked two reflections in me. On the one hand, the consolation of knowing that no matter how much artificial intelligence progresses, it will never be able to reproduce that little girl's feelings. And, on the other, gratitude for the life we've lived, which has allowed us to watch our parents grow old (in some cases, this experience has been stolen from us) little by little.
If it's already hard to see how parents, who are losing faculties and acquiring limitations, inevitably approach death, imagine what it would be like if this happened in a short period of time.
I imagine someone is already working on an app that shows you what you'll look like eight months pregnant when you've barely taken the Predictor test.
We should hold on to the natural rhythm of the passage of time, but they're making it increasingly difficult.
