It is very famous that, at the beginning of cinema, when it was projectedThe arrival of a train at the stationAnd as the locomotive approached on the screen, viewers jumped up from their seats in fear, thinking the train was about to run them over. Right now, in a chat room, we're also unable to tell if we're talking to a robot or a human. But just as we learned to distinguish between the real train and the one filmed, we will learn to separate artificial intelligence from intelligence.
As a writer, I need to start thinking about what places AI will expel me from, but also what doors it will open for me. According to the pessimistic view, we creators might as well start packing our bags. Just tell AI to write a novel to win a literary prize, and it will write it and could win you every literary prize. But ghostwriters have always existed; intelligence has always had to contend with artifice, that is, with lies.
Lies are distinguished by their stillbirth. We've just come through a long period of restricted freedoms, marked by objectives like the repression of the October 1st referendum and the excesses during the pandemic. For decades, we've promoted automation and screen-based technology, dismantling humanism and replacing it with screens. The state has expanded hand in hand with capitalism, and capitalism with hand in hand with the state. Bureaucracy and taxes have multiplied. But humanity remains trapped in this cage, ending up depressed and without a future. In exchange for a few slivers of freedom on the internet, we've let it into our kitchens. Once inside, it takes care of patching up the cracks itself.
What a relief for humanity to put itself on autopilot, turn its back on moral values, and let robots replace humanism. We have lived through a golden age of irresponsibility, and today it would be a great business opportunity for any country to take the lead in promoting humanism—a very inexpensive undertaking that would only require a willingness to tame the machines to our advantage. Accustomed to battling lies, we Catalans would have a significant head start.
So I live with the hope that teachers and professors are finally rising up, because education is at the heart of this issue. I am circumstantially optimistic and believe that humanism (which is necessarily anti-technical, anti-progressive in the naive sense of the term, anti-foolery, de-fanaticized, and therefore free) will have to come and rescue us from a mechanization that artificial intelligence is merely bringing to fruition.
