Waking up on time

Albert Einstein said that “if the Moon had consciousness, it would be convinced that its orbit around the Earth is free”. And humans? We have elevated our condition above that of the other inhabitants of the planet, consecrating as a reference for our way of being in the world the ideal of the Enlightenment: the capacity to think and decide for ourselves. But daily life makes it evident that we are far from fulfilling this reference; we are a species articulated around power – the difference in potential that any relationship contains – and the abuses that stem from it. And, if Voltaire is right when he says that “humans have no remorse for the things they are accustomed to doing”, there is still a long way to go. We must be very careful. Reinhart Koselleck put it more sophisticatedly, in the account of a German doctor's dream: “After the consultation, around nine in the evening, I lie down on the sofa with a book about Matthias Grünewald, and suddenly my room, my whole house, becomes wall-less. I hear the loudspeaker noise: by decree, walls are suppressed until the 17th of this month.” The paradoxes of the human condition: without walls there is no freedom, even though walls are the most common instrument for isolating the citizen and leaving them without space to be themselves. Translated to the present day, Ulrich Beck put it more prosaically: “We are heading towards a state authoritarianism that, on the outside, will adapt to global markets and, on the inside, will behave authoritatively.” We see this day by day. And the proof is that there are fewer and fewer democracies every day, and those that remain are rigid, in societies that do not even have the impetus to stop the penetration of the far right.

Montesquieu describes the contradiction: “Man, as a being, is, like all things, governed by invariable laws. And as an intelligent being, he constantly violates the laws he has established and changes those he himself establishes.” This is the umpteenth expression of the central (and aporetic) question of the human condition: without power there is no freedom, but power limits freedom. And it is this reality that leads Alexis de Tocqueville to say that “he who seeks in freedom something other than freedom itself is made to serve.”

Let's leave the conclusion to Claudio Magris: “This turn of the millennium will depend on how our civilization resolves this dilemma: to combat nihilism or to carry it to its ultimate consequences”. It is the loss of the notion of limits that threatens the species' trajectory on the world, and which now generates exponential alarms due to the power acquired through technological means. Right now, artificial intelligence is at the center of concern about the fate of the human species. We are in the hands of those who configure it. Will we allow ourselves to be replaced by artifacts based on information combinatorics that have neither curiosity, nor feelings, nor passions, nor sensitivity? And that, in the hands of certain powers, can have devastating effects on this little treasure that should distinguish and honor us, which is the capacity to think and decide for ourselves? The day may come when everything is decided for us and we, distracted, unwilling (or unable) to see what is escaping us. The simple and precarious freedom of a being overwhelmed by its prostheses and by those who control them. A sophisticated version of totalitarianism that will domesticate people at convenience and without room for criticism, revolt, or protest. The world to come, if we do not wake up in time.