Albert Einstein said that “if the Moon had consciousness, it would be convinced that its rotation 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 ability to think and decide for ourselves. But day-to-day life makes it evident that we are far from meeting this standard; we are a species articulated around power – the difference in potential contained in any relationship – and the abuses that derive 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 lot of ground to cover. We must be very careful. Reinhart Koselleck put it more sophisticatedly, in the story 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, is left without walls. I hear the loudspeaker noise: by decree, the walls are removed 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 make their own. 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 it day by day. And the proof is that every day there are fewer democracies and those that remain are ossified, in societies that do not even have the impetus to stop the penetration of the far-right.
The contradiction is described by Montesquieu: “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.” Which is the umpteenth expression of the central (and aporia-ridden) question of the human condition: without power there is no freedom, but power limits freedom. And it is this reality that makes Alexis de Tocqueville say that “he who seeks in freedom anything 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 the technological path. 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 mounted on the combinatorics of information that have neither curiosity, nor feelings, nor passions, nor sensitivity? And that, in the hands of certain powers, can have devastating effects on this small treasure that should distinguish and honor us, which is the capacity to think and decide for ourselves? A day may come when everything is decided for us and we, absent-minded, without wanting (or being able) to see what is escaping us. The simple and precarious freedom of a being overwhelmed by its prostheses and by those who have control. 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.
