In front of a packed room, with a fiery tone and performative spiritthe French philosopher Éric Sadin appeared at the Buenos Aires Book Fair and, in an urgent intervention, called to question the indiscriminate and accelerated advance of artificial intelligence in different areas of our lives, a phenomenon that he did not hesitate to consider as a “civilizing movement”: “It does not correspond that certain engineers disconnected from reality have the key to the destiny of humanity and that, on top of that, they enter walking on a red carpet.”
“What is artificial intelligence? Don’t know. I’ve been trying to develop that definition for years, but the extent to which these technologies stick to our discourse is shocking,” he said. the author of “Artificial Intelligence or the Challenge of the Century: Anatomy of a Radical Anti-Humanism”, “The Siliconization of the World” and “Augmented Humanity”, all published by Caja Negra. Along the same lines, he marked to what extent the arrival of ChatGPT, the generative Artificial Intelligence technology, implies a break: “At the time when technologies endowed with speech capacity were consolidated and we all got used to Siri speaking to us with a human and pleasant, spectral voice… that’s where ChatGPT appears, a system that requests instructions and makes us capricious”. For Sadin, the relationship with instruction got into our relationship with language and contributes to the “civilizing abjection”, which distances us from “doing, creating, politics, fighting and everything that exceeds giving instructions.” ”.
With the freshness and self-confidence of a rock star and before a long line of people who crowded at the door of the Carlos Gorostiza room, the philosopher was the first to enter. At that precise moment, he was approached by an employee of the Fair who asked him for his “at sign on Instagram to share on the Fair’s networks.” “Ouch, no. I don’t use social networks”, the philosopher kindly snapped, who in the framework of the talk he gave minutes later, did not hesitate to call Facebook engineers “criminals” who consider the democratization of artificial intelligence as “criminals”. a new illustration.
Under the title “Philosophy of the metaverse and ChatGPT”, Sadin spoke for more than an hour and was guided by questions from the journalist Facundo Carmona. He apologized for not being able to express himself in Spanish on “an issue so relevant to language” and dedicated the first part of his speech to remembering the Argentine journalist Eduardo Febbro, who died in Paris in April. “Eduardo, as a correspondent for Página 12 in France, proposed to me in 2013 to do an interview for the newspaper and thus my relationship with Argentina, with the Caja Negra publishing house and with the rest of Latin America was born. I want to pay tribute to him because he was a great connoisseur of French thought and because I owe him a lot. I am very grateful for the interest that he showed in my work and for the fidelity that he showed with my books”, he said, emotionally, before the public.
Artificial Intelligence, Facebook, Twitter and the red carpet
Afterwards, Sadin fully immersed himself in the most urgent issue for thought and the social sciences: the appearance of ChatGPT and its impact on education, the labor market and the most urgent present. “We need less journalism and more thinking. In recent years we realized things when it was too late. hoh, we have to try to capture what is coming and what effects of consciousness it can engender”, he maintained about the role of philosophy in such a situation.
Sadin considered that times accelerated between October 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg released “a pre-recorded video in which he announced to all of us the arrival of the metaverse alone in front of a camera”, and December 2022 when “an earthquake occurred with the irruption from ChatGPT”. “It is a great conceptual and moral error to speak of ‘addiction to technology‘. There is no such thing, what there is is a pixelated existential condition inaugurated with the arrival of smartphones and that left our existence tied to the screens”, he pointed out.
For Sadin, they are no longer systems that better organize actions for human life, but we can entrust to them “the power to take over and deal with our most fundamental human faculties: language and image representation. And this is a civilizing movement with profound anthropological consequences”. The change is of such magnitude that he considers that “the status of the human being is being redefined”: “It is no longer just the relationship with time and space, but what is expected of the human being. And this strong rupture is reduced, denatured and presented as an almost normal evolution of the course of history”.
When asked about the request signed a month ago by magnates like Elon Musk and intellectuals like Yuval Harari in which they asked for a pause in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Sadin resorted to his self-confidence and irony to answer: “Yes, yes, Harari is a historian… but a prehistoric one! who suddenly starts talking about AI. And that is heard with great truth value. How long are we going to put up with this, it’s incredible. And well, Elon Musk is schizophrenic. It is one of the faces of the technologization of our lives and the development of AI and now they tell us that the world to come is extraordinary but that we have to be careful because it could be a catastrophe. It is of an incoherence that does not go anywhere ”.
Sadin understands that “we are experiencing a change in the status of technologies regarding the enunciation of the truth: they can no longer only collect and manipulate data, but also the ability to process, evaluate, diagnose and then tell us what we should do. Combinatorial power technologies have the power to suggest action to us and to tell us what is true and what is not. And that is extremely dangerous because the idea of truth has a performative effect, it influences what we decide to do”.
What to do in this scenario? “Well, we can ban it as we think it’s gone too far and send all these moguls into permaculture, but I don’t think we’ll be very successful. I think it is necessary to mobilize society and resort to its interposition. That the teachers, the scientists, the politicians, the students put on the table what are the risks of relinquishing control of our language”, he said.
Sadin closed his presentation at the Book Fair with a call to wake up civil society: “It does not correspond that certain engineers disconnected from reality have the key to the destiny of humanity and that, on top of that, they enter walking on a red carpet.”
To comment on this note you must have your digital access.
Subscribe to add your opinion!
Subscribe