Home » Kazuo Ishiguro and Venki Ramakishnan: the sunset of the truth saved by science

Kazuo Ishiguro and Venki Ramakishnan: the sunset of the truth saved by science

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LONDON. Literature and science, two British Nobel laureates (and that Nobel) compared, the concept of truth terribly precarious, the world, perhaps disturbing, that awaits us. It was an intense, enlightening encounter and, although it lasted almost an hour, unfortunately too short the one between the famous writer Kazuo Ishiguro (in the opening photo) and Venki Ramakrishnan (in the photo below), the British naturalized Indian chemist and biologist. A big event organized on Friday by the Financial Times as part of its Digital Festival 2020, still all online due to Covid, and hopefully it’s the last year. Certainly, Ishiguro and Ramakrishnan have not betrayed expectations.

First of all, what is the truth today? Ishiguro in the United Kingdom has just published his first novel after the Nobel Prize in 2017, namely “Klara and the Sun”, “Klara and the Sun”, in Italy in May for Einaudi. And he unfolds to the paying public online all his pessimism about the future of humanity. For the English writer of Japanese origin, the idea of ​​truth today has become tremendously rarefied, and so has the “concept of science, usually based on evidence and method. But today ”, explains the novelist,“ there is a different approach, and we saw it during the last American elections: the evidence is irrelevant, instead the narratives and the debate between voices count, often without any substance. The truth is now often dictated by emotions, and as a writer I too have unwittingly contributed to this kind of “fiction”, ”he adds with a hint of remorse.

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“From this point of view, too, I feel at a crossroads”, adds Ramakrishnan, “today it is increasingly difficult to define what is true and false. After all, the role of science is to remove doubts. But I want to underline one thing ”, the scientist points out,“ this does not mean that science is less emotional. We scientists also have our own irrationalities. The beauty, however, is that, at least in our field, in the end the truth always comes out ”. “This is very true in your industry,” Ishiguro replies, “and we saw it for example in the AstraZeneca European vaccine diatribe, where the emotions were overwhelming, but in the end science won. Today, however, in the real world there is a diversification of the truth that worries me: it is as if someone came to look for a tennis ball, in this case the truth, in my living room and then at a certain point say: but I can take other balls, and that’s okay ”.

The latest novel by Ishiguro, soon also in Italian bookstores, focuses on artificial intelligence, according to the Nobel Prize “seductive but dangerous”. The book tells the story of a solar powered robot named Klara. “My work does not want so much to trigger a debate on artificial intelligence, but above all to give an idea of ​​how its development could have consequences on the whole world: not only on our emotional, family and therefore interpersonal sphere, but also how it will change us themselves intrinsically as individuals “.

The scientific Nobel laureate Ramakrishnan adds that “artificial intelligence can also change the way we perceive the truth”, a very delicate topic. Not only that: on occasions of technological revolutions such as the digital one we are experiencing, Ramakrishnan recalls that, “beyond the industrial and economic boom, it took a century for the conditions of workers to really improve”. On this Ishiguro agrees and decidedly pessimistic: “In this round, with the giants of Silicon Valley and the Gig economy, I don’t know if there will be the same jobs in a few years: most likely, there will be fewer and fewer . We remember that those years, despite the great industrial and technological progress, exploded the phenomenon of slavery abroad and other tragic and dramatic events such as the world wars, and only after these conflicts were human rights really born as we consider them today “.

The Nobel Prize-winning writer concludes with another note of pessimism: “Humans are not at the center of this technological and digital revolution we are experiencing, but their data. The complexity of today’s world does not justify the fact that we should give up on it. They ask me if one day artificial intelligence will even write novels. It may be, I may be unemployed, but in my opinion this is not the main problem. The real problem will be when artificial intelligence and robots write the constitutions, our laws, guide our political campaigns, our feelings… well, this could be a new Nazism ”.

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