1. I ask (prompt) Intelligence, Luna comes out. Why?
Since I have been thinking, studying and reading about artificial intelligence, I don’t know for what bizarre uncontrollable trick of my very natural neural network, at a certain point the image taken by the astronauts of the Apollo 11 missionthe one now kept in the NASA archives, where the Earth is seen from the Moon.
The Earth rises above the horizon of the Moon, i. Image taken by Apollo 11, July 1969. The coordinates of the center of the land here are 86 degrees east longitude and 3 degrees north latitude. (Photo by Space Frontiers/Archive Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Why? Why does my head return that image?
It’s not a “hallucination”. That image has always made me think, in fact one of the first things that astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did after conquering the Moon was to photograph the Earth. That’s right, days of travel, high risk of death, discomfort, heat, cold, hunger… and the first thing you do is it photographing something that you had under your feet a few days before? It always seemed interesting to me.
That seems interesting to me to understand the things that are close, very close to us, we must necessarily go far away…very far away.
Here is the answer to the alleged error that emerged in my very natural neural network: the photo of the Earth from the Moon is not a hallucination, but it shows us how the same thing is happening as we are “conquering” artificial intelligence, this planet far from our humanity. Yes, it’s true, these days everyone looks at, studies and uses artificial intelligence, amazed or scared, but this achievement is also opening up a series of new reflections and fascinating insights into natural intelligence, on our brain, on our mind, on our way of being human, on emotions, on the many forms of intelligence that characterize us… I don’t know what is cause or what is effect, but in recent years we talk much more about the brain and mind compared to the past, and this seems to me to be a great achievement. I believe that all this would not have happened if we had not left/gone to the “planet” Artificial Intelligence.
Here, if you didn’t love artificial intelligence, if you feared it, know that indirectly, and now more than ever, this discipline is casting a new look on the most important thing we have, our intelligence… But we had to go far to see it from the right perspective and start respecting it for what it really is…
2. Generative like agriculture
A few days ago, on social media, someone wished me a bad end, they didn’t wish me death but “only” to be beaten up by some of my enemies. He did it only because in a reel I showed how AI technology and image recognition (image to text) could replace humans in the activity of cataloging books, with all due respect to the librarians, who could perhaps take up their time for more useful functions…
Il issue of job losses it is a serious topic and we will have to address it in the coming years, but even in this case I think it is right to broaden the lens to include other great technological revolutions of the past, to better understand this one.
My hand slipped and I widened the lens enough to photograph it too revolution that occurred 12,000 years ago, the one known as agriculture. Not bad, actually better because this one seems the most similar to the one we are experiencing… The one that can give us the most indications on what will happen.
Without becoming heavy we must remember that from the birth of A wise man until this technological revolution, humans only did two jobs: they hunted and gathered food. Point! Two jobs, you know? We traveled around the world just to look for food produced naturally by nature… Sorry for the repetition, but that’s exactly how it is: produced naturally by nature.
Agriculture, like livestock farming, is instead a forcing, an artificial deviation from the natural food production process. As you know, however, it produces much, much more than a natural process, making us travel fewer kilometers, less effort and using fewer resources.
Image generated with Dall-e
With the arrival of agriculture and livestock, as you will remember from middle school books, A wise man it stopped and proliferated, created the first civilizations, in these days and thanks to that invention history began. True, many humans lost their social usefulness, hunters and gatherers slowly lost their jobs; it is true, perhaps as Yuval N. Harari says in Sapiensmany of us also lost many skills and abilities, but think about how many new jobs that technological revolution brought.
Think of the positive transformation that that technology of artificially generating and multiplying food brought about for our species.
What we call civilization today and within which we recognize our humanity started right there: writing, history, memory, mathematics, social organization, all of this arrived only thanks to that revolution. Hundreds of new professions emerged from nowhere: the blacksmith, the carpenter, the politician, the accountant, the doctor, the merchant. Two professions lost, hundreds gained.
Now, I would like to point out that exactly like agriculture, Artificial Intelligence is also generative and multiplicative, it magnifies something natural, these machines do not produce food but ideas, we prepare the ground, we make the right request (we put the seed ) and without effort, without too many resources they are able to produce words, ideas, knowledge, relationships. And since today the economy is no longer based only on food but on knowledge, this revolution could actually produce the same effect that agriculture produced, the greatest revolution ever. That’s right, Artificial Intelligence will bring about a social and cultural transformation that we can’t even imagine. Why stop her? Can you imagine how many hunters or gatherers will have tried to convince humanity to continue the millenary tradition of nomadism?
Can you think what we would have missed if we had listened to them?
3. The new different
The last important thing about this innovation lies precisely in its own diversity, at least compared to our way of thinking. An autonomous diversity, which as time passes will be increasingly less conformable. I believe or at least I can glimpse that hallucinations are or will be the interesting part of this technology, not the logical answers we expect. Let’s not conform these machines, let’s leave them free to express. Artificial Intelligence is powerful and fascinating precisely because it can become a new look at the world. An alternative look to ours. We must not expect it to think like us, it is similar to us but it is different, we run on a biological substrate, they are technological, our biology dies, theirs does not. In short, what is emerging is a different intelligence, and its diversity must be welcomed and integrated into our society. The different has always been scary, today the different is Artificial Intelligence, let’s not limit ourselves, let’s not close ourselves in our boundaries of identity, let’s open ourselves to the different.