We are at a disturbing crossroads: we are beginning to be able to artificially recreate behaviors that we consider unique to our species
Artificial intelligence and ethics have come closer together, as the number of meetings and publications shows today, and everything indicates that they will be closely intertwined as AI develops and shows more clearly, if possible, the cultural crisis to which, beyond other social, economic and technological transformations, We are dedicated. We are shifting our concern from how we should be to how we want to be. There is no longer a model to be fulfilled, but a model to be made.
From the beginning we have been leaving outside of us, in artifacts, capacities provided by our natural constitution. And the result is in all cases that the artificial extraordinarily amplifies what we can do only with what evolution has endowed us with, that is, naturally. Scrape with your fingernails or amplify the action with a stone scraper; carrying on our backs or in a transport machine; retain in memory or write on a durable support; undulating the air with our voice or that persists and reaches the sound regardless of the distance; manipulate with the magnificent skill of our fingers or do it with precise and tireless automatons… Our story is one of astonishing extraversion. A unique phenomenon in evolution. How far will it go?
Now we find ourselves at a disturbing crossroads: it is because we are beginning to be able to artificially recreate behaviors that we consider exclusive to our species and the most defining of our identity, of our humanity. Behaviors that we have been regulating with rules to comply with and models to follow. And it is that we leave out, in artifacts, decision-making and, therefore, behaviors in the face of the uncertainty of the environment and before our own actions that we considered to reside in the most intimate part of our human nature. But this concern increases because, like any artifact, its actions and, consequently, its consequences are amplified. Their ability to receive information before a decision is made, to analyze the different consequences of the action, to foresee the benefit and harm, to contrast the decision with existing norms, will exceed the capacity of the human brain to control. We will therefore have to trust their decisions, as today in the very fast calculations of an on-board computer for a manoeuvre (and which we can no longer do without).
We have reached a point where we feel the vertigo of being creators of artifacts “in our image and likeness”. Not because we mold them physically similar to us, since the most powerful and present will be invisible or almost unrecognizable, so close that they will listen to us, know us well and assist us in daily life until we cannot separate ourselves from them, but because they will perform the intimate functions for which we need to internalize ethical norms that govern them. How, then, to transfer them to them? It doesn’t seem as simple and straightforward as other instructions that are programmed. Above all because they cause a rebound or speculative effect: these “creatures” make us see ourselves with a perspective hitherto unheard of and provoke a reconsideration of ourselves. And if we have the possibility of building them, do we want them to be just like us, with the same characteristics with which natural evolution molded us to settle in the world and have options for survival as a species? Or, since it is another environment, another world, to which they have to react, it does not make sense to transfer to them cultural norms that were born to regulate in society the behaviors that were necessary for the survival of an animal species.
So, since what we build will respond to the law of every artifact, which is to amplify the natural, human action that has been extraverted into it, then we will see ourselves in these artificial “creatures” as in a mirror that shows our features in great detail. Disturbing, but also an opportunity to reconsider how we see ourselves so far.
Life in digital it is an imagined scenario that serves for reflection, it is not a prediction. The Alephites, prosthetic beings, move through it, in continuous connection with the digital Aleph, since the Net is a phenomenal contraction of space and time, like the Borgian Aleph, and not a mesh.
First Publication
Antonio Rodríguez de las Heras, Professor at Carlos III University of Madrid.
