The history of civilizations is, almost always, a sum of countless uneventful events; it is never a Tolkien novel. Another matter is its narrative, which prioritizes dramatic events, like cavalry charges, or explains logical stories with a beginning and an end. In general, the most widely read history avoids delving into slow evolutionary processes, which often bring about changes. No one wants to watch how a tree grows. Thus, for example, four thousand years ago, the Mesopotamians invented a surprising technology—a slow and accidental process that is seldom discussed: they invented a time machine.
The technology they created allows the teleportation of knowledge through time and space, and it does so absurdly cheaply. The time machine is, of course, writing. With this, and despite the thousands of years that separate us, we know exactly and directly what Plato, Thucydides, Livy, and others transmitted to us, at least as far as their mastery of this technology allowed.
Writing well is not easy; the writer is a sprinter who dedicates years of effort to run races of five minutes. It also has its mysteries: to write a good book, there are three rules, but the problem is that no one knows what they are. The great essayist George Orwell compiled rules for good writing: elimination of superfluous words, use only of original metaphors and tropes (i.e., unexpected guests are the ones we remember), avoidance of reflexives, and favoring short sentences. Triangulating the circle, Orwell did not follow his own rules in presenting his rules.
All of this is important when one wants to convey information or ideas. When one wants to agree on ideas, not so much; it is often more useful to use terms that allow parties to understand what they prefer and then develop meanings according to events, forces, and needs. This is evident in the first great democratic Constitution, the American one, and in a multitude of subsequent documents, including religious texts, business purposes, and commercial slogans.
Where will AI lead us? We must not fear new ideas; we must fear old ones.
Recently, a technology has been created that writes surprisingly well, at least in English, Spanish, Catalan, and various code languages: generative artificial intelligence (AI). It is a brontosaurus; to live, it must ingest immense amounts of data and energy. It will generate changes that are difficult to anticipate. Let’s remember that the appearance of writing served to record commercial agreements, establish laws, inventory and create prose, poetry, and letters, and eventually became the track that led us to science, diplomacy, states, and armies.
Where will AI lead us? It’s hard to know. Let’s remember that we must not fear new ideas; we must fear old ones. It does not seem that it will affect politics, at least not directly, since political writings are meeting points, not database summaries. It will impact the world of security. AI, generative or not, will eventually enable the construction of drones, armored vehicles, ships, and intelligently coordinated and autonomous robots, without the need for humans. If so, technologically advanced countries, like Western ones today, will be much more powerful than the rest. Faced with all this complexity, can we be sure that it will happen? Well, we would have to say that: I refuse to answer the question because I do not know the answer. To know, one would have to travel through time.
Article written by Marc Murtra and published in La Vanguardia: Countries under the new time machine
