Publicado originalmente en Medium – Manuchis
As I can see, all humanity is already known, we have to search for the “other” in other places. As far as I know, alien life is not visible to us yet. Artificial Intelligence is the result. I have a few arguments to convince you about this idea, but I think it worth it.
I don’t like to discuss about facts but culture. Since humanity exists, the most amazing activity that we have developed is known the unknown. To be curious is not a human thing, but to explain it is. For thousands of years, we created myths and sciences to understand other cultures, ethnic groups, etc.
The “other” is something fascinating, because it defines us. Without the other we have no identity. We are a humanity at all, but that doesn’t matter, we need to be ourselves also.
For western society, discovery and sharing cultures was vital. We learnt from the Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Arabs, etc. almost everything that we know. With that knowledge we created machines to go where the others were. Ships and Planes. And with that knowledge we created something record the knowledge. Photography and Video. And to storage the knowledge. Computers. And something to share it. Internet.
We arrived happily to the XXI Century, amazing times. We lack of peace and a sustainable world. But we have distributed knowledge. Collectively talking, there is almost nothing that we don’t know from the human being (culturally speaking). There is, probably (not sure at all), culture that we don’t know. It doesn’t mean that we understand everything. Only few people only want to understand, but everyone wants to know. Again, is an identity matter.
At the same time, thanks to our knowledge, advanced machinery is taking big steps to build the next culture. As Darius Kazemi pointed, an alien culture that we don’t understand, that is totally strange for us. It doesn’t matter that we created it. The point is that for us, is magic.
I was reading today this post about computational imagination, things that in the XVII Century was like the beginning of what we have today. It took four centuries to accomplish something near imagination (we don’t know when real AI will be accomplished).
I would like to highlight here two situations. First, the principle of simmetry in socio-technical innovations is still relevant. We didn’t invented nothing in the last two decades, we have been working on this for centuries.
Second, if the planet Earth doesn’t collide because of the Climate Change or the religious war (you can call it terrorism if you want), our only salvation is AI. Not because it will be revolutionary in terms of food production, health, self-driving cars (?), and, as its last discoursive irrationallity, universal basic income.
We will need AI as a cultural matter. We will need AI to save us from ourselves, to create the “other”, to believe.
I’m not pretty sure, but the image of god is a little blur here. Who will be god in this world? As you can notice, we always need a god (put the name that you want here) before killing each others.
Westworld has a point here, we will need fiction to feed our egos (I found this serie a little pretentious, but I only saw a few chapters).
Hi! It’s me again. Just fund this video today. What if we are just fucked up?