“Even as a young man I could not share the opinion that if knowledge is dangerous, the ideal solution lies in ignorance. It has always seemed to me, instead, that the real answer to this problem lies in wisdom. It is not wise to refuse to face danger, even if one must do so with due caution. After all, that is the meaning of the challenge posed to man ever since a group of primates evolved into our species. Any technological innovation can be dangerous: fire has been dangerous from the beginning, and language even more so; both can be said to be dangerous today, but no man could call himself a man without fire and without speech.».
If you go and search on Google, you can match the phrase you read above to the great writer and biochemist Isaac Asimov, without being sure that he actually said it. We take it as it is, giving it absoluteness. But can we really be sure? (spoiler: he actually said it)
The problem concerns artificial intelligence and its future, if we really can’t guarantee ourselves that we have the right answers to our questions. And if, even more, we don’t know how to ask the right questions. Will the machine take over one day? It’s fear that can’t stop progress, but it’s not enough to set abstract rules (Asimov’s three laws of robotics, for example) to have a certain limit to what an algorithm can do. We need to weigh our words and put what Carlo Noseda, President of IAB Italia, calls prompts, the requests we address to computers: “We live in a strange period, in which people rely totally on technology, but in which we feel the need for real models: for example, posters of athletes like Sinner have reappeared on the walls of children’s bedrooms, as hasn’t happened for a long time. For this reason, we need to get out of the virtual to build a future that our generation won’t use, and probably doesn’t even have an idea of what it could become.” And for this reason the (first) watchword is to manage the revolution, «which is not the same as the industrial one, which has changed the way we have approached life. The technological one is changing us inside».
Training, here is the second word, perhaps the most important. And I return to the basics, to philosophy, to history, to know how to ask the right questions and not leave the answers to those who can find them in a millisecond, giving you only time to confuse you. TheInteractive Advertising BureauIAB precisely, does this: an association that brings together people and advertising companies to understand how to communicate its digital change to the world. In one of the next events, the one in October in Milan that will be called «Intersections», Greg Hoffman will be a guest, the creative who brought discrimination as a marketing object to Nike (remember the case of the American football player Kaepernick who knelt in protest at the national anthem?), he is a black American adopted by a white family: «It’s a clear example – says Noseda, who is also CEO of the agency M&C SAATCHI Europe – of what we are trying to explain: do we have the right questions to ask artificial intelligence to prevent a computer from becoming incapable of discriminating against someone in the future?
Big Brother is a real risk, and Ray Kurzweil – the Google engineer who twenty years ago wrote The Singularity Is Near, predicting that 2050 would be the year in which humans would integrate chips to become a different species – has now corrected himself in a recently published text entitled The singularity is closer. Or in 2045. Science fiction? «The problem is understanding that artificial intelligence is a simple definition, studied by marketing and used to make everyone understand what it is. But in reality it is something that none of us have a true understanding of, it is a much deeper mechanism, a part of a structure of which generative AI is only the cover». To be clear, it is not the – reassuring – one that our smartphones are said to be full of: «It will probably mark the end of democracy, if mathematical calculations decide for us. Or even of humanity, if one day the machine decides that we represent a lethal virus for the existence of our planet. And perhaps, in fact, we are».
So what to do? Yes, the rules are fine, «but Europe continues to set borders because it is slow, while the US and China are going very fast without brakes: they are now untouchable, and the next step is for artificial intelligence in communication to become a tool for mass opinion». And so: when will we face the real problems that AI is posing to us? It is precisely a question of questions: «We are dealing too much with ethics, but we still lack the basics of this technology. Reading today is considered an ancient word, and yet my father used to tell me: what do you do with Google if you don’t know what to search for? Well, with AI it is no longer even a problem of searching on internet engines, it is knowing that we risk asking the wrong questions with the result of having manipulated answers. For example, someone is wondering how much this revolution will cost us in energy? An hour of artificial intelligence training consumes 100 kilowatts, all it takes to make an electric car go 100 km by charging it all night. We don’t have all these resources for a technology that will ultimately be used by only a fraction of the billions of people on Earth, and it will create an even bigger gap than the current one. The scenario is terrible.”
Today, Noseda basically says, we are the architects of these infrastructures and the urgency is to prepare ourselves to know how to do it well, because without knowledge of a machine we are already defeated. We must know what prompt to insert, «and for this go back to studying what is believed to be no longer modern, that is useless. Instead, read history, philosophy and, why not, religion: probably a techno-human society will arrive where new beliefs will be discovered.
And instead the kids don’t know that there is nothing more technological than Catholicism, which doesn’t place any limits on entry and which invites confession and listening, which is a bit like the Google mechanism. And then there is forgiveness, which is the “ctr-alt-del” to start from scratch. And there is even the cloud…” Paradise, in short, where all the questions find answers. If of course you knew how to ask them.