The tech sector’s latest soap opera, the firing and reinstatement of Sam Altman as CEO of OpenAI, is shrouded in mystery about a supposedly sensational advance toward general artificial intelligence made at the company. That would put Altman on the level of Oppenheimer, the inventor of the atomic bomb: he would be the driving force behind something that will change our lives and the global balance. The IAG, whose acronym adds a G, also called superintelligence, would bring us the singularity, the moment when creation surpasses its Creator. Almost no one thinks this is as close as the company that brought the still rudimentary ChatGPT to market. But will it happen? In what period?
Until then, it is daring to claim that what machines do today is thinking, even though AI is making very rapid progress. For now, we still need to think about what some do more brilliantly than others. The documentary miniseries Alter Ego. In three chapters, Invisible Intelligence brings together the human minds that best understand and explain what is already there with AI and what is to come in the next decade. The most groundbreaking, for better or worse.
Directed by Beatriz Pérez de Vargas and premiering on RTVE Play before its next broadcast on La 2, Alter Ego brings into dialogue two powerful currents of thinking about thinking machines: the utopian and the catastrophic. Two moderators each address the individual trends. Almudena Ariza (When will it have done that if we see it every day in Ukraine, Israel or Palestine?) Look for voices that reassure and upset us because they believe AI will save us from cancer and the climate crisis will free us from boring jobs and give us more free time; It will improve our lives, which will be very long. Carles Tamayo, on the other hand, visits the doomsday prophets: AI will delve into mass surveillance, spread hoaxes and lies, make public debate more toxic, be used for war and oppression (nothing that isn’t already happening so far), but it will also take jobs and power away from us , and in the end we humans will be left in the gutter, we will be redundant, except for the super elite who will manage the new shed. Each chapter is set on a temporal plane: the first tells what is already happening, the other two take us to what is expected in 2028 and 2033, and each is more interesting and disturbing than the last.
The journalist Carles Tamayo with the engineer Nuria Oliver in the documentary.RTVE
The engineer and researcher Nuria Oliver explains very well the sins that algorithms are already committing: the lack of diversity (that Netflix always recommends us the same type of series, that Facebook and X lock us in political bubbles), the lack of transparency (that AI gives us an answer, but we never understand where it comes from) and the enormous accumulation of power in a handful of companies. The debate that is already underway is how we can introduce ethics into cold machines and guarantee that their criteria match our values. Of course, this includes regulation, which is beginning to take increasing measures in Europe, which are far more pronounced in the United States than in the United States. It is more difficult to understand what China is planning in this regard.
We hear very new ideas. Perhaps technical education will no longer play such a big role in the near future: everything technical will be done by machines, and what people need most is critical thinking. A person without much training will be able to perform tasks currently reserved for scientists. But there are fears we haven’t had before, and they arise here: What if someone could build a nuclear bomb in their backyard? The future of employment is another big debate: some foresee massive job destruction; Others predict a time of greater balance between work and play, giving us more space to interact with people, which is already running out.
Of course, a utopia can also become a nightmare. Several experts are speculating about what artificial general intelligence will be. Maybe then we give up and give him political power, believing that he will do better than our improvable authorities. Attention: We would have ended democracy, that would be a real technocracy. For Antonio Torralba, a researcher at MIT, there is no need to go that far: perhaps artificial intelligences are not good political leaders, but they would make excellent advisors. There are also those who believe that we should not fear this final step, from consulting to directing. That we will delegate decisions to IAG and they will convince us to do better until they meet everyone. It could happen that some countries do it sooner (authoritarians have it easier) and their success drags the others down.
José Ignacio Latorre, a quantum physicist who studies neural networks, prefers to imagine that there will be different superintelligences, not a single all-powerful one. Nevertheless, dependencies will arise between the most advanced countries and the others that are even greater than those at present. “When people discovered anesthesia, no one wanted to go back to the 12th century and have a real toothache. When AI makes your life easier, you won’t want to part with it. “You won’t see the danger in it,” he says. A sentence that is disturbing: “I have seen everything I thought overcome.”
Not everything we hear falls into the categories of utopia and apocalyptic. Amidst so many announcements of an almost science fiction future, the third path, that of the pragmatists, sounds sensible. They are the ones who believe that there will be important progress, yes, but it is better for us today to focus on the abuses that are already being committed. Mathematician Cathy O’Neil is one of the clearest: “The mistake is to believe that AI is self-aware, even though it has always been created by humans and used against other humans.” Singularity is a marketing term, so the owners of this technology have no Take responsibility. “This conspiracy theory is distracting us from the real problems.”
Maybe Sam Altman raises excessive expectations that delight his investors. Even if so, that doesn’t mean extraordinary things won’t happen. Artificial intelligence will be so invasive, permeating every level of bureaucracy and our activities, that we will not be able to resist it. The final toy will therefore be an advance from techno-capitalism or surveillance capitalism, that model based on the massive extraction of our data in order to do business with them, that is, with us. We’ve been doing this for several decades. It will accelerate. Fasten seat belts.
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