Unreleased Beatles song and the students who created nudes – 11/05/2023 – Tech

I woke up today to two seemingly disparate events: the students who created and shared nudes of their classmates and the release of the Beatles’ new song.

One common element: technology. Omnipresent artificial intelligence, which creates and destroys, enchants and terrifies. It’s not that…it’s what we make of it. Going beyond the shallow analysis of kids who destroy and geniuses who create, let’s reflect on how AI changes and challenges us.

As Nilton Bonder said, since Adam and Eve, betrayals have imposed themselves on traditions and we have challenged the status quo in search of growth. Our entrepreneurial hunger was never curbed by the knowledge that we would go too far.

We didn’t do this when we discovered tools that took them to the top of the food chain or when we created the atomic bomb. I once heard from an editor who talked about Amazon’s arrival in Brazil: “I wanted the ebook to be uninvented”. Although understandable, it is not viable.

Given that nothing will be uninvented, let’s look at the impacts, starting with the Impact on Truth. We call what we are living in the “post-truth era”, as if facts were relative.

Science helps and hinders conclusions because, while it tests hypotheses with the aim of controlling and predicting, it also questions itself. The scientist seeks the truth and questions what is established and this is not paradoxical.

Truth is socially constructed because our senses and logic offer limited means of understanding reality. That doesn’t mean we give up searching. There is an important distinction between scientific limits in the pursuit of knowledge and the manipulation of facts for one’s own benefit.

The second aspect is the Impact on Vision. Technology has allowed us to deliberately imprison ourselves in bubbles, mirroring what happens in homogeneous groups. We have lost the ability to dialogue with those who are different and to understand the ecosystem of the problem.

This encapsulation weakens us and leaves us hostage to fear. Instead of looking at it clearly and deeply, as Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, we try to avoid it, aiming to make the uncertain certain. Faith, the unknown, become certainties shouted at the top of our lungs. We can shout as much as we want, no one is listening in the other bubble.

While the first aspect deals with our relationship with the world and the second with our relationship with others, the third talks about the Impact on the Self. For Byung-Chul Han, we need privacy to exist, but we deny ourselves privacy when exposing ourselves online. We are wired to connect, but not to deal with the judgment of thousands.

We are increasingly tense, insecure. We cancel ourselves or attack ourselves, reproducing the same behaviors that were inflicted on us. We use the lives of people we don’t even know as proxies for our frustrations and mercilessly attack someone we know nothing about… except they made a mistake. Who never?

We talk about technology, impacts… we need to talk about the future. Let’s go back to school. All these elements are present. We know that it is not the fact that the school is Catholic that instilled in students a taste for pornography. We know that content-oriented schools do not produce morally worse people. We know that there are good rich parents and good poor parents. We know that technologies will spread more and more. We know that dialogue is fundamental. We know that families and schools play a fundamental role in this. We know many things, but we don’t know more things yet.

These are conversations that need calm, care and time. Conversations in which we need to allow ourselves to enter with an open mind, full of doubts, discomforts and hopes.

I’m sorry to disappoint anyone who was hoping for a recipe for the future. Theories say that to deal with adaptive challenges we need to allow ourselves to learn. Sharpen curiosity and empathy, allow ourselves the discomfort of the unknown. Move forward together, as fast as we can, as slowly as we need. At the end of the line, believe me, there will be a new Beatles song waiting for us.