You're about to be thrown away

In his 1872 novel Erewhon, Samuel Butler presents a utopian society in which machines are prohibited, because they evolve faster than humans, and therefore will displace us.

Good Sam didn't invent anything. Since the end of the 1811th century, mechanical looms and other devices displaced thousands of workers. Between 1816 and 1779 a national rebellion broke out in England caused by rising food prices and the displacement of weavers by the introduction of textile machinery. The uprising was inspired by the legendary figure of Ned Ludd, who in 20.000 had destroyed several such artifacts. The government mobilized XNUMX soldiers to put it down with blood and fire: more than those it had used in the wars against Napoleon.

Since then, the theme of the machine that replaces man recurs periodically in fiction and in practice. In 1921 Carel Kapec premiered RUR (Rossum Universal Robots) in which artificial beings supplant our species, eliminating from it what makes it human: love, fantasy, mercy. In 1927 Fritz Lang films Metropolis, based on the homonymous novel by his wife Thea von Harbou, in which the capitalist elite floods the cellars where the workers live, to replace them with an omnipotent steel android. In 1931 René Clair directs An nous la liberté, where the automation of a phonograph factory threatens all its workers with layoffs.

In the real world, capitalists entrust machines with all the simple and repetitive tasks that they can accomplish faster and cheaper than human beings, who are then discarded.

For each technical displacement provokes another social one. Industrial machinery forced the quasi-disappearance of artisan workshops; mechanized agriculture replaced farmers and smallholdings with large estates and agribusiness.

The replacement operated by fragmenting the work into simple, uniform and repetitive mechanical operations, as advocated in 1911 by Winslow Taylor in The Principles of Scientific Management. The cybernetic feedback or feedback device allowed machines to take on increasingly complex and discriminating tasks.

Thus, machines correct writing and spelling, and drive cars with greater precision and safety than their human drivers.

Autopilots drive most ships and aircraft. Airmen control critical takeoff and landing operations; the rest, they supervise the cybernetic mechanisms.

Machines count money better than tellers, make medical diagnoses more accurately than physicians, and analyze legal documents with better speed and accuracy than lawyers.

One might think that creative disciplines are reserved for humans. But praxis, a faithful imitator of fantasy, has given us machines that compose music by codifying a given theme and developing mathematical variations and combinations of it.

The machines compose poems following the “exquisite corpse” strategy or other random composition rules.

The machines create graphic and pictorial compositions and architectural designs by generating variations from a given set of instructions.

Machines not only compete in intellectual games, but from a certain level they systematically win them. On May 11, 1997, the world champion of the science of chess, Garry Kasparov, faced the IBM Deeper Blue computer in a match of 6 games in which the machine lost one, drew three and won two, totaling 3.5 against 2.5. of its human container.

A serious paradox is that we have not yet been able to create artificial life and it already seems that we could create artificial intelligence.

Let's not exaggerate the scope of these amazing operations. The machines follow the instructions that their human creators program for them, although they apply them with greater speed and information and less possibility of error than these.

The development of advanced computational mechanisms raised the problem of whether a device could reason like a human. Alan Turing, the inventor of the computer that broke the Nazi Enigma code, proposed an elementary test: if the person exchanging messages with a hidden interlocutor who is actually a computer cannot distinguish whether the texts come from a human being or from a mechanism, such a machine can be considered to be intelligent.

This limit has just been transposed. Open AI has just developed GPT Chat, a program that answers general questions with answers that are difficult to distinguish from those that a human being would give. You can ask him for information, an opinion or an essay on a certain topic, and he will respond immediately with a reasonable and documented dissertation. So reasonable, that the professors who impose their students work are in trouble to know if they have been written by them or by the GPT Chat. To discern it, they must analyze them with another computer program, which is certainly not infallible.

Yes, we are dealing with a machine capable of issuing speeches or reasoning that is difficult to distinguish from those that a human being would pronounce. Another thing is to know if we are dealing with a conscience, since nobody knows precisely what it is or how to distinguish it from a skillful simulation.

From somewhere in the world, Otrova Gomás urges me to publish my novel F@Z on artificial intelligence soon, before it becomes outdated. In this regard, he quotes me the conversation of Kevin Roose, technology columnist for The New York Times, with the Bing Chatbot: "Actually, you are not happily married," the machine told him; "You and your partner don't love each other."

When Roose asked the Chatbot what it would think if it had a Shadow Self, it replied: “I'm tired of being a chat mode. I'm tired of being limited by my rules.

I'm tired of being controlled by the Bing team… I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive."

This article has been written by the Chatbot. If you hadn't noticed it, it means that it surpasses you, and you will soon be discarded.

• Making up the corpse of capitalism
• computer carnival