There is an interesting text by Emanuele Severino, now certainly marked by time but equally stimulating, entitled ‘The Decline of Capitalism’, published by BUR, ISBN: 9788817018739. The text was revised by Severino in 2007 and is a very interesting look at the future.
Capitalism and the dying world
We certainly live in an era marked by capitalism: an economic system that admits of no religion, no philosophy, no ideology other than profit. Certainly this should not be surprising, nor scandalising, or even surprising, rather one should reason on the actual usefulness of capitalism in the current ecological situation. The problem with capitalism is its actual sustainability because, as a catalyst for profit, it is not concerned with the maintenance of resources, but with their exploitation. Over time, humanity has overlooked (and is still doing so now) the side-effects of such exploitation, of a frenzied acquisition of resources.
On the other hand, it is also true that, at present, imagining an alternative model to capitalism is mostly impossible. History has taught us that with the end of communism, many balances have broken down, that the socio-economic order has changed radically, and that alternative mechanisms such as socialism are unable to guarantee the technological development we feel we need. Capitalism in its development, however, has created a strange condition that has brought it into conflict with technology, which, in a sense, was created by capitalism itself.
Capitalism is in conflict with technique, because while the apparatus of technique tends to reduce scarcity as much as possible, capitalism must perpetrate it.
“The Decline of Capitalism”, E. Severino, BUR, Pg. 80
We must be careful with that‘must perpetrate it‘, because in fact capitalism would not exist without that action but, at the same time, it is threatened by itself and by that exploitation that leads it to be at risk of extinction. Severino’s idea, imagined over 20 years ago, was correct at the time and still is today.
In order to survive, capitalism must therefore curb technological development at some point: it must control it so that it does not put everyone on an equal economic footing.
“The Decline of Capitalism”, E. Severino, BUR, Pg. 81
Computing and Technology
The ecological problem is addressed in Severino’s text, as well as in many other texts from the 1960s and 1970s, as an emerging problem: today it is an emergency on a global scale, against which capitalism is already struggling. Will it continue to absorb resources that the planet cannot provide or will it find another way to survive?
Of course, technology is proposed as the solution to many critical aspects of human life, not least the ecological ones that threaten man’s existence on the planet more than others. Technique, understood as the highest expression of science and rationality, has gained greater scope and is expanding without any real direction. We could call it pervasive and those who have lived through the period of Internet expansion and technological evolutions will certainly have perceived this ‘explosion’ of growth.
As a whole, technology, guided by modern science, does not intend to realise a certain purpose rather than another, it does not intend to act and go in one direction rather than another: it intends to increase indefinitely its capacity to realise any purpose and to go and act in any direction.
“The Decline of Capitalism”, E. Severino, BUR, p. 139
Artificial intelligence and blind expansion
There is a lot of talk about artificial intelligence and certainly this is possible because potentially there are so many areas of application that it is impossible to see a defined profile. When Konan Jean and Claude Kouassi wrote“A Comprehensive Overview of Artificial Intelligence”, they identified the 8 pillars on which artificial intelligence was founded. But many of these pillars (e.g. neuroscience) are superstructures of other disciplines to which artificial intelligence can be extended (e.g. neurology, biology, etc.). There is no definite direction that artificial intelligence seems to be able to take: rather, it seems to be applicable to everything, expandable blindly into any field, from law to engineering, from architecture to literature. There is no clear boundary and this distinguishes it from automation. In automation processes, the machine that replaces the worker has, instead, many boundaries.
- Ithas a spatial boundary: the machine occupies a precise space and that space only. It cannot “exit” that space outside of which it would have no purpose.
- It has a functional boundary: the machine exists to perform precise functions, beyond which it is no longer needed.
- It has an operational boundary: the machine performs certain movements and only those. It does not need to perform others.
In the factories of the 1970s that developed automation, the processes fundamentally remained the same whether they were operated by man or machine; certainly the timing, precision and technique could improve, but a milling cutter remained a milling cutter. Artificial intelligence put the human being in front of a mutant technology in spatial, operational and functional dimensions. Such an event has never happened before, and questions about the risks are more than legitimate, they are necessary.
Impulse, theocracy and technocracy
Impulse is a term of Latin origin, essentially meaning to push. Impulse requires at least two actors: the one who pushes and the one who is pushed. In the extraordinary complexity of the human being, emotional, mental impulses drive man’s actions: everything develops internally and is sometimes realised externally (think of a work of art for example). In the machine, the same dynamic can take place even if for different causes; in this regard, there is a wonderfully intriguing analogy written by Carlo Sini:
In the age of the gods, the imitative automaton is the priest, the sacred community.
“L’Uomo, La Macchina, L’Automa”, C. Sini, Bollati Boringhieri, Pg. 100
Man is the automaton of the gods: he performs the rites handed down to him by the deity to communicate with the divinity that is beyond the human dimension. Without those rites one cannot communicate with divinity, without that priest one cannot have a channel of communication with the divine plane. There is an impulse: the priest prompts the prayer, the deity is prompted to respond.
The paradigm repeats itself between man and artificial intelligence, but there is one essential variable: the basis is not rituals, beliefs and symbolism, but numbers and technology. Man is the god and artificial intelligence is the priest who performs the rites imparted by the god-man. It would be necessary, indeed obligatory, to quote Feuerbach’s Theogony that he wrote on the subject:
If man could do what he wants then he would never, ever believe in a god, for the simple reason that he himself would be god.
Source: ‘Theogony’, Ludwig Feuerbach, Laterza, Roma-Bari, 2010, p. 51.
However, in the classical relationship with the deity, the human level remains separate and distinct with rules independent of the divine. The Greeks were well aware of this distinction and kept the planes quite separate: the man who prayed to Zeus was aware that he was praying to another plane that had the name of Olympus, which human beings could not access even when dead.
In the relationship with artificial intelligence, the human level is profoundly and radically changed by a non-human entity that imitates the human mind. There is a similarity that brings the coexistence of ‘god’ and ‘priest’ on the same level. Severino would agree with Feuerbach: the impulse of technology has radically altered society from a capitalist society to a technocracy in which the divine plane vanishes and with it rituals.
Relying on God begins to appear as alienation and man’s renunciation of himself, when it is no longer believed that God’s infinite power is something existing.
“The Decline of Capitalism”, E. Severino, BUR, p. 139
Ultimately the impulse was present in the theocracy, but it also remained present in the technocracy, the change was in the transition from one to the other with a triumph of the technical dimension over the spiritual dimension.
Decision-making under emergency conditions
It almost sounds like an oxymoron: deciding on something particularly complex under conditions of urgency is strongly discouraged, but it has now become the norm. At ‘Climate Change 2022’, Jim Skea, co-chair of the IPCC, exposes the urgency of a situation that has been postponed for too long and is practically on the threshold of irreversibility: a process with ‘domino’ effects that foresees, among other consequences, the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, the melting of the North Pole, and the slowing of ocean circulation around the North Pole, which would manifest its effects above all on the climate of Europe.
Under conditions of urgency, one cannot choose wisely, but it will be necessary to do so, and among the various decisions to be taken, some may concern the implementation of solutions including artificial intelligence as an element of countering and mitigating ecological risks. The point is not the usefulness of the tool (because that is what AI is), the point is the adoption of a complex solution without having the full picture of the problem.
Conclusions
The advent of artificial intelligence, if one can speak of an advent given the long established studies, was greeted with wonder and amazement. Justified and well-placed feelings that almost immediately gave rise, however, to perplexity and concern. An uproar of emotions that can be summed up with one question: should we fear artificial intelligence?
This question is misplaced: one should not fear artificial intelligence but the possible misapplication by humans. There is a very interesting Latin proverb by Publilius Sirius: ab alio expectes alteri quod feceris i.e. expect from one, what you have done to another. I think it is an interesting phrase: artificial intelligence will do what we ask it to do but also not to do. The responsibility will be ours, ours alone.
