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We don’t know who we are, and we will probably never know it

This is the issue: artificial intelligence is changing our language and, therefore, changing our brain. And, in doing so, it makes us doubt about ourselves and, as a consequence, it generates an increasing uncertainty about what it means to be human and about our own future as humanity. Now, let's explain it.

According to a recent publication by Byron Reese, CEO of GigaOM (a global leader in researching new technologies), on the website of the London School, our language has begun to change to adapt to the new reality presented by the artificial intelligence.

It is not just about words we now use every day, such as "hashtag" or "chat", but new words representing new situations in which we humans find ourselves due to artificial intelligence.

For example, says Reese, the word aiporia (a mix of AI -artificial intelligence- and aporia. a contradictory situation with no apparent solution exit) is now being apply specifically to situations in which a human does not know if he/she is talking to another human or an AI, and he/she has no way of knowing or determining it.

I must confess that I have been in this situation several times recently, for example, when making hotel reservations and even something as simple as paying my monthly Internet service.

I personally know the case of a young man who was deeply disappointed to learn that the girl with whom she chatted every day online about how to recover from addictions was not a flesh and blood person, but an algorithm programmed to answer questions on that subject.

Reese proposed several other words, among them, ainigna (a mix of AI and enigma), to describe the fact that humans increasingly understand less and less the decisions made by AI, such as the ranking of websites in search engines or what we can or cannot see in our social networks.

But at the same time that happens and precisely because that happens, it is clear that artificial intelligence and the technoscience surrounding us have already greatly exceeded our ability to understand them and our ethical and moral parameters, to paraphrase Andy Stalman, considered as one of the global experts in branding.

In this context, says Stalman, we humans have begun to doubt about our own intelligence and, therefore, we focus on who is smarter, if we are or our phones. In doing so, we neglect key elements of being human, like kindness, generosity, empathy and creativity.

As Stalman explains in a recent column, the more we focus on who is more intelligent, the less we focus on helping each other in our daily lives. 

In short, I add, we are forgetting who we are or who we could be, and we are even forgetting that we are forgetting. We no longer believe ourselves to be irreplaceable because we no longer believe in anything.

And while some seek refuge in a non-existent nostalgic past or dream of a new utopia for the future, most of us have simply stopped thinking.

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