Project Vision 21

Artificial intelligence can now clone itself, or at least large language models can, according to a recent study from Fudan University in China. Since AI cloning does not require human intervention, researchers say that in a short time and if the cycle is repeated, AI will surpass human intelligence.

“Successful self-replication under no human assistance is the essential step for AI to outsmart [humans], and is an early signal for rogue AI”, the researcher said in a study published last December in the database arXiv, according to Live Science.

For my part, I believe that we humans are striving so that AI does not need much effort to surpass us. Just by looking at what is happening in the world today (“world” in both the material and biological sense, as well as the spiritual and cultural sense) we already have enough evidence that our natural intelligence, far from expanding, is shrinking.

These two phenomena (presented in an extremely simplified way in the two paragraphs above) seem to be two sides of the same coin, that is, they seem to be so interconnected that one cannot happen without the other and that each feeds back into the actions of the other.

In a recent interview, Argentine actor Fabian Vena, who focuses on one-man shows about philosophy, stated with great certainty that “One’s thought is not one’s thought, but of everyone who has influenced us,” adding that “ultimately, what one is thinking is not one’s own.”

Or, as one of my philosophy professors at the University of Buenos Aires often repeated a few decades ago: “My best ideas are in the heads of others.”

In other words, as neuroscience has categorically demonstrated during the first quarter of the 21st century, our thoughts and our cognitive processes in general are not confined to our individual minds, but include personal networks, technologies, and everything we use to learn and communicate, now and in the past.

This process of assimilation, integration, and appropriation of the thoughts of others, generally unconscious, not only makes us think what we think, but also creates the illusion that those thoughts are our thoughts, when in reality we are only regurgitating what others thought.

A century ago, Alfred Whitehead argued that “Western” thought is just a footnote to Plato’s thought. And Werner Heisenberg claimed that quantum physics is “extremely close” to what Heraclitus had already thought 2,500 years ago. Now, we recycle influencer memes, and we are satisfied.

Algorithms have colonized our minds, and we no longer think, we only calculate. And that is exactly what AI does (at least now): calculate. But AI lacks the experiential, existential and imaginative dimension of humans.

If AI can duplicate itself and is on its way to surpassing human intelligence, that is because we have delegated the calculating aspect of our intelligence to AI and we have done so in such a way that, after delegating it, we have adopted it not only as our own, but as the only way of thinking.