History has evolved: before humanity lived on promises, today it lives on trends, modes, propensities, styles… but hope still remains latent in fieri for the promise. Paradoxically, in a compulsive world, media-driven and immediate, there is still hope: “Hope not as a conviction that things will turn out well, but as the certainty that something has meaning, regardless of its final result” (Václav Havel).
Society is the architect of dilemmas; virtual media are believed more than physical people. The accelerated expansion of digitalization, artificial intelligence and robotics, which deeply affect social structures, decision-making processes and the collective imagination through the media way in which they deliver information, transmits a message that some languages and behaviors imitate, but remain foreign to human experience. Pope Leo XIV affirms it: “Artificial intelligences do not live an experience, do not possess a body, do not go through joy and pain, do not mature in relationships nor know from within what love, work, friendship and responsibility mean” (MH 99). Progress is seen as a transcendence of human limits, making limits out to be not something constitutive, but as a defect that must be eliminated, transcended or set aside, allowing confidence in the risks of an agent without social responsibility that decides on processes that affect life, relationships, access to opportunities and the rights of each person. Artificial intelligences will never be able to help us endure the effects of the consequences of the decisions they help humanity make.
Facing a dislocated stage of society, we find hope or fear. Fear takes away hope because it blocks us, leaves us static, shrinks us; while hope, as Ernst Bloch would say, is active, created and creative force that constantly transforms seeking what is lacking. Technology allows us to escape and not have to face what frightens us and threatens us or poses a vital challenge. We want, therefore, to spare humans from having to be human. The great hope is refusing to believe that uncertainty is the only certainty and the apocalypse our only future. The human being must be risky and responsible for his own acts so as not to also be responsible for acts that indicate a rarity that does not belong to him; “the human being flourishes not despite the limit, but often through the limit” (MH 118), recognizing in fragility, vulnerability places where relationship, care and openness to the other mature.
Hope is an antidote so as not to be overcome beforehand by uncertainty and catastrophism; it is an interruption of the antagonistic present and an anticipation of building a more human future for those who have no hope: the surplus, the crucified, the discarded, the violated of this time, so perplexed and indifferent to their cries of pain. A society that takes refuge in devices marvels and is moved by the publications of some phenomena and, blinded before the direct tangible realities that happen before their noses, we cannot call it a society of human beings. Let us avoid the goodbye to humanity at all costs.
Artificial intelligence has been fitted into the category of development; development is seen as a polysemic term because it allows locating controversial or distorted concepts, whether by the will to confuse or the lack of sufficient knowledge and, therefore, inescapable, and it is difficult to know what the intention is. Artificial intelligence appears as a powerful tool, capable of offering real benefits, but also of amplifying forms of domination when separated from an ethical and anthropological orientation. The growth of technical power does not immediately coincide with good: “Power can act as an accelerator of the technocratic paradigm and, for this reason, they need a new spiritual, ethical, political framework. More powerful does not necessarily mean better” (MH 93).
“Never has humanity had so much power over itself and nothing guarantees that it will use it well, especially if we consider the way it is doing it.” (LS 104) There are powers that rebel and are not there to execute a ministry or service, but to provoke authoritarianism, and to serve a power as Thomas Hobbes would say “man is a wolf to man” Especially in a society where it seeks position, hierarchy losing its natural calling service; the danger of humanity is to be a victim of its own fabrications, if everything that man undertakes, creates, designs and places to supply functions, accelerate processes, without an ethic and anthropological axiom, he is building his own extinction, running the person the risk of becoming instrumentalized, objectified, mechanized giving value not to his being but to his doing, in the sense of production and manufacture. Diminishing the dignity of work and trusting more in the artifacts that are production of it, for self-destruction and limiting himself in responsibility.
Not for religious or mystical reasons, but to safeguard the constitutive; either we care for the human or we say goodbye as humanity. For transhumanism seeks that humanity be transformed radically by future technology in order to avoid aging, overcome the limitations of human understanding and memory, eliminate human suffering in general, whether biological or psychological, and eliminate human captivity on Planet Earth. And another tendency is posthumanism, which rejects the idea of anthropocentrism and seeks to transcend the human species into something more advanced; it is the dissatisfaction with capabilities, qualities and defects, it is a flight from what is essentially human undervaluing its constitutive. The truth is that, if we are extinguished, whatever the prototype, evolution will end later. The human being is the one who drives that evolution. Dismissing humanity, the world will be a place of obsolete trinkets and a heap of garbage. Let us trust more in humanity than in apparatus; let us not humanize apparatus nor reify humans.
REFERENCES
MH. Abbreviation for the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas by Pope Leo XIV
LS. Abbreviation for the encyclical Laudato Si by Pope Francis.