Compared to people like Elon Muskwho fear that the Artificial intelligencewhich has already far surpassed natural intelligence in solving complex problems, may end up extinct the species that created it, the Pope Leo XIV He is an optimist. Although in his first encyclical, Magnificent Humanitaslisted many things that could go very wrong, it also assumed that, with proper regulation, AI could be a force for good. This seems to be the general opinion. Despite their fears, Musk and others are investing billions of dollars in the development of AI. They argue that, if China takes the lead, you will be in a position to dominate the world, so USA he is forced to do everything possible to compete.
For now, all this is mere speculation; Some have even attributed it to Musk and company’s desire to get more investments for their businesses. It’s just that at this point no one really knows what effect AI will have on the world. On the positive side, almost every day some recognized expert claims that it will help find cures for many deadly diseasesbut there are also those who predict that, within a couple of years, it will replace between the twenty to thirty percent of jobs that still exist, which, of course, would have catastrophic social consequences.
In other words, AI is already revolutionizing war: thanks in large part to her, the ukrainians are beginning to expel the Russian invaders from their territory by creating ever-larger exclusion zones between themselves and their enemies, in addition to providing drone swarms with the ability to decide for themselves, so to speak, the best way to attack them.
Be that as it may, there is no doubt that the spectrum of AI is having a demoralizing impact in millions of people. As the Pope reminds us, the assumption that we can surpass humanity in intelligence poses a challenge to our collective self-esteem. The mere existence of AI may reduce the human creativity as happened in the almost thousand years between the collapse of the Greco-Roman civilization and the Italian Renaissancewhen the supposed need to submit to the alleged will of an all-powerful and omniscient deity—the AI of the Middle Ages—had a suffocating psychological effect.
In addition to consuming more and more material resources, since it requires enormous amounts of electricity (the data centers consume more than most countries) and waterAI is discouraging young people from studying with the dedication of previous generations. Combined with the negative effect on reading habits and therefore on the literacy generated by smartphones and other devices derived from the dizzying technological progress, AI allows university students to produce essays and even doctoral theses without having to do anything more than ask a “research assistant” to do the work for them.
For many years, economists and other experts have insisted on the importance of what they call “human capital”. According to them, the future belongs to countries that have a large number of well-educated and technologically savvy men and women, rather than those with abundant, easily exploitable natural resources but with inhabitants who are ignorant according to internationally current standards. This has made sense for a long time. After all, as many have pointed out, Swiss and Singapore They are much richer than him Congo either Boliviaand are likely to continue to be so. Impressed by such arguments, governments around the world created new universities and expanded existing ones with the stated goal of increasing the human capital at their disposal.
But then big problems arose. In almost all relatively wealthy countries, considerable numbers of university graduates soon found themselves forced to accept jobs that they had been taught to consider appropriate for their inferiors. “Why should a person with a degree for which he has often paid a fortune be forced to make a living washing dishes, flipping burgers, or stocking shelves?” they asked ruefully. As has happened time and time again, the discrepancy between what seemed reasonable hopes and a discouraging reality has generated discontent among “overqualified and underemployed”which helps explain the turmoil affecting not only developed countries, but also others seeking to join them.
This is not surprising. When they come together, these discontents—who make up what some have called a lumpen intellectuality in all Western countries—are dangerous. Over the years, they have provided leaders and cannon fodder to extremist movements of the left and right determined to destroy the status quo and all those who defend it; There is no reason to think that this time they will be more passive than those who were like them in the past. They are rebels with many causes, but with few achievable objectives.
And now, to top it off, AI has begun to leaving millions of people with academic training out of work and, if the so-called experts are right, it will soon do the same for many other jobs. Among those most affected are already people specialized in computer programming and similar fields; It soon became clear that AI can accomplish such tasks much better than the talented individuals who used to monopolize them, and as things are going, it is about to displace most of them.
Does this mean that those who say that, from now on, people will have to recycled approximately every five years to keep up with technological change by acquiring new skills? Maybe yes. The recently established educational model, in which teachers strive to prepare students for the labor marketwhether the current one or his successors in the decades to come, without worrying about education in the traditional sense of the word, and telling them that college degrees are beneficial because they greatly increase their earning capacity, could be left obsolete coming soon.
Although for many years plumbers, electricians and so on they will have no difficulty finding clients, the same cannot be said for many people with degrees in computingand much less in fields such as gender studies or the postcolonial studieswhich were created for clearly political reasons. For young people who have not yet decided what to do with their lives, this uncertainty about what the future holds can only be discouraging. Just a couple of generations ago, their equivalents could confidently aspire to professional careers of up to half a centuryin which they would ascend step by step, but today no one seems to have the slightest idea of what awaits those who are still in high school when they enter university, if that is their goal, and much less in the following years.
He academic world is changing rapidly: USAuniversity professors without a permanent position often depend on public aid to survive. The same happens with the journalismwhich, relatively recently, experienced a boom, hence the ephemeral popularity of “communication studies” in universities in many parts of the world, before being hit by Internetwhich monopolized a large part of the advertising revenue on which the main newspapers and television networks depended, forcing them to try their luck online. Many sank, taking most of their employees with them. A similar fate could await a considerable number of lawyers, financial experts and even doctors yes, as some predict quite plausibly, AI goes even further into their respective spheres.
Like everything else, education is constantly changing. During the last four or five decadesmost systems have been oriented to satisfy the demands of the labor market, prioritizing vocational training about outdated beliefs about the value of what for millennia have been called humanities. However, with the drastic economic and, therefore, social changes that are occurring rapidly, this position now seems erroneous. Perhaps it would be wiser for schools, universities and other similar institutions to refocus on teaching young people about roots of civilization to which their country belongs and in transmitting to them what the notable Victorian poet and cultural thinker Matthew Arnold memorably described as “the best thing that has been thought and said” by our ancestors that has been preserved in books. They should also take into account beliefs that flourished for a time before being discarded and, as they delve deeper into the history of our specieshelp them locate themselves in the history of humanity so that they can better understand what is happening in the world.
