Javier Santaolalla: “Science and technology can save or destroy the world. Deifying them is dangerous.”

WIRED: Do you have any religious position?

Javier Santaolalla: No, I consider myself agnostic.

WIRED: Don’t you directly position yourself as an atheist?

Javier Santaolalla: In general, perhaps because of my conciliatory nature and the way I understand things, aggressive, denying and mocking atheism is the one that bothers me the most. I am tolerant of the believer who gets up every morning and prays and I think it is great that he does so. I am not in any position to laugh at him or ridicule him. Nor do I feel in any superior position to take the atheist and ridicule him for his beliefs. He bullying and contempt are not enriching. They are low, of little personal caliber. The atheism of the person who wakes up convinced seems to me as respectable as faith.

WIRED: What aspect of the future are you excited about? What makes you say “we will see this coming and when it happens it will be great”?

At the technology level, what I am very excited about right now are the advances in space exploration. I think it goes in the direction that science requires. As I said, I think that human beings are curious, they want to go further, understand more. In that sense, space exploration is extremely human. Currently, many people are alone, feel lost, hopeless. Space exploration addresses these pains, unites us, is multidisciplinary and is on the frontier of knowledge. On the other hand, the technology that worries me the most is artificial intelligence, due to its ability to impersonate human elements. I am concerned about technologies that endanger the most characteristic elements of our species.

I don’t consider myself a Luddite, I’m very supportive of technology and I’ve always enjoyed it. Like any technology, AI has its good side and its bad side. I think it is very good to evangelize about the good things, but I also think that there have to be voices that are cautious about the negative ones. Many times, not even the people running artificial intelligence know what they are doing. I am also concerned about the biases it introduces. Behind its development, there is decision-making that is not neutral.

In the short term, medium and long term, I am concerned about two things. One is that the value of the human is simply lost to the point that we really deify a technology. In the long term, and this will sound like science fiction, I worry that we will end up being replaceable or simply useless. I am concerned that there will come a time in the evolution of AIs when humans no longer have anything to contribute. I’m not saying that a machine will decide it directly, it could be a collective of anti-humanist humans. I’m afraid that one day someone will decide that we have 80% of the population left over.

WIRED: Do you think science can save the world?

Javier Santaolalla: I believe that science can save the world and it can also destroy it. It is a powerful tool. When human beings face a problem, they know that they have science as their main ally. However, it can also annihilate us and, therefore, we must be very alert. Science and technology are beautiful, but they are not harmless. In short, I believe that we must move away from idolatry, from deification.

I love science evangelists because I think society needs more science. But just as we need evangelizers who distribute that passion for science, which is what I try to do, I believe that we also need people who control this deification or excessive idolatry towards a thing that is nothing more than another tool to help the being. human to be happy and find his place.