Twelve dead monkeys and a resurrected grandfather blur the border of the self

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“I always wanted to tell you that I was very excited to attend your wedding.” In a lesson in sentimental pornography, a synthetic voice pronounced that phrase to provoke the tears of a woman who lent herself to the program's experiment. The Anthill. That voice, recreated with artificial intelligence from a real recording, simulated that of her grandfather, who died just the day after that wedding. Some families already resurrect their deceased with similar systems, it is an emerging market around mourning, but they do not record their spontaneous reaction to broadcast it on prime time.

A decade ago, artificial intelligence was an academic thing, not the spearhead of geopolitics, technocapitalism and Pablo Motos' program. At that time, Google launched one of the largest efforts in that field: it fed a silicon brain made up of 16,000 processors with millions of YouTube videos. After all that enormous effort, a pattern emerged: kittens. The machine learned to recognize what a cat was. “How many cats does a child need to see to understand what a cat is? One. We have no idea how he does it, but from a single example you can already recognize them,” Ramón López de Mántaras, a CSIC expert in this field, told me years ago.

Now an experiment published in Science opens a disturbing door: they fed a machine with the experiences of little Sam, who wore a helmet with a camera between 6 and 25 months. This program has understood how a child acquires the word “cat” thanks to the intersection of visual and verbal stimuli from his environment. And it aims to reproduce that learning, without millions of viewings, only with the same experiences as a child who takes on the world in his first steps.

Let's expand the experiment. That machine that he has learned with Sam could learn much more if he continued to record his life, what he sees, what he hears, what he says and what he does. In the same way that they made the dead grandfather speak, a much more sophisticated Sam could be recreated, with all of his experiences, with all of his voice patterns, but also behavior, capable of representing him. We carry our cell phones with us constantly, and soon they will be devices that also record images, such as brooches and glasses. That is already on the market and, meanwhile, conversational artificial intelligence, chatgepetés, they are already capable of playing increasingly specific roles. It is not difficult to imagine that this way we will each have an avatar that speaks for us: he will chat with yours to see when we can meet, with my boss to ask for a day off and he will ask my mother's person how he is doing with the new medication.

Sherry Turkle, an expert on our relationship with technology, has been warning for decades about how we lose empathy by introducing intermediaries with screens and distancing ourselves from the real conversation. We no longer call our friends, we give them a like; we follow his life in his stories, as we do with famous people; We don't have a coffee, we leave them seen on WhatsApp. In his 2015 book In defense of conversation (Attic), already warned that we treat machines almost as if they were human and people almost as machines, to which “we put pause in the middle of a conversation to look at our phones.” Since we don't pay attention 100% because of cell phones, “interacting with machines doesn't feel like a big loss.” Earlier, he had written: “Technology catalyzes changes not only in what we do, but also in how we think.” He published it in 1984 in a book called The second me.

40 years ago you could not imagine the depth of the change we are witnessing. On Tuesday, Elon Musk announced a new step on his path to the cerebral iPhone. His company, Neuralink, has implanted a chip in a patient's gray matter. It is not by far the first to do so: many have already been implanted and are used to experimentally treat Parkinson's, epilepsy, to improve speech or cognition. A man completely immobilized by ALS, who had never spoken to his four-year-old son, was able to suggest watching a Disney movie together thanks to this neurotechnology. But Musk's tweet (it's all the information we have) generated a lot of commotion: because we know that the size of his ambitions are only comparable to those of his verbal diarrhea.

Musk does not like to wait for the traffic light to turn green: Neuralink has carried out the implant when he has a complaint on the table for the death of twelve monkeys in the experimental phase of those chips. His first product, called Telepathy, is designed to allow people with disabilities to control devices through thought. But his ambition encompasses deep integration between human brains and artificial intelligence, connecting us to machines to improve our cognitive abilities, accessing information instantly and communicating through thought. Expand the limits of human experience.

Would we put our brains in Musk's hands? The trajectory of any emerging technology always leans towards money. Artificial intelligence is already in the hands of technocapitalism, more concerned about us wasting time using its products than about improving humanity. Of the 30 largest neurotechnology companies in the world, all but one choose to share our brain data with other companies.

Precisely for this reason, neuroscientists like Rafael Yuste, from Columbia University, have been promoting the promulgation of neurorights for years: because they know that with implants like Musk's, you can, already today, read thoughts, modify behaviors, alter perception. “We have a historical responsibility. “We are at a time when we can decide what kind of humanity we want,” he assured me when launching his campaign. Today, he tells me over a video call, he continues tryi
ng to get countries to legislate it “beyond declarations of intent,” like the one he promoted. Spain in the EU.

All this news shows that technology will extend our thoughts and personality beyond our environment, beyond our life and even beyond our will. Did the deceased grandparents want to go have fun The Anthill? Will avatars grow up with the babies of the future? Did anyone think about the naked women and pornifiedfrom Taylor Swift to Almendralejo, by developing those apps?

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