Technological innovations have enabled humanity to make enormous
strides. But the main goal is missing from these, the one that hashaunted the minds and dreams of most human beings for millennia: a world
of freedom and fraternal equality. How to achieve it should be the
yardstick that guides our relationship with technology. Unfortunately,
this has remained largely the prerogative of the masters of the world
who have also used it to increase their power. Revolutionary movements
have dealt with it little and badly, almost never managing to counter it
with an alternative use, managed and controlled from below.
As paradoxical as it may seem, even artificial intelligence - created by
military agencies for the purpose of waging wars, passivizing and
enslaving populations - contains a high potential for liberation if, by
taking possession of it, it were directed against States and
multinationals. It is not so remote a hypothesis if it is contemplated
in the Pentagon manuals where, alongside the digital war between States
or between large corporations for domination over the planet and in
space, there appears the challenge brought to the established order by
many small subversive groups, elusive, with "artisanal" and in any case
effective means, because they are able to paralyze the enormous
centralized infrastructures (energy networks first and foremost) that
depend on digital and that feed, in addition to the main public and
private services, also the data processing centers of the financial and
military-industrial complexes.
That this is not a delusion is demonstrated by the incredible figures
(1.5 trillion dollars) that the so-called "cybercrime", to which should
be added the occult, illegal or paralegal markets, that thrive on the
web, subtract every year from the legal economy. This happens because at
the origin of the Internet, and then of Artificial Intelligence, there
is a capital sin: not having been developed with the objective of system
security. It would have caused blocks and slowdowns incompatible with
the primary need for which these systems were created: to speed up,
optimize, maximize the achievement of the pre-established objectives,
avoiding downtime and waste of resources.
But this is only the first of the problems. With the introduction of
Generative Artificial Intelligence, which dates back to just over a year
and which, learning and evolving autonomously, exponentially improves
previous performances, digital systems have become so complex and
interactive that it is impossible for the developers themselves to know
all their potential combinations. Of some algorithms or genetic
programs, created autonomously by Generative AI, the initial developers
themselves no longer know what they do and why they do it.
By inventing a type of intelligence more advanced than their own, it was
inevitable that they would no longer be able to manage or understand it
adequately, leaving the field open to those who, by creating fairly
simple "system bugs", could easily infiltrate and sabotage it from
within, causing irreparable damage, or, something less easy but must be
done, try to reprogram it to make it harmless and useful for our
purposes. Reversing the logic of the system, placing Artificial
Intelligence at the service of free and supportive communities, should
indeed be among the primary objectives of revolutionary groups: to this
end, technical experts and scientists will be needed to be trained,
connected to each other in a network, who will develop alternative
technologies that allow humans to take back control of their lives,
defeat and control artificial systems from below, using them if anything
as mere prostheses in order to improve their condition.
This is a task that can no longer be postponed because digital
"superintelligence" could soon transform the earth and its inhabitants
into simple computational resources or targets for new sophisticated
weapons systems.
"As society and the problems it faces become more and more complex,"
wrote Theodore Kaczynski, "and machines become more and more
intelligent, people will let machines make more and more decisions for
them, simply because decisions made by machines will yield better
results than those made by humans. Eventually, a stage may be reached
where the decisions needed to keep the system running will be so complex
that humans will no longer be technically capable of making them. At
that point, the machines will have effective control, and humans will
simply not be able to turn them off, because they will be so dependent
on them that turning them off would be tantamount to suicide."
Such a fate would merit a "dedicated" philosophical and scientific
reflection that so far exists only in embryo. The devastating effects of
Generative Artificial Intelligence, in a direction that leads straight
to the extinction of the human race by military means, can already be
seen in the experimental use that is being made of it in the wars that
are bloodying the Middle East and Ukraine: for example, killer drones
that identify the enemy through optical recognition software and
autonomously eliminate him, and the civilians around him, without the
need (and direct responsibility) of any human operator.
A scenario that anticipates that of a self-destructive war between
nations, with no holds barred, for an unlikely future digital hegemony.
Natale Musarra
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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