By Franco Berardi
Who wrote this text? Me or Franco Berardi? Peter Gabriel says the question is irrelevant.
One year ago the visionary musician Peter Gabriel released a book titled Reverberation, a sort of technophile introduction to the science behind deep listening.
“Reverberation is the impact a sound makes after the sound has stopped,” explains Peter Gabriel. Grab hold of any sound and hang on tight, you’ll be amazed how far it reverberates and where you end up.
Now, in an interview with yahoo Gabriel speaks of Artificial Intelligence and the future of music.
The recent innovations in the field of Artificial intelligence sound alarming for artists designers, musicians, and writers too.
Someone told me that chatbot is able to compose the kind of capricious essays that I usual write.
For days I refrained from asking to chatbot GPT: “write a whimsical essay about Peter Gabriel and Artificial intelligence in the style of Franco Berardi.”
Then what?
What if the text you are reading is the reply of a chatbot to the question above?
Who knows?
And also: who cares?
Now I wonder: “Should I be afraid of the next steps in deployment of the Cognitive automaton? Should I fight against the invading Artificial intelligence that is stealing jobs to creative workers? Should I be congratulate with the talking and writing machine?
So far I am unable to answer this question.
However I may ask the question to the chatbot himself (or herself).
Gabriel suggests to take it easy. He knows that what’s happening in the field of automation of cognition is huge and it is evolving fast, too fast for conscious control.
Gabriel writes: “this is something that’s going have way more impact than the Industrial Revolution and the nuclear bomb. So, if we don’t start anticipating what it might do, it’s going to be too late, because it’s very fast.”
Then he says:
“Some would argue [that you can’t replace] the [human] spirit — but I think there are probably going to be algorithms for the spirit, too! So, we might as well just grab the algorithms and dance with them, rather than fight them. … Unfortunately, I don’t think my job or anyone’s job is safe from AI.”
I don’t know what Gabriel means by the word ”spirit”. But I know that my sensible and sensitive point of view is my own experience.
The chatbot is already able to write a love letter, and is able to perform the behavior of a human in love. Of course it can do it: he has read Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina so it is able to recombine relevant information and utter a seductive enunciation. But the chatbot is not experiencing that kind of disquieting exciting affect.
Affect is beyond its capabilities.
But Gabriel gets intimidating:
“It’s coming whether we like it or not, so we might as well try and work with it rather than work against it, and make sure that there are programs in there that protect ethics and some sort of morality. “
The story of an ethical regulation of the intelligent technology is untenable. For centuries we have been discussing ethical rules, ethical politics, ethical values. We did not reach any agreement.
Who will decide about moral and political alternatives? Who will establish the ethical rules governing artificial intelligence? Who will decide the limits of its military use?
Artificial intelligence itself?
The Gabriel conclusion, however, is incontrovertible:
“ If an intelligent species is so smart that it can destroy itself, it very often does. I hope we don’t fall into that trap, but we can have a wonderful party on the way to jumping over the cliff.”
We have deserved our own termination, and the extinction of human civilization that is underway.
Don’t be sad for this inconvenient detail.