Artificial intelligence (AI) is at a turning point: it has gone from niche applications to spreading all around us in extremely varied forms that are progressively changing our perspective and our relationship with technology. This poses new challenges concerning the role of people in this new artificially intelligent world, and claims about human marginalization, once belonging to science fiction, are now prophesied by eminent scientists [1].
Curtis White wrote this excellent book to speak out about his firm conviction on the centrality of people notwithstanding the profound transformations of the world we live in. White is a distinguished professor emeritus in English at Illinois State University, as well as the author of several recent books focusing on social criticism. White uses the philosophical weapon of as-ifs (borrowed from the German philosopher Hans Vaihinger) to attack and unhinge many deeply rooted certainties that people often uncritically give as ineluctable, because they are inherent parts of our social structure. Roughly speaking, White just tells us that most (if not all) of these certainties are just the result of a narrative (as-if) that is repeated so many times and propagated through generations so as to appear inevitably true. But--this is White’s key point--they are just narratives and, therefore, subject to change, especially to the people’s advantage.
White uses the metaphor of bots to launch his attacks (quite inappropriately for a computer scientist, but this is not a technical book). For the computer scientist, the #Money-Bot and the #STEM-bot are of much interest, because they criticize many claims that computer science and information and communications technology (ICT) too often take for granted (although they are only narratives, in White’s viewpoint, sometimes told in bad faith). As an example, in #Money-Bot, White attacks the hackneyed idea that technology is replacing people in low-end jobs (and, progressively, in higher-end jobs), therefore people must continuously improve their skills in order to avoid competing with computers, since the outcome of this competition is always destined to be in favor of the latter. White polarizes this idea (with the intent of showing its fallacy) by letting the reader imagine a world where everything is performed by over-intelligent machines, including love and sex. To this purpose, White gives a long commentary on the recent Spike Jonze movie Her [2], which is in perfect accordance with the book’s message. In the #STEM-Bot, White criticizes the pervading materialism--initiated by an education based on scientific reductionism--which actually marginalizes more human aspects of life, including faith, arts, and so on, and trivializes deep metaphysical issues like the definition of conscience and free will.
White’s arguments are not only directed toward technology and science. In #Buddha-Bot, the new fashion of Western interpretation of Buddhist philosophy is ridiculed. In #Eco-Bot, the question of sustainability, which fills the mouth of present policymakers, undergoes a severe objection. In #Art-Bot, the phenomenon of art business is fiercely denounced.
White’s commentaries and criticism are sharp, explicit, and characterized by irony. (Perhaps the book is too US-oriented, though the subject of the book involves the whole Western culture.) They span many aspects of society, but are characterized by the leading thread of criticism of reductionism and its principal spokespeople. In all his analyses, White tells us that it is not indispensable that the world goes in the way a minuscule group of people (often with direct interest in big industries or profit organizations, but also ideologues and scientists) continually narrate. If the world, as it is or will be, is not as we would like it to be, we can and should rebel against these narrations. White resorts to art as the means for such rebellion, in the same way romanticism was a way to oppose illuminism. Art gives the possibility of expressing new stories, eventually different from those we hear repeatedly, and gives hope for a better future.
Reading this book was really fascinating. Not all the critical analyses are easy to accept, but all of them leave an impact on the reader. As a computer scientist, this book accompanied me like a hair shirt, as many of the fiercest criticisms are directed toward stories we have been told and we tell to the next generation. Now the book is closed and the hair shirt is gone, but marks remain to remind me that human beings must always be at the center of our thoughts when shaping our future with science and technology.
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