Jose Maria Lassalle
The human being enters into a radical change that will directly affect his existence. It is related to the not too distant appearance of an otherness that will place us before someone completely different from us. Until now, otherness, philosophically speaking, has occurred between beings of the same human species. Gender, age, race, language, class, religion, nationality or culture have been, among other conditions, material determinants when identifying an intelligent agent with whom to interact based on a difference that it did not prevent empathic communication between conscious human beings.
However, humanity now faces the challenge of an artificial alterity that puts us to the test ethically and ontologically. It is shaped by the machine, although not in the way that was experienced in the 19th century during the industrial revolution. Then, the social, economic and political consequences that the introduction of the machine brought changed the planet and dragged us towards the fullness of modernity and industrial capitalism. A cultural change that transformed the planet and humanity, but that placed the machine within an object status of dependence on the human being that did not allow cognitive interaction between it and the worker who used it.
For the first time we can have before us an otherness in the form of a self-conscious machine.
Today, the digital revolution places us before a scenario of changes infinitely greater than that experienced two centuries ago. The platform economy based on data and algorithms that underpin the structure of cognitive capitalism uses a repertoire of exponential technologies that place the machine in a role that automates work and places the human being in a complementary role dependent on it. Under the disruptive impulse of digital innovation, the machine advances towards a paradigm of subjectivity that can turn it into an agent with responsibility for its actions. Something that cannot be ruled out, since, as Jörg Zimmermann or Armin Cremers suggest, the artificial intelligence systems that are currently being experimented with could acquire intentional and almost conscious functions in the future.
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And it is that, although for centuries philosophical dualism has considered that consciousness is linked to physical interactions within the human brain, the empirical evidence, as Stanislas Dehaene maintains, is compatible with the possibility that it also arises from specific computational processes. Hence, the European Union's High-Level Independent Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI) has defined ethical assumptions that condition innovation in this field. The goal would be to ensure reliable AI. However, this reliability is approached from a perspective that does not preclude AI and robotics from being autonomous systems that interact cognitively with human beings. If so, we would face an intelligence different from ours. A possibility that is, as Pope Francis points out, at the "heart of the change of era that we are experiencing."
Preparing for it is strategically essential. Not only on an ethical and legal level, but also psychologically. For the first time in history, humanity can face an alterity in the form of a self-aware machine. An ontological situation that forces us to anticipate how we want the relationship we will maintain with it to be and, above all, how we are willing for it to proceed: in terms of caution or trust? Of dependency or interdependence?
There is no doubt that the meaning we give to our relationship with machines, and how we are willing to respond ethically to the interaction that they will pose to us when they achieve full decision-making capacity, places us before disturbing and decisive dilemmas as a species. Will we configure that relationship in friendly or hostile terms? From robophilia or robophobia? These questions may sound like science fiction to us, but the acceleration of advances in AI and robotics warn us that we are closer than it seems when it comes to having to answer them practically. Not surprisingly, the material progress of humanity and the management of the environmental catastrophes that we will face can no longer be resolved without the assistance of exponential technologies.
The meaning we give to our relationship with machines places us before disturbing and decisive dilemmas as a species
In this sense, no one disputes that the action of AI and robotics will definitively change work, education, health, industry, agriculture and livestock, mobility and all services. The risks and opportunities are the subject of interdisciplinary debates that will soon jump onto the political agenda. Some are already insinuated, as is the case with the universal basic income, but others are postponed due to the ethical, and even anthropological, complexity that they provoke and that escapes, for the moment, a non-specialized analysis of them.
Among these debates that are postponed is the question of artificial alterity that appears in the title of this article. An issue that has not yet been put on the practical table of our reality, but that is felt in the ethical horizon on which we will have to discuss publicly. Among other things because the thesis that Turing and Von Neumann introduced at the dawn of cybernetics that machines would mimic the abilities of the human brain, including consciousness, are beginning to be true. Hence, voices arise that defend that conditions must be created so that humanity and machines align their interests based on a friendly and complementary collaboration.
Conditions must be created so that humanity and machines align their interests
It would be about machines not being seen as a potential enemy, but, as Margaret Archer defends, defining themselves in advance as an ally that helps us improve as a species and that contributes to a good digital life that also includes our relationship with they. A challenge that the Japanese have curiously set themselves since 2015, when they launched the New Robot Strategy. An initiative that we Europeans should also encourage, since it is essential to design an ethical framework that favors a friendly environment with the machines that will inevitably work and live with us.
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