Apart from the fact that cars don’t fly yet and that teleportation hasn’t just come out of our minds, the world has reached a stage similar to the future we imagine: as George Orwell imagined it, of course, with a Big Brother that we gladly put in our pockets in the form of a mobile phone; but also how we imagine it as a whole, in view of the artificial intelligence that writes the texts without help or that recreates images with greater veracity than the truth: an authentic photo can be taken as false before its simulation.
We are at that point, having overcome the relativistic debates about what was the truth and what was a lie to verify that the simulation of an image or a voice can supplant anyone and agitate conflicts. We barely talk about it, as if it were the most normal thing and it did not involve risks, because our main virtue in the face of the amazing agitation of things consists in not being surprised by any. It happened with the invented sequence about a false arrest of Donald Trump, although the incident was not major. At this rate, a new artificial intelligence will be needed to unmask artificial intelligence, and so on until we don’t need it ourselves.
We are at the point where a large international bank, subjected to the strictest controls, collapses and drags the rest down by a hoax that someone has spread out of interest on social networks. We have already passed the future that we imagine: and it turns out that Ramón Tamames lived in its political scene, instead of debating whether something should be regulated.
The most developed world is also the most fragile, victim of its speed: a click makes investors tremble and forces governments to react; an image catches on faster than our ability to wonder where it came from and if it was made on purpose. And for what purpose. We have been exposed because, of the future, we have often been more spectators than actors. Due to lack of interest or lack of time, we have enough with what is ours, making ends meet and ensuring the future. The world advanced but the educational model continued with the traditional subjects. They created artificial intelligence and we were amazed at their novelties, without going into the details of the process. The computers filled us with cookies and we accept them.
They built the navigators with algorithms that track our breathing without us requiring that those paths be transparent, so that the few hands that moved them would explain to us why they wanted so much information. How much freedom do we have left in the freedom that we have left?, someone might ask. Someone optimistic, don’t get me wrong: seeing the future is not giving up. It is to demand tools that are up to date, as modern as their advances: education in Spain does not need more ideological twists, but a concrete adaptation to the future. Especially now that it’s over.
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