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Reading, I think, is one of the few means that human beings have to discover the spirit of others. People talk little in depth: they rarely share their most intimate impressions and experiences, and even less often do they listen to those of others. They gossip a lot, but in this, they limit themselves to sharing an external view of the facts: gossip, as we all know, although very personal in the emotional realm, always bears the perspectives of others; when it provides a view of its own truth, it ceases to be gossip.
People also read very little, but at least the books are there, always available to anyone who wants to open them.
The world of speaking seems to cling to the conventional, to what is known to all: the compliance with rules, the establishment of agreements, and prescribed actions. It’s rarely conducive to intimacy or confession. On the other hand, reading seems to introduce us to a special, unknown, unique world: someone’s inner world, the one that cannot be seen or heard with the naked eye or with the simple ear; the one that sounds best when transmitted silently.
The anecdote of the moment when Augustine of Hippo sees St. Ambrose read in silence is well known. At a time when all the reading was done aloud and for others, the fact that his teacher read silently to himself seemed to Augustine an almost ghostly act: Ambrose looked absent, as if transported to another world, far from his body. And, indeed, in a way, he was; although it sounds strange, reading can be like occupying another body for a moment.
In a previous article, I suggested that a text can describe and convey even the bodily experiences of the writer: those of his inner organs, and also those external. We vibrate with others when we read, even through the centuries. (That, I understand, is the value of reading works in their original languages.) To hyperbolize my idea (that is, exaggerate it), I now turn to a brilliant passage by Víctor Nubla, who in his book La ciencia a la luz del misterio (Science in the Light of Mystery, although there is no English language edition) compares using a spinning wheel to paint ceramic pieces (for example, to draw a colored line around a clay pot) to recording sounds on spinning acetate discs, which are subsequently reproduced with a hypersensitive needle on a rotating turntable (ah, the old days!). Nubla’s thesis is that if primitive women and men were painting on rotating earthenware, with their voices vibrating in the air as they pressed the brushes, their strokes might have engraved their voices, which could be reproduced with the right technology. It would be wonderful to hear those talks recorded at the foot of the lathe. Well, my idea (not so original) is that texts are like this (although not literally): through them, people not only transmit what they think and feel, but also their physical sensations, even their impulses. So, with the right technology, perhaps one day we will be able to record patterns of bodily behavior in world literature. Today, the reader represents this technology: sensitivity.
Reading aloud and for others is of great importance: it can express the spirit and, with community warmth, compensate for the wear and tear of spoken words, if not with the touch of the air, then through interpretation. (This is why, and unusually, I prefer robotic voices to dramatizations in audiobooks.) However, the printing press and the mass production of books led to a fundamental leap in human beings’ ability to communicate with each other, even over time.
Human reality became liberated. More people could learn more about one another and discover the spiritual complexities of those who, in daily life, might seem trivial and flat. Unsurprisingly, this discovery became a boom, revealing the individual value of each human being: modern individualism, exalting the person and the originality of each human mind.
As this discovery spread, most of the population began to intuit that even among their humblest neighbors someone as complex, varied, and intriguing as an author of books might exist. The person, as a unique being, occupied, then, the center of creation, facing the Creator. (That was very good, because, around the same time, it began to be said that the Earth was not the fixed center of the universe but a small, round, orbiting planet; consequently, everything in human society began to lose footing – similar to what is occurring today: it became urgent to discover new grips on the world, because, in the external world, everything was collapsing, so the possibility of retreating inside – through books – was a kind of miracle.)
Existence found refuge in philosophical understanding: “I think, therefore I am” became the motto that surged through several centuries. Books were leaders in this movement. (Protestantism was also invented, in which the faithful chatted and confessed directly to God; another fact: Saint Teresa of Jesus, the brilliant writer of that time, strongly contributed to introducing this type of personal conversation with God in Catholicism, setting it as a form of spontaneous, unmemorized prayer).
Today, in our world, where the social system and overpopulation impose pragmatic, efficient, direct, directive, obedient, monosyllabic speech (yes, no, okay… well, okay uses two syllables), where, as never before, spoken language is strictly functional and necessary. Gossip, showing that we care about what others do, tends to be a thing of the older generations. These days, I say, it is common to compensate through written communication (including this one that you and I, dear reader, are having); writing is proliferating again, especially in almost all social networks.
Indeed, people read and write more than ever. They don’t read books; that’s another thing. However, I insist: the books are there. In fact, nothing prevents them from coming back strongly in the future; nothing. (And now, with digital, not even the 451 degrees Fahrenheit at which paper burns: an inside joke for those who have read Ray Bradbury’s novel.)
Writing and reading continue to be an excellent opportunity to connect with another spirit. Until very recently, this had been happening person to person, because, even if it was published on collective, public networks – such as Facebook – communication was still between individuals, as always. (Even when someone addressed a group, they did so in their own name, and specific people responded.)
But then, a new resource emerges (you guessed it, reader: I’m about to discuss artificial intelligence). Perhaps as a result of this proliferation of individual exchanges, of this veritable explosion of closeness (or at least, of its possibility), a new resource suddenly appears, as I say, destined to take everything to another level of complexity, pushing human communication to its next level. If you will allow me to exalt and exaggerate, I will say that, at this new level, individuals cease to be remarkable, and something like “the spirit of humanity” begins to dialogue with itself.
My fantasy, now complete, would go like this:
It all started with the story of human beings who gossiped (as Yuval Noah Harari says in his book Sapiens) when the horde spread what members said about each other. These were purely individuals weaving, at the speed of light (which is also the speed of gossip), a collectivity. Like good spinners, they moved their shuttle about to weave a social fabric with threads that were anything but harmless, either accrediting or discrediting others, seeking consensus among the different members. Thus, some were insulted, and others were praised, strengthening the rumor of the majority (it was, therefore, the ideal democracy, the one that, in frequent moments of carelessness, ends up placing in power the most skillful speculator, the greatest gossip).
NOTE, dear reader, how amusing: I began playing – without any ulterior motive – with the speed of light, and now I speak of speculation, which has to do with mirrors (specula), from which my fantasy allows me to extract that power arises from speed to the mirror and directs – and redirects to wherever one wants – the rumors of others.
So much for gossip, now let’s see what I can say about writing. When it was invented, millennia ago, a change occurred: rumor was no longer enough; now the powerful could communicate, dictate, and send orders over great distances. (As we know, the best technologies always fall into the hands of the powerful.) Power extends as far as the written word reaches. (For this reason, all people must preserve their own languages, which foreigners and enemies do not understand; this, which was already important in the Age of Gossip, became crucial in the Age of Literacy). Linguistic boundaries are the ones that really count. The spirits of each people, although propagated orally, are definitively settled in the books of the powerful, creating identities unfamiliar to strangers. If speech is power, writing and reading are more so.
I continue my fantasy: With the invention of the printing press, power spreads (so much!) and changes hands. The town arises. Each head is a world, and all together they create the new representative democracy, where, it is said, elected individuals present the decisions of their voters. However, just in case, the guillotine was invented to behead those who got out of line. But it is not enough: the heads, now severed from their bodies, continue to think: science is invented; Kant defines Pure Reason. Individuals believe they have the right to think. They are convinced that they are being listened to. However, over time, disoriented by seeing that being “heard” never favors them, they take refuge, again, in the only place where they are not required to order their minds: The church has a renaissance. Two factions are formed: those who conspire (to restore the power of speech) and those who pray. Books lose value (although not for the few noble spirits who find in them resonances of something more than dogmatic echoes and electromagnetic waves). Soon, no one reads. Entertainment and spectacle begin. The voice is lost in the moving image. You believe what you see, you see what someone says, you say what you hear. Nobody understands anything, not even me.
Nevertheless, I continue to try: Today, we have returned to the stage of gossip, but now mediated by written laws, written agreements, and authorized prejudices. No one reaches the human interior except by ascending the high peaks of good literature, scarce and challenging. Young people make strenuous efforts to share their spiritual intimacy in short, influential writings, which they toss – like shipwrecked bottles – into the social network, placing their hope there. But we adults – still nostalgic for gossip and its power to lynch people, and still dominating discourse through education and advertising – mock and insult them, accusing them of being introverted, frigid, selfish.
So, artificial intelligence emerges: our new target. It is true that it is born under the domination of the powerful, but it is false that it is their creation. Nothing truly new arises from private status, nor does it remain in it. All ideas, all knowledge are collectively human. This is what we have come to understand (no other is the positive side of postmodernism, accused of exalting individual truths, but not recognized for this important lesson). I add, continuing my fantasy, that all the physical laws discovered and used in the new technologies; all the tools that interact with matter and light and change them; all the assemblies that forge new devices; all the mathematics that order what we have seen and produce images on our screens – all of this was already envisioned by the first human being under a tree.
Nothing belongs to anyone; everything is ours. What artificial intelligence does is re-establish ancestral knowledge that no one, not even it, can discover or falsify better than we do. The turmoil that is imputed to it, for example, truth and lies, is also ours. Each assertion of that gesturing-visual-speaking-audio-graphing-reading computer system represents us all, at least those of us who have put our grain of sand in the discovery and falsification of reality (that is, all of us).
It is our spirit. At least it is another of the often-repeated efforts to synthesize everything we are, yearn for, say, deny, and all that we have pointed out, obtained, and believed we had left behind over the centuries.
It is our spirit. That some people package it and put a price on it has always happened. What does it matter if our students write texts with artificial intelligence, and we also assess them with it? Before—when the students themselves were converted into machinery—they memorized and then wrote texts that we graded; we, ourselves, were transformed into evaluation devices. Life demands new strategies: perhaps we should let the machines follow their dialogue and enter ours when we need them, and, for our part, continue to leverage what we have learned in this long, continuously renewing process, continuing to advance in our historic journey towards the human spirit, in our search for the interior of others.
Translation by Daniel Wetta
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
