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Everywhere there is talk of the threat to labor that new artificial intelligence (AI) devices represent for many professionals and the challenge that opens up for academic institutions to train experts. Such fear is invaded by fantastic images of super-human robots that appropriate the world. This tendency to overestimate the capabilities of others immediately reminds me of a myth that I have seen ubiquitous these days: Bill Gates is not only a billionaire but possessor of such deep knowledge about current issues that he can comment on any topic and even make accurate forecasts about what will happen in the future regarding all of them. (Repeatedly, we are reminded how in 2015, he predicted the arrival of the pandemic). However, we should pause a little to remember that Gates has all that information and all those “own opinions” thanks to also having one of the largest teams of advisors in the world, so everything he “thinks” and says has disseminated through an information network that reaches practically every corner of the planet (Concerning the pandemic, science predicted its arrival from the first decade of the century, so there was no magic in his saying it publicly one day.)
A competitor becomes more apt to win the more times he wins. Money makes money, they say. Power summons power. This also happens with artificial intelligence. However, we must not forget that similarly, without his team of advisers, Gates is nothing more than a man of limited knowledge; artificial intelligence is nothing but a pile of cables without the information feeding it from outside, that is, from us. The machines are still at our service. What Professor Reyna Martínez said during the Observatory webinar is true: “The mission of artificial intelligence should always be to enlarge the human being, accompany him, and make the tasks he performs daily more pleasant.” To fulfill this, we must increasingly personalize professions and stop mimicking algorithms. That is, if I am a writer, a teacher, or a popularizer of science who usually expresses myself in front of my audience impersonally, there is no doubt that I will soon be replaceable. Also, if I dedicate myself to deciphering the consumption trends of the population and how to best manipulate those trends (i.e., if I am a marketer), an algorithm that does all that much more quickly and in greater detail will easily replace me.
We must begin to trust more and more that behind all our professional skills is always that “someone” who is us and whom no machine can replace: “someone” similar to little Bill Gates, who is left alone when his team of advisors disperses, and who is just like all human beings, who do not know who they are, where they come from, or where they are going.
A competitor becomes more apt to win the more times he wins. This, which seems so normal to us, so “ours,” is actually one of the laws of a kind of savage competition, inhuman in some way. Let me explain. I recently read a sentence that perplexed me: it spoke more or less of “competing to avoid rivalry.” What! Competition is not the same as rivalry? That sentence seemed like a bad translation, but when considered carefully, it contained something profound: it pointed to thinking of competition as a human creation and rivalry as something we can avoid. Sensitive to this idea, shortly afterward, I was surprised to find in a dictionary of antonyms that the opposite of competing is not collaborating or sharing but hoarding. Seen this way, we understand competition as a human formula to avoid the absolute domination of someone, a regulator created to counterbalance the impulse to snatch from others, once and for all, everything they have; a way to put a cap, a limit. Competing would be more like a contest than a lawsuit, more like a contest based on rules than a grab among cocaine sharks (metaphor of the Spanish philosopher Ernesto Castro).
So, instead of being concerned about competition from artificial intelligence, we should worry more about the kind of competition we exercise against our fellow human beings. As far as machines are concerned, they currently have a competitive ambiguity that allows us to think about both positive and negative consequences. While some persons (or should we say, im-persons?) will be displaced, others will find in artificial intelligence the opportunity to become indispensable. An example nowadays is that any insensitive job applicant can fill out an application with ChatGPT and pose as a warm and attentive person; however, overcoming this is the ability to conduct live interviews and identify “soft skills” (like being kind, diligent, cooperative, etc.), which begins to be highly valued. We can imagine many other examples of this revaluation of the “face-to-face.” In our field of education, the opportunity opens up to design artificial intelligence to meet our information requirements while teachers and students focus on cultivating human creativity and leveraging its inevitable riches and risks.
Fear of innovation is nothing new. We can presume that, with its appearance in the seventeenth century, the Encyclopedia prepared by Diderot, d’Alembert, Voltaire, Rousseau, and other intellectuals unleashed scandals and fears and would have been seen as something threatening those in charge of gathering and transmitting knowledge. Today, if we look at it, the work appears as a historical treasure but obsolete as an informative tool; not only it but also its most recent updates will soon be part of the past, replaced by robots that can develop and write for us, in seconds, about our subject of interest. As long as we do not attribute visionary oracle gifts to it (as we are willing to do with Gates), ChatGPT is a “glorified” encyclopedia that can increase our effectiveness and save us time.
Well, okay… I have been saying that more than worrying about the competition of AI, we should consider the savage rivalry we exercise against each other. I, for my part, confess that I am often ashamed when I discover myself reading the lists of professions that will supposedly be displaced by artificial intelligence and congratulating myself that mine is not among them. Embarrassed, too, I find myself reviewing the number of likes that readers give to my texts and comparing it with other writers and researchers. Even more embarrassing, I have compared my ills with others, sighing gratefully when I come out better (stronger still is my apprehension when I compare my children with other people’s children). These are things I would call “rivalry,” which always seems to have a destructive tinge.
Let’s look at it this way. No one will have a hard time admitting that our drive to excel comprises what we call “egomania.” It will be more challenging to accept that this is not a matter of degrees, that is, that egomania is a drive that will overcome all obstacles and will carry us to its depths, where others are annihilated if we do not stop it or at least compensate it with something, perhaps a counterbalancing impulse. I believe that the vicinity of egomania includes the “delusion of grandeur” just around the corner, and before it gets dark, we must walk the other way. Fortunately, nature has also endowed us with the opposite drive, one that somehow imposes on us to forget ourselves, not to be seen, not to stand out, to “be forgotten” (as the poet Jaime Sabines says), a compulsion that at its most potent achieves something like “vanishing into the other,” “confusing ourselves with the whole,” “integrating into the cosmos,” as the hippies on LSD trips used to say. I, not idealizing this longing to disappear, associate it with melancholy, which Freud called the “delirium of smallness,” which will also consume us if we do not compensate for it with a bit of self-love.
In summary, while the triumph of egomania can lead us to madness through solipsism (believing that I am the creator of everything), the victory of melancholy drags us into the loss of our being, a kind of catatonic state. These are two horrible ends that none of us want (and fortunately, both spirituality and psychiatry have worked hard to avoid and even reverse these quite successfully).
We must agree that the best is a middle ground between these two poles. We can conceive that this middle ground is “competition,” where, to begin, you cannot compete without considering others. When I compete, others appear as the limit of my success. For example, perhaps my dream is to have wings and fly, and something in me feels capable or worthy of doing so. Still, if thinking about it, I admit to competing, then at that moment, I may also accept settling by running very fast, at least more quickly than the others. But if I insist on having wings and flying, I will have to compete with those who fantasize the same.
I compete when I admit that others exercise their abilities simultaneously to achieve something. That is why competition seems to me a human invention to regulate exchanges of all kinds. Perhaps it is based on specific natural compulsions, but these, when they become human, will seek a balance. If we accept this argument, it becomes clear that only homogeneous skills can come into play in a competition. That is, the results must be assessed the same (you cannot compare my ability to answer one test well with the ability of another to do it by cheating). That is why the rules of competition ensure a level playing field and that the skills evaluation does not apply to different sets (I insist: an athlete sprinter should not compete in speed with a swimmer).
In addition, in competition, no one can definitively withhold the prize. It sounds strange, but the truth is that if you monopolize the award without it circulating subsequently, you have more chances of winning the next competition precisely because you have more resources. In a “human” style competition, the winner must always return the prize to the game, and the other competitors can always have a second, third, and thousandth chance to obtain it. Remembering, as my teachers told me (and we must keep repeating it), what matters is not winning but competing and thus finding the human formula of balance.
In short, human beings see in competition the need to regulate both the temptation of egomania, which drives us to snatch what is foreign, and melancholy, which leads us to let ourselves be defeated. Our challenge is to enter the contest daily and, once inside, recognize in others (again and again and again and again) the measure of our success. Competition as a human value is simply another face of collaboration because its purpose is the participation of all in the common welfare according to their abilities. I would dare to say that in all human collaboration (which differs from natural collaboration), there is competition; just as in every competition, there is collaboration when meeting these three golden rules: equality of conditions, transparency of skills, and recirculation of the prize.
However, as we all know, the problem invariably arises when the prize is scarce, or some competitors feel it is scarce. So, our first impulse is to break the rules, create secret alliances, hide skills, spoil the conditions of others, hoard profits… Therefore, to overcome these temptations, human beings have the gift of always choosing prizes that are scarce or never scarce. Almost all the philosophers of the world have advised this: to pass from ephemeral to superior and imperishable pleasures, to seek the supreme good, to bet on the well-being of others as a personal benefit, to love as a way of nourishing and cultivating the good.
But, truthfully, how difficult all this sounds! Without a doubt, it is easier to teach and learn to compete with others and eradicate them or let ourselves be defeated than to try to unteach and unlearn all those “skills” given to us spontaneously, which, in humans (when we try to be genuinely “human”), sooner or later become non-competencies and turn against us.
Let’s finish this text by still dreaming of the education we want. Many anecdotes and tales exemplify what it is like to see awards at the highest value. One that I found beautiful and dazzlingly logical appeared at the end of a chapter of a series of children’s cartoons called Dragon Ball. In it, one of the heroic protagonists arrives at the door of a martial arts contest, where an aide-de-camp with a stuffy nose and a naïve voice receives her. Seeing him with a saddened face, the girl asks why he is like this. “Because I’m coming to fight in the championship final… against my best friend!” he replies. Then the girl gives him, as I say, one of the most stimulating ethical answers I’ve ever heard: “But why are you sad? It’s the best thing that could happen to you! You should be grateful because whatever happens, you will have reason to celebrate: if you win, because you have won, and if you lose, because your best friend has won.”
Such a response is moving. And deep down, it remains enigmatic. (By the way, this may be a simple syllogism for artificial intelligence, but for us, it will never cease to be a beautiful challenge).
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 
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