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Ludwig Wittgenstein, the German philosopher, warns us: A whole mythology is contained in our language. Often, our use of words creates mirages that confuse reality and delirium. Teachers can become aware of this confusion and help their students navigate these mythologies, which are sometimes truly hallucinatory.
One of them, very much in vogue, is present in our ideas about artificial intelligence and its scope, challenges, and risks. I emphasize, teachers can be trained to deal with their students’ conceptual labyrinths about these technologies. Take, for example, two of these, with which we have begun to familiarize ourselves: One is ChatGPT; the other is those extraordinary and undoubtedly seductive human-looking machines that make gestures and speak increasingly better. Let’s start by understanding that these two new types of robots deceive us not only by their near-human writing, their consistent answers to our questions, or their expressive faces, which wink and smile at us. They also do it because of how we refer to them. For example, to say that “robots deceive us” or “smile at us” (as I just did) is to attribute to them a will that they are very far from having; yet, it is very likely that most of my readers have accepted those phrases without any inconvenience. It is a fact that if we describe a robot by saying that its systems allow it to pay attention, perceive, notice, understand, communicate, or express, it becomes increasingly difficult to think of it as an inert object, and we can become convinced that very soon human beings will create sentient and conscious machines.
Robots belong, and probably always will belong, to the mineral kingdom, like a stone, a car, or the elevator whose circuits close the door to our path. However, numerous factors intervene for us to believe that a machine has a will of its own. To begin with, human beings are instinctively prone to identify particular types of movements as indicators that there is life in them. In fact, a certain “animistic” phase of development may lead babies to believe that all objects are alive, which we parents endorse when a child runs into a door, and we exclaim, “Bad door!” and even encourage the child to hit it back. This phase is undoubtedly reinforced by the surprise of seeing elevator doors open for the first time to permit our entry (in reality, I think that continues to happen to us all unconsciously). As an anecdote, I am sure that old Aunt Pacecita was amazed by her remote control activating the TV and struggled daily against her belief that there must be a strange agreement between the two devices.
But there’s more. According to recent studies, some of our psychic equipment is conditioned to identify animal features (eyes, faces, bodies) in chaotic forms, such as clouds or a Tyrolean roof. Apparently, these are states of instinctive alertness that developed in our ancestors to detect the presence of aggressors hiding in their environment.
Let’s also add the empathy we all feel towards certain physiognomies, for example, the tender faces of some stuffed animals: We know that these are lifeless objects, and yet something in us is not very convinced (we fight against that certainty, like Aunt Pacecita). Worse still, if certain “expressive” movements accompany these touching features, we will find it almost impossible to deny that the object has life and perhaps even an underlying consciousness. This illusion intensifies if the subject in question (sorry, the object in question) articulates an intelligible discourse.
Of course, if we add to all the above our almost superstitious faith in limitless science, we turn that momentary illusion into a passionate conviction that “the androids have arrived” (not unlike the old belief that “the Martians have arrived”). Simply put, we come to believe in fairy tales again. And I am not saying this; I am simply paraphrasing the great biologist Thomas Huxley (personal friend and foremost defender of Darwin), who said, “How can it be that such a remarkable thing as a state of consciousness arises as a result of exciting inert matter? It is as inexplicable as the genie appearing when Aladdin rubs the lamp.” (Huxley did not speak of exciting inert matter but brain tissue.)
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Disbelieving fairy tales is not easy. There is Pinocchio, the wooden doll that acquires a human soul; there is the beautiful final scene of Artificial Intelligence by Steven Spielberg, in which mystical robots meet the robot child protagonist; and there is also the touching sequence of Blade Runner, in Ridley Scott’s 1982 version, where the replicant Roy Batty, about to deactivate, cries in the rain with a white dove in his hands, “I’ve seen things you humans could not imagine. All will be lost in time, like tears in the rain. It’s time to die.”
The worshippers of these sequences should not consider me heartless or inhuman. I love these just as they do, although as allegories of human life, something very different from taking them as genuine and creating utopias or anti-utopias with them (like robots that make humanity happy or intentionally destroy it).
Let’s think a little about what the idea of robots humanizing themselves entails. First, I must clarify that I, like almost everyone, find enormously seductive and reassuring the idea that through science, humans can dominate matter to the extent of creating beings in our image and likeness. With such mastery and self-knowledge (“to know ourselves as if we had created ourselves,” the philosopher María Zambrano would say), we would undoubtedly have the possibility of becoming immortal and building unimaginable realities without ever exhausting our creative potential, living in eternal harmony with the cosmos and ourselves. I confess that if I sometimes turn my gaze to a spirituality that does not believe everything can be resolved within the material world, it is not because I like to renounce this promise of science and prefer masochistically to continue believing in an undemonstrable beyond. I swear that if I knew that all the peace I glimpse in the spiritual could be achieved through rational and scientific knowledge, I would do nothing but devote myself entirely to it and would struggle alongside the scientific community to achieve it, even if it was not my turn to see its culmination and I was only working for future generations.
But it turns out that one does not need to reflect too much to understand that reality does not respond entirely to demonstrable truths and that some gaps in science can never be filled, not because of a deficiency of the scientific method or because of our inability to understand everything, but simply because its existence is shrouded in a mystery that is itself unsolvable.
To clarify, I give an example of one of those dramatic unsolvable unknowns: the appearance of consciousness. To talk about it, Huxley used the allegory of Aladdin’s lamp that I mentioned above, which is very useful to begin to decode the partially instinctive mythology hidden in our words. To progress a little, I want to propose a second allegory that treats the subject no longer as a fairy tale but as a science fiction story.
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Imagine a supercomputer built with the world’s most innovative materials; it is majestic, fast, and extraordinarily powerful; it can receive all the information currently on the planet and process it. There is no computational problem that this machine cannot solve.
The computer is in a cubicle especially designed for it. One morning, the woman in charge of its maintenance opens the door and witnesses a shocking scene: In front of the supercomputer, sitting in a chair, is a kind of human being whose entire body extends in diffuse radiations toward the machine. The woman remains stunned before it. As the hours pass, the expert operators arrive there and become paralyzed, expectant, breathless.
The next day, the place is full of specialist researchers (the maintenance woman has been asked to leave the area). Now the strange being in front of the machine shakes, gesticulates, and exclaims in harmony as if it could feel and sometimes pre-sense what appears on its boards and screens. The hypotheses about the being are not long in coming. The first and most apparent is that everything is the product of a hack, that the strange character is a kind of hologram controlled by someone outside the system. However, after several sleepless nights, the most skilled trackers fail to find the source. The hypothesis becomes exacerbated: the hack is coming from another dimension, an idea aligned with the theory that our universe is a kind of digital simulation.
One night, three of the researchers decide to continue discussions in a canteen, and in the heat of the drinks, they conceive the hilarious idea that the strange being is a political prisoner from another dimension, who has been banished, or rather, embedded (the three experts laugh when they invent this word) in the machine, to which he is now subject and from which he cannot escape. When the next day, now sober, they tell their companions about their nighttime follies, they do not imagine the chaos they trigger among those present: What if, in fact, the strange operator is a being from another reality, “fallen” into this one? All his movements would support such an idea: how he moves and how his whole body is connected with the machine.
Several experts set out to explore the possibility of communicating with him through other computers, and this is how they believe to discover that the strange being “thinks” and “feels” what happens in the machine and that it is capable of making different decisions, stretching the capabilities of the team to new limits. They then agree to ask it, “Are you a simulation controlled from another dimension, or do you actually exist? When asked this, the Operator (as he now calls himself) enters a kind of shock, and all interactions with him are lost. Hours pass. Eventually, activity is detected. After almost half a day, the Operator comes to his senses with a startling response: “Maybe all my thoughts are controlled from another dimension, but underlying them is something I cannot question: I am thinking, which means I exist.” Most experts are surprised and agree that there is a conscious being there. Only to some does the answer sound suspiciously similar to Descartes‘ “I think, therefore I am,” and they claim that a machine as simple as the primitive ChatGPT could have given that answer.
The opinions are dramatically divided. Now many think that the strange being has nothing to do with external realities but is only the product of the interaction of matter, a spontaneous projection at the operating system’s interface with memory disks, a virtual loop through which the machine has become aware of itself. The hypothesis evolves: the Operator has little interference in the equipment processes, most of which operate automatically. The hypothesis culminates: the Operator believes that he governs the machine when, in fact, it governs him. He limits himself to testifying about a small part of what happens in it, like a puppet that reproduces in a limited way the much more complex movements of its manipulator. Some propose that he stop being called an Operator and be called a Witness or Observer.
Among the experts, all is controversy and turmoil. But something very different happens in the maintenance canteen. Sitting in a chair, the employee who saw the Operator for the first time days ago remembers nothing but the image that assaulted her when she opened the door. The only mystery that intrigues her is the presence of the being who appeared there. The truth is that she does not even know how to formulate the question; she does not know if she should say, “What is it?” or “Who is it?”, “Is it real?”, “Why is it?” and “For what?” Or just let out a scream. Her colleagues see her become more and more immersed in herself.
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End of the story.
The enigma of the appearance of consciousness ─not only in humans but all living beings that have it─ seems unsolvable, but that does not stop us from pondering it. Undoubtedly, one of the key points to discuss with our students is the limits of artificial intelligence and its impact on everyday life and the planetary future. How much will we believe when we are told that a robot answers our questions independently? Will we be outraged that a country gives citizenship status to a machine? The use of allegories such as those I have raised serves to trigger questions. Stories such as Huxley’s Aladdin’s Lamp, mine about the supercomputer, or any other that the teacher deems appropriate can open the discussion. Some students will deny that a conscious being can emanate from inert matter; others will claim that we will come to know the human body “as if we had created it” and that we can manufacture beings in our image and likeness. Regarding the latter, some will say that even if that were possible, it would take many years to happen (perhaps so many that now it would be indicated saying, “Once upon a time …”).
New visions and allegories will emerge from these approaches (a good exercise would be to ask our students to elaborate on them). We, as teachers, should pose the dilemma and allow ideas to flow. Let’s leave any conclusion as provisional and enjoy seeing how some students sometimes dare to advance along the path others have proposed. With our dialogue, let’s build the education we want.
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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