Culture in the age of the algorithm

I don't like extreme predictions, they are not usually the ones that take real shape. I'm pretty sure things won't be as Ray Kurzweil has prescribed. He wrote that "in the year 2047, artificial intelligence will have surpassed human intelligence, and biological and non-biological intelligence will have combined, and artificial intelligence will have expanded through the universe at an infinite speed that will turn the colonization of the universe into an inevitable feat that will be carried out without effort.' Sounds like rhetoric to me. The coming world will not be an effortless feat, in the same way that historical experience shows that things are not as apocalyptic approaches usually predict, those who assure that the world is hopelessly lost, in which the Human intelligence is destined to surrender to artificial intelligence.

In any case, however, it is necessary to be aware that AI will probably renew the definition and social role of culture. I wonder how algorithmic intelligence will interact with human intelligence: will it complement, compete, or do a little bit of everything? How will it modify the knapsack of knowledge, the portfolio of values and the set of skills and sensibilities that characterize human culture?

The batteries should be put on. What we don't face today we won't have tomorrow. We have entered the age of the algorithm and our country remains mired in the age of steam. We should be playing Go but we're entertaining ourselves by playing checkers. Cultural Catalonia is falling behind. We accumulate a deficit of reflection and cultural resources that will soon be chronic and surely irreparable.

We Catalans, therefore, insist on minimizing the importance of culture and education, and therefore of human intelligence. We continue to confuse the foundation with the ornament, we continue to put on the tail of our concerns what should be at the forefront. We persist in not facing the great paradox of our time: we live surrounded by an enormous amount of knowledge and life potential, but we translate it into an immeasurable density of ignorance, falsehood and discomfort.

Unfortunately, we cannot find a way to move forward into more democratic and intelligent forms of government that allow us to explore the limits of our present and future. We are avoiding complexity and we are losing positions in the definition of the new humanism that demands our country and the world today.