2029: The end of our people
At the beginning of September, coinciding with the start of the school year, the world woke up to a new threat in sight. “I believe that if we do not slow down the current pace of progress, there is a high probability that we will all die in the immediate future,” stated Jacob Coxon, mathematician, technologist, and former Anthropic employee. Just what we needed! Afterwards, other voices joined in. The latest, David Robison, who had led transparency work on the OpenAI safety team.
The matter has reached the point where the very tech-bros of Silicon Valley, such as Google and X, have asked to hit the brakes. In contrast, Trump says there is no slowing down. The 47th president argues that the United States is immersed in a technological war with China that must be won at all costs. Because, apparently, if we must go extinct, it is at least better to get there first.
Faced with this scenario, I ask myself: what if Terminator was not science fiction, but a documentary ahead of its time? Let’s remember the plot of this cult movie from the eighties. In the year 2029, machines dominate the Earth after a nuclear apocalypse caused by Skynet, a supercomputer that wants to destroy humanity.
And this is where the date amuses me. Because in 2029, we Mallorcans also have an important appointment: we will celebrate the 800 years of the conquest by James I. Eight centuries since the Catalan troops entered Madina Mayurqa and Mallorca was incorporated into the Western Christian world. Later, new settlers arrived seeking land and a better future, a bit like now, really. Mind you, with the usual little inconveniences of medieval conquests: deaths, slaves, rapes, and a previous society shattered. For all these reasons, I ask myself: what if, while Skynet prepares its apocalypse, we celebrate the 800 years of the birth of the Mallorca we know… just as we begin to witness its end?
It is true that there are reasons to be concerned about artificial intelligence. We have already seen systems capable of acting in ways not foreseen by their creators… and that is scary. We are not just giving brains to machines: we are starting to give them hands. They can act, make decisions, and execute tasks with ever-increasing autonomy.
But there are also researchers who say we shouldn't hyperventilate. They believe that so much obsession with Terminator distracts us from the problems we already have here. Sandra Wachter, a professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, points to risks that are much less cinematic but quite a bit more real: disinformation, job losses, environmental impact, lack of privacy, algorithmic biases… Along these lines, Yanis Varoufakis has long warned that the technological revolution could end up further reinforcing the power of a small elite. That is to say: perhaps AI will not exterminate us. Perhaps it will simply serve to make the rich richer, large corporations more powerful, and democracies a little more decorative. It is not as spectacular as a killer robot chasing Arnold Schwarzenegger, but it does not sound particularly reassuring either.
There also exists, fortunately, the opposite possibility. It is said with hesitation and many caveats, it is true, but there are voices that are still capable of dreaming of a better world. I am speaking of top-tier figures, like Nick Bostrom, who has imagined a future in which AI frees us from a good part of our obligations. Machines will work for us, diseases will disappear, we will not go hungry, and we will be able to dedicate our lives to the arts, to thinking, to loving, or, simply, to lounging on the sofa. A universal retirement for humanity. Fantastic. We would sign up for that right now.
The problem is that, while we wait for this technological paradise –or the arrival of Skynet–, the real world continues to function. And in Mallorca, we know perfectly well how it functions: the Mediterranean is getting hotter and hotter and meteorological phenomena are becoming more extreme and unpredictable. Our energy model continues to depend on resources that are not infinite. Tourism continues to break records on islands that have exactly the same square kilometers as they did a thousand years ago. Housing has become a luxury product, and gentrification transforms neighborhoods, towns, shops, and even the language we hear on the street.
But the response, as a society, remains the same: more tourists. More swimming pools. More villas.
And watch out, because elections are coming now. The PP and Vox aspire to govern in Madrid as well—in the Balearic Islands we already know what it's like to have them in Government—and, if there is one thing they have defended, it is precisely to continue fueling this flight forward. And then we worry that an artificial intelligence might obsessively pursue a goal without understanding the consequences… alas! Perhaps, in the end, we have trained the machines too well in our own image and likeness. But I am not very sure that we have to wait for Skynet to see how everything goes to ruin. Perhaps Mallorca will not end because a superintelligence decides, one fine day, that humans are expendable. Perhaps our end will be much more vulgar and, above all, much more our own: it will have been us ourselves who, by dint of wanting to be money junkies, will have made the land where we live uninhabitable.
