I liked it better when my father was my ChatGPT

PalmaWhen I was little, I was convinced that my father knew everything. To me, there was no knowledge in the world that was not within his reach. I imagined that he had a huge database installed in his head, where—if he tried hard enough—he could find the answers to all my questions. I knew very few things, as was natural for a six or seven-year-old girl. But he, on the other hand, who must have been in his mid-30s, had already learned everything. He no longer went to school like I did, because he no longer needed to. He did not have to look anywhere to know if it was the Sun that revolved around the Earth or the Earth around the Sun, nor the multiplication table for 8. He had it all in his brain, immense and fully equipped in my eyes.

And it is not that I thought my father was the only one. He was the smartest, but I thought that if he possessed all that knowledge it was because he had lived long enough to accumulate it. For quite a few years, I believed that knowing everything was a matter of time, a natural and direct result of growing up. I understood, quite sensibly, that we children had just enough knowledge to solve our little needs and that a moment would come when we would hit a ceiling and the lessons would start to spill over the sides, because they would be repeated, like trading cards, because all the world's knowledge was an achievable and finite thing.

I imagined that everything that could be known fit into a few books and that, one day, I would have the answer to every mystery I could imagine: how many nationalities there are in the world, why planes fly, what the differences are between a leopard and a cheetah. Not knowing something did not worry me. I knew that I could ask, learn, or read about it. All the information was available. I just needed to ask the right question, capable of unlocking it.

Discovering that there were things I would never know was a shock to me. I don't know if my father ever verbalized to me that no, he couldn't know everything either. But I remember the feeling of helplessness when I became aware of it. I felt as if someone made me zoom out and turned the world into something much vaster than I had known up to that moment. I had grown, but I felt smaller than ever. I had been swindled. What was filling all these confines that had now opened up before me, which I would never reach with my questions?

Now, my world is folding back in on itself again, finite, limited by the questions I am capable of asking. "What's on your mind today?", my ChatGPT asks me. As if everything I needed to know started from my own mind. "Ask ChatGPT". Will I someday discover that, like my father, ChatGPT doesn't know everything? For now, history repeats itself, but with more demands and less curiosity. "Do I have to wait for the stuffed pasta shells to defrost to make the soup?", "I want to sign a PDF that I have on my computer", "Foot size six years old child".

Before, I used to call my father whenever a red light turned on in my car. Now, I know it will be faster to send a photo of the dashboard to Gemini. Even though I have him saved as AAPapa, the AI always gets there faster. It saddens me that this is what prevails. And it saddens me that he has stopped believing that he is the only one capable of giving me all the answers in the world.

My blind faith in my parents has been so great that, one day, when a huge and unknown insect got into my apartment in Barcelona, I called my mother in Mallorca to help me get it out. I have asked her how to hang a shelf, what product I should use to clean the resin sink, and how to load a silicone gun. Now, it is she who suggests that I simply take a picture and ask about it on the internet.

Someone to think my thoughts for me

AI will be the tomb of our oral transmission. A time will come when we will no longer ask each other anything, when we will no longer discover anything for each other. We will no longer need each other. However, we will be able to ask everything of some artificial cloud of thought, much more valid than a human, even if that human is your father or your mother.

It may be that my son or my daughter will no longer need to ask me anything, because this screen is omnipresent and omnipotent: it can do everything and is always there, it does not rest or disappear for eight hours to work. If anything, it will tell them: “You have reached the file limit; get a premium account”. With me –that is for sure– my children will not be able to have a premium account. I, too, will have to ration myself, I will not be able to pour all my content into them. I will not even be able to be that anymore, a vessel for my offspring.

Or perhaps yes. Perhaps, to save time –to think less and finish sooner– I will pay for the premium subscription: a subscription to some intelligence that reasons my thoughts for me. I will no longer have to find, learn, and apply the way of doing things. I will simply strive to formulate a good prompt. I will forgo, one by one, all the knowledge I acquired and once needed, until I am six or seven years old again. And, if one day I forget who I am, I will ask ChatGPT to remind me.