Juan Villoro: “The machines, poor things, still don't know how to suffer like us.”

Technology has changed our lives in the last twenty years, and someone had to explain it from a humanistic perspective. Writer Juan Villoro (Mexico City, 1956) takes on a similar challenge in his latest essay, "I Am Not a Robot " (Anagrama), which he discusses with this newspaper in a Barcelona hotel. "The relationship between parents and children has changed," he lists, "as have our banking transactions, our relationships with politics, our education... The customs of the species have changed. I portray the way new technologies transform our behavior. I would love to read a book by a witness who lived in the 15th century, when books became popular thanks to the printing press. It would have been fascinating: to see how it affected our relationships with universities, families, religion, the State... I wanted to do that."

Diderot, Rousseau, Sinclair Lewis, Philip Roth, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick... are some of the authors cited in a work that, at its core, explores what it means to be human, includes snippets of intellectual autobiography and interviews with a wide variety of people, such as astronaut Cady Coleman, who confesses that she only dreams of returning to space and would love to leave Earth forever, “what she was telling me with her husband and children in the background, it had a curious effect.”

The data “Human IQ is going downhill”

“James Flynn, who died in 2020,” Villoro says, “was an expert in measuring the development of human intelligence and found revealing data. Throughout the 20th century, the IQ rose by 30 points, which is quite remarkable considering that the IQ of a genius is close to 140 points. The species advanced significantly, reaching its peak in the 1970s, stagnating until the 1990s and beginning to decline at a rate of two points per decade. This is understandable because there are cognitive faculties that we use less and less. We don't orient ourselves in space, but rather obey the navigator. We don't memorize phone numbers because they're in our electronic address book. We have digital prostheses that do the work for us, and this dulls certain faculties. We live in an environment where machines are getting smarter by the minute, and we are getting dumber by the minute. The competition is starting to become unequal.”

The author focuses on the so-called Chaplin syndrome. “The great actor wasn't honored at a convention of his stunt doubles. And today, we have to constantly prove who we are: we have to look like our ID photo, on social media we define ourselves with a password or an avatar... All these kinds of substitute identities for who we truly are have brought about personality changes to such a degree that we often understand ourselves better by what we do on screen than by what we actually act as people.”

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Numerous science fiction works predicted much of what is happening today, "such as the danger of an authoritarian technological system of control, or that there are already machines very close to having the condition of Philip K. Dick's replicants, that is, there will soon be some that have not realized that they are machines."

"One of the few healthy things about having someone like Trump," he says, "is that he has exposed the ways and customs of politics that were there, but hidden. The fact that the front row of his inauguration was occupied by the great magnates, and not his cabinet, reveals where the real power lies in the United States."

“I haven't intended,” he clarifies, “to be a Nostradamus calling on people to live in the countryside, break away from electricity, and eat roots. Rather, I'm showing how AI is a formidable tool, more closely linked to the world of books than is often believed, but which must remain as such, an instrument, not become an end in itself. It could serve, for example, to build more democratic and participatory societies, far from the domination of political parties, but to do so, it shouldn't be in the hands of people like Musk.”

Villoro also studies how “reading fiction allows us to better understand this fragmented and dispersed world, since literature gives meaning to individual scenes and establishes connections.”

And will AI one day write good novels? “It wouldn't be surprising, since it already publishes opinion pieces. For now, the great asset of our species is that we are able to transform pain into words. If we experience trauma, we feel the need to work it out in writing. We have this advantage over machines: poor things, they don't know how to suffer.”