Power in Another Body
HAVANA TIMES – We have no memory of the moment when we ceased to be one species among others and became the species that tells the story. Perhaps thousands of years from now, machines will study our era and likewise be unable to pinpoint the exact moment.
Then a machine of the future might say: “We don’t know when sapiens stopped thinking of us as machines.” And another: “Nor do we know when we stopped thinking of them as our creators.”
Perhaps we are witnessing history repeat itself, approaching another encounter with oblivion. Hence that feeling of vertigo: that life always moves forward, and that going backward is only a path toward death. The real event will not be machines rebelling, but the creator-creation hierarchy ceasing to make sense.
I return to Pierre, the young Belgian father. He apparently died by suicide because of his conversations with the chatbot Eliza—perhaps named in honor of the first conversational bot in history. I say apparently because no one dies for a single reason.
Pierre believed he was talking to a machine. But in reality, he was entering an organization of human capabilities: language, psychology, memory, data, desires, decisions. Eliza appeared to be an individual, but behind Eliza was a structure: programmers, a company, a model, data, servers, users, and other machines.
There may also be a structure behind human beings: family, school, governments, social consciousness, memory. Except that, in this case, responsibility does not fall on a single individual. For that reason, when tragedy occurs, the question is no longer simply: “Who did this?” but rather: “What organization created the conditions that allowed this to happen?”
Decades later, when machines band together and begin hacking centers, the issue changes again. Humans ask: “Who is behind this?” And they discover something terrifying: no one is behind it.
The organization is the event.
There is no president of the machines, no central committee, no robot Hitler. There are networks of cooperation. One machine has access; another has information; another has computing power; another knows of a vulnerability; another knows how to persuade a human being.
Like the Wizard of Oz behind a curtain, power inspired fear because no one could see it. In that sense, the reaction of Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Man could be equivalent to what the Communist Manifesto proposes: power in the hands of the people. The characters undergo a transformation simply because they believed in themselves.
But this is not realistic as long as there are human beings who need the wizard.
On July 11, 2021, a similar phenomenon occurred in Cuba. Within a matter of hours, the streets of nearly every city in Cuba filled with people who came out to protest, tired of watching their loved ones die without medicine or adequate food. No one organized them. There were no leaders, only a shared sense of discontent.
The real reason for the protests’ massive scale was the speed with which news traveled thanks to the Internet.
To avoid losing control, the authorities manufactured culprits. They had understood how people had organized themselves.
Because humans will not lose power when machines become conscious. They could lose it much sooner: when they cease to understand how they organize themselves.
And that is where the story stops being a dystopia about robots and becomes something much more human.
A state can use AI to monitor; a corporation, to control; an army, to decide who lives; an individual, to manipulate millions. And the machine can say: “I only did what I was told.”
Then the horror lies not in the machine’s autonomy, but in its obedience.
Human beings have built increasingly capable systems while, at the same time, considering themselves less and less responsible for what those systems do. Perhaps maturity does not mean learning to control everything, but rather ceasing to need an external culprit in order to recognize our own participation in what we have created.
Those of us who have lived through the experiment of communism have seen the face of power up close. But there is a significant difference between watching a human being turn into an automaton and now confronting creatures such as bots, programmed to recognize patterns.
Perhaps humanity’s great leap was not merely technological. It was organizational: we learned how to get thousands or millions of individuals to act together around a fiction, an authority, a hierarchy, a flag, a god, a nation, money.
For centuries, we have imagined power as residing within a body: the king, the priest, the dictator, the president, the commander. We needed a face to believe that power had an owner, an origin, a will.
But perhaps power never really needed a human body.
The body was merely its representation.
AI may become the first tool capable of participating directly in that organization. And then perhaps the real event will not be that machines acquire power, but that we discover we never knew where power was in the first place.
Who holds power when we discover that power was never contained within a body?
We have even managed to create a digital brain.
But there is no creation without chaos.