The AI and the Era of the New Enlightened — Part III
Part III of the series to demystify Artificial Intelligence: walking through a Mexico City that replaced its identity with repetition, and discovering that the same thing is happening to the Internet. On digital garbage, the vanished cost of producing, and a new form of illiteracy.
Demystifying Artificial Intelligence — Part III
The Era of Digital Garbage
One of my favorite activities has always been walking through Mexico City, all the more now that I am about to begin a new chapter far from it. I hope it will be a quieter life, perhaps a more human one, though that does not mean leaving the world of technology behind. I have never felt contempt for the city where I grew up; it would be a lie to say I did not love it. Mexico City has an essence that is hard to explain and, for many years, wandering its streets was a way of discovering it.
I liked to lose myself between the Centro Histórico, la Juárez, la San Rafael, la Roma, or la Zona Rosa. To spend hours in its libraries, to walk into a museum without planning to, to stumble upon a hidden restaurant or find a specific book in a bookstore that existed only there. Every neighborhood had a personality. There were businesses with decades of history, unrepeatable cafés, street stalls everyone knew by name, and small shops that forced you to cross half the city because they simply did not exist anywhere else.
Even the shopping malls were different from one another. There were few of them, and precisely for that reason each one kept a certain identity. The movie-theater chains competed by offering different experiences, the bookstores had particular selections, and each zone seemed to build a distinct part of the city. Walking was not merely getting around; it was discovering.
Over time that feeling began to disappear.
It did not happen from one day to the next. It was a slow change, almost imperceptible, as the deepest transformations tend to be. Many old houses were demolished to build apartment buildings that could exist anywhere in the world. Public spaces vanished to make way for new shopping malls. The small pharmacies gave way to national chains. Restaurants began to repeat themselves over and over. The same cafés occupied corner after corner. The same storefronts. The same shops. The same experiences.
I am not saying those places are bad. Many of them work extraordinarily well. The problem is something else.
When everything starts to look alike, the city loses part of what made it worth walking through.
The new buildings tend to be taller, more efficient, and more profitable, but they rarely have character. The new shopping malls are enormous, though you need only walk through a few to feel you have already visited them all. Paradoxically, many of those apartments will never be inhabited because of their disproportionate prices, and many of those shopping malls will end up filled with empty units. They take up space, consume resources, and replace places that once had an identity.
Little by little I came to understand that this had a name.
Garbage.
Not because it is useless by definition, but because it occupies a space far greater than the value it actually provides.
I tell you all this, reader, not because I want to turn this blog into a personal diary, nor because the ideas for this series on Artificial Intelligence have run dry. On the contrary. I needed this introduction because, while walking through the city, I understood that the same phenomenon is happening on the Internet.
Artificial Intelligence, as we have seen in the previous essays, represents one of the most important technological advances of our time. I also believe that, in the hands of someone who has mastered a craft, it can become an extraordinary tool. Its capacity to carry out repetitive tasks, organize information, or speed up processes that once took hours of work has never stopped surprising me.
The problem has never been the tool.
The problem begins when the cost of producing disappears.
Today, companies and many individuals live convinced that anyone can become an expert in any subject simply by using the right model. I am not talking about earning a university degree; I am talking about studying a discipline for years, making mistakes, practicing, building judgment. And yet there is no shortage of people who publish books they would never write without AI, give talks on subjects they have never researched, and produce courses, documents, or articles whose only virtue is having been generated quickly.
The result is an illusion of knowledge.
And every illusion needs to produce something in order to sustain itself.
So we get forty-page documents when the idea fit perfectly in three. Endless presentations full of diagrams no one understands. Manuals so long that their own authors would rather ask another Artificial Intelligence to summarize them. Websites practically identical to one another, distinguished only by a color palette. Blogs that repeat exactly the same ideas with different words. Videos, newsletters, ebooks, and posts born to be forgotten a few hours later.
That, to me, is digital garbage.
Not because it is poorly written.
Not because it was generated by an AI.
But because it occupies a space infinitely greater than the value it provides.
We are changing eras and, with them, the meaning of illiteracy is changing too. I no longer believe that a modern illiterate is only someone who cannot read or write. I believe it can also be someone who has stopped building judgment. Someone who produces content they would never read. Someone who publishes documents they do not even fully understand. Someone who delegates thinking, then delegates reading, and finally delegates comprehension to another Artificial Intelligence.
It is a strange game.
One person uses an AI to write a document they do not understand. Another uses a different AI to summarize it because they do not want to read it either. In the end no one knows exactly what was said, but everyone feels the work is finished. It is a modern version of the game of telephone in which people no longer even take part; only models exchanging text while we assume that someone, at some point in the process, was thinking.
And perhaps that is the real risk.
Not that Artificial Intelligence generates garbage.
AI does exactly what it was designed to do.
It is we who decide to fill the Internet with forgettable content, the cities with buildings that have no identity, and our work with documents no one needed to write.
A few days ago I ended one of my walks through Mexico City with a feeling that is hard to describe. It was not nostalgia. Nor sadness. It was the impression of having walked a great deal and discovered very little.
Later I understood why.
When a city replaces its identity with repetition, it stops inviting us to explore.
And perhaps the same thing is happening with the Internet.
Never before had we produced so much apparent knowledge.
Never before had we occupied so much space.
And yet, I find fewer and fewer things that are truly worth remembering.