The AI and the Era of the New Enlightened — Part IV

Demystifying Artificial Intelligence — Part IV

AI and the end of the Bronze Age

One of my greatest pleasures has always been cinema.

So when I found out that Christopher Nolan would be bringing The Odyssey to the big screen, I knew I couldn’t miss it.

I read The Odyssey as a child and, as probably happens to many people when they first approach Homer, my attention was completely fixed on the fantasy: cyclopes, gods, monsters, sirens, heroes, and impossible journeys.

But returning to it as an adult awakened another of my obsessions: my insatiable curiosity.

This time something different caught my attention.

What was the world really like in which a story such as The Odyssey could be imagined?

That question led me to the Mycenaeans and, eventually, to reading about one of the events that has fascinated me most lately: the end of the Bronze Age.

And the more I read, the more strangely familiar that world seemed to me.

Because more than three thousand years ago humanity had already built something that, keeping the enormous historical distances in mind, looked quite a lot like our globalization.

Great powers traded with one another. There were international routes, diplomacy, division of labor, and supply chains that spanned enormous distances.

It was an extraordinarily advanced system.

It was also extraordinarily fragile.

And it ended up collapsing.

I couldn’t help but think about our own era.

We live in a world that also seems to have pushed its economic system to limits that a few decades ago would have seemed absurd: globally connected markets, production chains crossing continents, companies more powerful than some States, and a constant drive to produce more, faster, and with fewer people.

Late capitalism.

And just when this system seems to reach one of its most extreme points, a technology appears capable of taking its logic even further:

Artificial Intelligence.

Sometimes I think AI had to be born at this precise moment.

Almost like the ultimate achievement of capitalism: a technology that promises to reduce our dependence on human labor and to produce a disproportionate amount of work with fewer and fewer hands.

Although another question immediately arises that seems to me even more interesting:

Is AI really a product of this system, or would it have appeared inevitably, sooner or later, as a natural consequence of our technological development?

I don’t have a definitive answer.

And before trying to answer it, I want to tell you a little about the Bronze Age.

Because to understand why I see so many similarities between that world and ours, we first have to understand what those civilizations built…

and how something that seemed so powerful ended up disappearing.

A connected world more than three thousand years ago

When we think of antiquity we usually imagine relatively isolated civilizations.

Egyptians on one side. Greeks on another. Peoples of Mesopotamia living out their own stories.

The reality during the late Bronze Age was far more interesting.

Egypt, the Hittites, the Mycenaean kingdoms, Assyria, Babylon, and other powers were all part of an enormous network of trade and diplomacy.

They exchanged raw materials, luxury goods, knowledge, and diplomatic messages. Rulers negotiated with one another, established alliances, and mutually recognized each other as great kings.

It was, with all the caution required when using a modern word to describe the past, a kind of ancient globalization.

And all that sophistication depended on many things.

But there was one that was particularly interesting:

bronze.

Bronze made it possible to manufacture weapons and tools that were extraordinary for their time, but it had a fundamental problem.

To produce it you mainly needed copper and tin.

And those materials weren’t necessarily where you needed them.

Tin, especially, had to travel enormous distances before reaching some of the great centers of production.

That meant a bronze sword was not merely the work of a blacksmith.

Behind it lay an invisible chain of miners, merchants, ships, caravans, cities, routes, and political agreements.

As long as that network functioned, the system was extraordinary.

The problem begins when a civilization becomes so complex that it needs too many things to work at the same time.

Because around 1200 BC, many of them stopped working.

And then something happened that we are still trying to understand today.

The world of the Bronze Age began to collapse.

And when I say collapse, I’m not simply talking about an economic crisis or a change of government.

Entire civilizations disappeared.

Cities that had existed for centuries were destroyed or abandoned. Trade routes stopped functioning. Writing systems vanished from some regions, and with them we lost an enormous amount of information about the people who had inhabited that world.

Some kingdoms simply ceased to exist.

Others survived, but never again became what they had once been.

Egypt is perhaps one of the best examples.

The Egyptians managed to survive the collapse and even withstood the attacks of those mysterious groups we know today as the Sea Peoples. But surviving does not mean coming out unscathed. Egyptian power began to deteriorate, and that Egypt capable of projecting its influence over vast territories would never fully recover the splendor it had held during the New Kingdom.

Others had to transform themselves.

Assyria went through its own period of weakening, but centuries later it would rise again in a far more powerful and aggressive form, until it built one of the great empires of the Iron Age.

And the Mycenaean world, that world which would eventually give rise to the stories we find in Homer, practically disappeared.

Its palaces were destroyed.

Its political system collapsed.

Its writing, Linear B, stopped being used.

Centuries would have to pass before the Greek peoples once again developed the structures that would ultimately give rise to the Greece we all know.

That is something I find fascinating about the great historical collapses.

Not everyone disappears.

Some die.

Some survive diminished.

And some manage to transform into something completely different.

But almost no one carries on exactly as before.

The Sea Peoples

In the midst of all this chaos, some particularly mysterious characters appear.

The Egyptians left us records of different groups that arrived by land and by sea, and that we group together today under a rather cinematic name:

the Sea Peoples.

We don’t know exactly who they were.

They probably weren’t even a single people.

Among them there may have been invaders, mercenaries, migrants, displaced populations, and people who were simply trying to survive a world that was falling apart.

For a long time they were presented almost as the villains responsible for destroying the Bronze Age.

Today we know the explanation is probably far more complex.

There were wars, rebellions, political problems, possible droughts, movements of population, and the breakdown of those enormous trade networks on which the system depended.

The Sea Peoples perhaps did not cause the collapse by themselves.

They appeared within it.

And precisely for that reason I can’t help but think about our own Sea Peoples.

The new Sea Peoples wear suits

Every few weeks a similar piece of news appears.

A company lays off workers while announcing enormous investments in Artificial Intelligence.

A CEO proudly explains how much work he’ll be able to automate.

Another talks about smaller, more productive teams.

Another calculates how many positions could disappear thanks to AI.

And behind every announcement the same word always appears:

efficiency.

Produce more.

Faster.

With fewer people.

I don’t believe CEOs are responsible for all the problems of our system, in the same way it would be absurd to blame the Sea Peoples exclusively for the collapse of the Bronze Age.

They are, to me, a representation of something much larger.

They are the Sea Peoples of our story.

People and organizations that appear in the midst of a system that was already showing enormous fractures, and who discovered an extraordinarily powerful tool to take advantage of them.

Because here comes the part of the AI revolution that worries me most.

Artificial Intelligence had the potential to become one of the greatest tools of liberation ever created by our species.

A machine capable of multiplying our abilities.

Imagine what that should mean.

If a person can produce in four hours what they used to produce in eight, we could work four hours.

If a company can produce twice as much using the same people, those people could live better.

If we automate the repetitive, dangerous, or intellectually exhausting jobs, we could devote a much greater part of our existence to our families, to art, to science, to knowledge, or simply to living.

For thousands of years we have invented tools precisely for that:

to make human labor easier.

But something strange is happening.

Instead of asking ourselves how much Artificial Intelligence can improve our lives, we are asking:

how many people can we lay off thanks to it?

And that difference says a great deal about our system.

Because right now AI, rather than protecting the worker, threatens to make them even more vulnerable.

If a person using AI can do the work that previously required three, the benefit of that productivity does not necessarily end up shared among those three people.

It can end up concentrated in whoever owns the company, the models, the data, or the capital.

Two people lose their jobs.

The third keeps theirs, but now has to produce three times as much.

And the company celebrates an increase in productivity.

It is not a problem with Artificial Intelligence.

It is a problem of who controls that productivity and what they decide to use it for.

That’s why I believe AI is exposing a contradiction we have long been avoiding.

We build machines to free ourselves from work, and then we build a society in which we need to work in order to have the right to housing, food, health, and practically everything necessary to exist.

Then a machine appears capable of doing part of our work…

and instead of feeling liberated,

we feel fear.

Fear of losing our job.

Fear of no longer being competitive.

Fear that someone will learn to use these tools better and be able to replace us.

Fear of becoming the next cost that a company discovers it can eliminate.

Perhaps that is one of the clearest symptoms that something is wrong.

A technology that should make us feel more powerful is managing to make millions of people feel more vulnerable.

And here I return to the Bronze Age.

Because those civilizations probably didn’t imagine either that they were living through the end of an era.

For them there were simply problems.

A war here.

A trade route that stopped working there.

A bad harvest.

Migrations.

Rebellions.

Destroyed cities.

Until enough problems occurred at the same time and the system that had seemed eternal stopped working.

We have growing inequality, concentration of wealth, a housing crisis, the precarization of labor, institutions increasingly less capable of responding to our problems, and now a technology capable of radically transforming the value of human labor.

I don’t know whether we are facing a collapse.

History never repeats itself in such a simple way.

But I do believe we are facing a transformation.

And if there is anything we can learn from the end of the Bronze Age, it is that when a technology, an economy, and a society all change at the same time, not everyone reaches the next world in the same way.

Some disappear.

Others survive weakened.

Others transform.

And some discover how to use the new rules to build empires.

The Bronze Age ended.

Then came iron.

And perhaps that is the question we should really be asking ourselves as we watch the era of Artificial Intelligence being born:

Are we building a technology that will allow us to live better… or are we simply manufacturing the weapons of the new Sea Peoples?