Mariano Sigman analyzes the implications of Artificial Intelligence: “We must not lose the love for human thought”

He has always been curious about experimentation and things that make him think. Today he is interested in neuroscience as well as music, painting and art, in addition to chess. Mariano Sigman has written a handful of books that seek to explain our time, marked by algorithms, codes and models of generative artificial intelligencefrom what he calls “the contour of the human.” “There are neuroscientists who have a much more biological interest in the brain, its neurons, its synapses, I am more interested in emotion, understanding sadness, memory, memories, motivation, that drive that makes us do everything,” he says, sitting in one of the rooms of the Westin hotel, where he has just given a talk on AI, at an event organized by Credicorp.

– Among those adaptations you mention, how much is our mind changing in more than a decade of social networks?

It changes a lot and it is worth remembering that this is not the first time it has happened. More than 2,000 years ago, Socrates complained against writing because he said that it was for lazy people who could not remember their own thoughts and had to put them on an external substrate. Today that happens frequently. Many people say: “it’s a spectacular movie, but I don’t remember, I have to look for it”… That is to say, one has a repertoire of ideas, but we lose them little by little when we deposit them in places. Originally it was a written paper, then it was Google and now you don’t remember anything. And that happens, for example, with the ability to move, a fundamental capacity of human beings and all mammals and we have destroyed it. Think that before, human beings crossed the Atlantic watching the stars, triangulating with very primitive sextants, and now you don’t know how to go from San Isidro to Rímac, which are the two neighborhoods that I know in Lima, if you don’t have a navigator. There are studies that show that the ability to sustain attention is declining extremely dangerously and attention is an elementary resource of human thought because it is the ability to decide where you want to direct your thinking.

– Today our attention span when jousting reaches 47 seconds…

It’s hard to know, because it depends on how you measure it, but what is pretty clear is that it decreases, and not by a small margin. There are studies that show that this also already happens with generative intelligences. People who solve problems using them lose the ability to solve problems on their own… The world of chess is an interesting place to look at. For a long time now, artificial intelligences have played better than any chess player, but that has not destroyed the game, on the contrary, it has improved it. In chess there is something like love for human thought that we must not lose. Some chess players play at a classical pace and perhaps spend 30 minutes thinking about a move. Where else today do you know a person who spends 30 minutes trying to find the truth about something? People, in general, want to solve everything in 30 seconds… For me, something terrible in Peru is that it has one of the most legendary chess players of the last 50 years, his name is Julio Grandaand very few people here know him. They have a hero of thought, whom they would have to vindicate.

– In that sense, how much returning to reading can also help.

What reading has is that it requires a certain effort and something that is very at risk today is sustaining that effort for a while, which we were talking about about chess. That is, the ability to persist… There are many people now who watch television and look at their phone at the same time, because they can no longer afford it. One of the things that happens with all addictions is that the same stimulus becomes insufficient to achieve the same response. Social media has that. Without realizing it, you spend 30 days scrolling and then wonder what I did in that time. On the other hand, when you read a book you exercise something very important, which is volitional control, which makes you one, precisely.

– I wanted to ask you about the risk of AI and fake news in an electoral stage…

Your question is very important, because one of the most delicate things that is happening now is how we maintain credibility and trust in a time so prone to all kinds of impostures and the solution is not easy. Among many other things, it requires from each person an enormous exercise in critical thinking, being alert, and healthy skepticism. Before, you said: “I have seen it with my own eyes.” Well, now you still have to doubt. That does not mean that you are in permanent doubt, but you wonder, you reason… you do not respond immediately, but you reflect.

– But we are in a time that demands immediate responses.

That’s part of the trap. Better to say: “Sorry, I can’t answer you right now. I need to think about it.” That “I need to think about it” is a good phrase for all of us.