Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence, having been developed over several decades, evidences its futuristic bet through its various attempts at defining its goals and expectations. An operative current has proposed defining it with regard to the processing capacities of devices and computers: in 1955, according to John McCarthy, the goal of AI was “developing machines that behave as though they were intelligent”,¹⁴ something that turned out to be insufficient inasmuch as the solution of so-called intelligent operations at the time could be executed by machines with electrical circuits; four decades later, in 1991, the Encyclopaedia Britannica proposed: “AI is the ability of digital computers or computer-controlled robots to solve problems that are normally associated with the higher intellectual processing capabilities of humans…”,¹⁵ an extremely general definition that included in the realm of AI any computer capable of carrying out mathematical or logical operations, storage and retrieval of information functions.

Another work branch of AI, more oriented to human activities, established a futuristic horizon. In 1983, Elaine Rich proposed what may be the most potent definition of AI: “Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the study of how to make computers do things in which, at the moment, people are better”.¹⁶ From this perspective, the execution of complex and different calculations in a small amount of time would not be relevant for AI, as this is a strong point of digital computers—consider Deep Blue, a machine that is capable of defeating the best human chess player—, but rather efforts should be oriented, for example, towards developing an autonomous robot or entity; that is, one that is not supervised or controlled remotely by a person, and is capable of interacting in the way a human being would in a meeting with unfamiliar people.

The opening of AI studies to everyday world problems has brought about a profound interrelation with advances in cognitive sciences, mostly neuroscience and psychology, as well as information technology science, algorithms and big data processing. In particular, advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) in computers gave rise to the implementation of “chatterbots”¹⁷ which, although quickly giving away their artificial nature, have derived in a wide use of bots in the commercial and service realms, for the purpose of answering questions within more or less clearly defined fields.¹⁸

Also, design, experimentation and development of increasingly sophisticated computer programs [software] and algorithms (codes), such as optical recognition (QR) and digital edition and those having to do with the workings of digital neuronal networks, became AI’s fundamental content and usage and oriented its main lines of work: machine learning processes, work automation, autonomous transportation and service robots.

Additionally, the broadening of AI’s goals from automated modeling and analysis of big data to robotic imitation of complex human processes and behaviors (visual and aural perception, natural written and oral language, acoustics, composition and musical interpretation, sensory detection and expression through gestures) has generated the build-up of new knowledge, sustained by exploration, observation and interpretation of human usage, interactions and expectations in connection with devices, interfaces and non-human entities with human attributes (logical thought, natural dialogue language, perception and speech), capable of carrying out specialized diagnosis tasks in the realm of health, or act as help for sick and elderly persons, as well as taking on high-risk activities and activities that are impossible for human beings to carry out.¹⁹

Gene Editing

On the other hand, gene-editing technology, which got its start with the 1953 discovery of the double helix molecular structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) by British scientists Rosalind E. Franklin, Francis H. C. Crick, Maurice H. F. Wilkins and the American scientist James D. Watson at the Cavendish Laboratory (Cambridge, United Kingdom)—for which the latter three received the 1962 Medicine Nobel Prize, Franklin having died in 1958 with no prizes being awarded posthumously—, as well as that of the Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) biological molecule in 1961 by various biologists and doctors, produced a bio-technological revolution with the discovery and implementation of “gene scissors” (CRISPR-CAS9) by Biochemists Jennifer A. Doudna (University of California, USA) and Emmanuelle Charpentier (Max Planck Unit for Pathogen Sciences, Germany), who obtained the 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for this innovation. Beginning in 2012, the date on which they published the results of their research, a wave of experiments has swept the world around the genetic modification of plants and animals, with their consequent impact on ecosystems, as well as on the treatment and elimination of human chronic and/or degenerative diseases.

Specifically, gene editing has opened strong expectations regarding the possibility that technology offers for the editing of human embryos, which implies the possibility of modifying hereditary patterns and evolutionary processes. Implementation of this technique by an international team of biochemists and doctors led by Dr. He Jiankui (Southern University for Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China) led to the birth of three human female—two of them twins—whose DNA was edited to make them immune to the HIV virus, as well as to smallpox and cholera. When the experiment became published in late 2018, it caused a great commotion among the scientific community and the governments of the countries involved, who demanded a global moratorium in connection with use of the CRISP-CAS9 technology. Dr. He was condemned to three years in jail; nevertheless, the existence of three genetically modified girls has become a pole of attraction for scientists interested in studying the biochemical and evolutionary effects of the technology.²⁰

Extraterrestrial Exploration and Colonization

Lastly, astronomical and extraterrestrial exploration and colonization technologies, the initial moment of which predates by some hundreds of years the technologies commented above through invention and deployment of terrestrial telescopes, as well as the study of meteorites, have experienced an unprecedented boom and acceleration in recent decades, through the sending of telescopes into space, the construction of the International Space Station (MIR, 1986; EEI, 1998), the deployment of mid-range satellites in the Earth's orbit, voyages by human beings into outer space and the installation of robots in near celestial bodies (the Moon, Mars, asteroids).

The main achievements made possible through the use of technological astronomical devices are the observation and transmission of data (telecommunication) from sidereal distances; this requires the building and use of high-precision sensors and of robots with certain margins of operating autonomy—which are exposed to extreme environmental conditions and unknown physical surfaces—, as well as the capacity to detect and collect samples of minerals and extra-terrestrial life.

Exploration of the nearby universe, in turn, has not only made it possible to contrast and create new conjectures concerning astrophysical laws, the capacity to deploy a complex planetary coordination—as in the case of the observation, measurement and preparation of the image of the black hole in the M87 Galaxy, published in April 2019, as well as the Sagittarius A* black hole in the center of the Milky Way in May 2022 through the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) and eight millimetric telescopes placed in different regions of the planet: Chile, United States, Spain, Mexico and the South Pole—, but also a powerful race aimed at exploiting and, in the longer term, colonizing the celestial bodies that are relatively close to our planet.

These technologies have also made the development of applications in the health sector possible, as well as in the realms of treatment of ecosystems and telecommunications. In particular, the deployment of information technology and robotics made by these technologies has derived in experimentation favoring cyborgization, as well as the development of virtual reality. Reception and perception as sensory operations are being widely futurized in the digital and virtual realms, as is the expansion (augmentation) of the human body’s capacities, thus opening new horizons in the realm of social links of work, consumption and entertainment.

A most important future plan related to these space technologies is the terraforming of Mars; that is, its conversion into an inhabitable planet. Its potentiality stems from economic, but also from social and political reasons, inasmuch as this would change terrestrial norms and life experiences.

Human(oids): Body, Symbiosis and Prosthetics

The future frontiers associated with digital technologies and AI stress the human condition, both in terms of its concept of corporeality and psyche and of its evolutionary biological and ecological assumptions.

Orientation in space and time based on the human body depends on the system of binary orientation coordinates in reference to its location: left/right, up/down, before/behind. In the orthogonal dimension, the body is the pivot that in a cartographic plane represents the center as relating to left/right and the place as relating to up/down, while from the space-time perspective, it incorporates the here-now in the before and after dimension. This system is made more complex by the erect position and the bipedal mobility of the human body, which releases face and hand while walking, making other relations (gesture and speech) possible. Sight becomes the orientation instrument that move away the human body from perceptive immediacy, allowing it to deal with distances on both the horizontal and the vertical planes—the heavens, the stars and the Earth. One last distinction occurs between the body’s centrifugal situation and its centripetal position in connection with other bodies.

These combinations of scenarios that configure what is human are questioned by developments in future technologies, inasmuch as they transform the position of human in the play of the world. Involvement with and distancing from the world, mediatized by a new generation of (personal) devices reconfigure a new form of reality (space-time multiplicities), where the body’s gravity weight and its orientations get dis/assembled and re/assembled, generating alterations in the choreography of gestures, articulations, awareness and inter-subjectivity, transversalizing agency and futures.

The body is medialized, expanding—while it stumbles, like Ephestos, the Greek god of smelting and fire—thanks to devices allowing programs to become incarnated (digitizing what is analogic both in a technical and a corporeal sense) at the moment in which people connect with an antenna that expands, augments and diversifies their sensoriality, as well as their information resources, reorienting the manner in which it places itself in the world (example: the everyday use of GPS incorporated in various personal devices).

Cyborgs, in turn, may still be considered to be anomalies, or rather an experimentation process of exceptional relations between humans and technologies, the others and the future. In this sense, technologies emphasize what is artificial, extreme, crossing naturalization thresholds in which, in principle, the body being questioned is implied (personalization of biometrics and life’s politics), generating liminoidal spaces/times, even though technological acceleration appears to configure order as a perpetual threshold, an echo of Alice's cat sentence: in order to remain where you now are you must run as fast as possible.

On the other hand, just as this constant experimentation disputes the notion, modes and contents of personalities and the social links they implicate, other senses of these extensions become prosthetics that rehabilitate capacities lost by human beings, reconstituting the person after traumatic impacts (sensible corporeity losses).

Lastly, the relation of human beings with robots or intelligent machines transcends the transmutations provoked from corporeity and expands the societal link with the immaterial and inanimate world, while intensifying the processes of competition, displacement and future of humanity. Thus, while it enables relationships of collaboration and the expansion of knowledge of the dynamic patterns in several areas of work and everyday life, it demands the acquisition of new knowledge and processes of social adaptability that question and modify the place of human beings in their environment, such as the use of domestic robots, first level medical diagnosis based on algorithms, the multiple metrics generated by the Internet of things.

Virtual Realities: Immersion and Presence

The generation of virtual realities has been the subject of technological production for some time, but in the last few decades interest in and concern for the virtual has grown, driven by technological progress. Nonetheless, virtual reality must be understood as a singular medium and not merely as one more technical construct, but rather as a possibility to transcend in a new way the frames of physical and social reality, transforming the senses of place and generating an unsuspected, non-bodily-invasive experience.²¹ This virtuality, a new framework for reality which, according to the research group led by Lik-Han Lee and Pan Hui, interoperates with physical reality, entails aspects of an enchatment of reality [surreality].²²

For Ellis, a researcher of NASA’s AMES center, immersion is the result of virtualization, understanding this as “the process by which a human viewer interprets a patterned sensory impression to be an extended object in an environment other than that in which it physically exists”.²³ Sensitive impressions are generated by visual, auditory, tactile and kinesthetic devices, which in turn are articulated in a tracking system. From this vantage point, discussion, research and proposals have revolved around the results and technological feasibilities of these devices and their capacity to transmit information from different sensory realms, such as they now appear reflected in the discussions revolving around the Metaverse.²⁴

Concerning immersion, the device turns into a portal or gate, a chiasm or Moebius ribbon, connecting the user with other users and with unreal space-time worlds, the fundamental characteristics of which are immediacy and the ever more intense sensation of reality and presence.

In this sense, the project of turning the Internet into a Metaverse is betting on a radical transformation of future technologies and their relation with human beings in the near future. According to Pan Hui, a professor of information technologies media and art at Hong Kong’s University for Science and Technology and NOKIA Data Science at the University of Helsinki, Finland: “The metacosmos may seem to be far into the future, but with the arrival of technologies such as Extended Reality, 5G and Artificial Intelligence, the digital explosion of our online world is not far”.²⁵

For Richard Bartle, an academic and designer of videogames from the University of Essex, United Kingdom, the metaverse “is a collective scheme allowing multiple 3D environments to interoperate and communicate among them in the same way as this happens in the Internet, but in 3D. It has aspects of reality and aspects of virtual reality”.²⁶ Meanwhile, the team of Lik-Han Lee and Pan Hui define it as: “a computer-generated universe defined through enormously diversified concepts, such as: lifelogging, collective space in virtuality, embodied Internet/spatial Internet, a mirror world [and] an omniverse: a venue of simulation and collaboration”.²⁷

This parallel universe, examined by Dionisio, Burns and Gilbert, constitutes “a convincing alternate realm for human cultural interaction” and presupposes four fundamental components for its feasibility, centered on the immersion experience: realism, ubiquity, interoperability and scalability.²⁸

Nevertheless, it has been posited that immersion is a necessary but insufficient condition for the purpose of generating presence, the sense of being there, which is the central goal of virtual reality.²⁹ Thus, it has endeavored to make the definition of virtualization more complex, by distinguishing immersion from presence: while the first one is a technological achievement, the second one is a state of conscience which, in this case, is the sense of being in a virtual reality.

The great goal of research on virtual reality is to account for the way in which passage through the looking glass is achieved: the passage/leap from one world/frame into another. Immersion constitutes the passage through the (looking) glass (Alice or the watery Matrix mirror), in order to become submerged in virtual reality.

A fundamental precondition for the leap is the plot postulated by the virtual world to its possible participants, the illusion of plausibility of another, self-contained world; nonetheless, the very experience and the feasibility of action within the virtual world are configured through presence, through the possibility of generating the illusion of being there.³⁰ Both illusions of presence and plausibility converge in the virtual body acting in this new frame of reality, from which struggles are re-described that question and even dispute the very frame where the virtual world is being deployed.

Competition between several of the big tech corporations (Microsoft, Apple and Facebook) that are seeking to reconfigure social media through virtual reality is creating a field of rivalries that revolve around virtuality and the plausibility of worlds (plots), the illusions of presence (ways of being there) and of virtual bodies, as well as their interoperation with the physical worlds.

Futurization: Science and Fiction

The frontiers of futures configured by digital and virtual technologies, AI, gene editing and space exploration have transformed the old scientific cabinet of curiosities, a private collection for connoisseurs and initiates set in museum spaces, into a giant and reiterated multi-media and audiovisual exhibition of technological novelties, feats and chimeras codified in multiple narratives about the relationship between human beings and digital devices, virtual worlds, non-human intelligent entities, as well as present future and futuristic, terrestrial and galactic spaces and horizons.

In the realm of public opinion regarding these topics, a grandiloquent and heroic tone prevails, one that is centered on charming the active or potential consumer, user, patient, professional or apprentice, of the futurized frontiers, experiences and horizons. In this sense, the old print magazines for the dissemination of science have been mostly been displaced by digital sites and channels, led by scientists and engineers, with millions of followers and subscribers, in which experiments, tests and riddles, both theoretical and applied, are visualized and expounded in detail, in connection with natural science, behavioral science and biology, as well as programming and digitized data processing.³¹ The platforms seek to transcend the dissemination of information, marketing and technical training; their main goal is offering a sense of reality, certainty and presence to future technologies, intensifying the utopian´s spirit and feeding the permanent expectations of invention and innovation among a non-specialist public.

Specifically, the technologies associated with the exploration and colonization of space generate futurizations that could find a place somewhere between presentations revolving around the subject of technological advances and fictional approaches to the subject, given their presentification and naturalization through the digital representation of exoworlds,³² both real and possible, and space tourism;³³ aside from showing images and sounds produced through the telescopes and robots that explore some extraterrestrial objects and the universe,³⁴ as well as the presentation of increasingly realistic and detailed audiovisuals of voyages and the personal experiences of the few human beings that have visited the stratosphere.³⁵

For their part, entrepreneurs involved with the frontiers and technologies of the future—in contrast to scientists and professionals linked with research and the application of computer science, bioengineering and AI—sympathize and use some of the fictional narratives in the presentations of their idealizations and goals; at the same time, some non-institutional thinkers [outsiders] explore the scope and limitations of these subjects, exercising a sort of art and futuristic bets critique.³⁶

Futuristic fiction, a tried and true and privileged realm for building trans-human and extraterrestrial horizons, is now exploring and imploding the present frontiers and diversifying the space-time planes and perspectives in all their artistic manifestations—in the media, onstage and in literature—recreating and representing the many —utopian, dystopian, saving, destructive, ominous, etc.—facets of temporary frontiers and future technology bets.³⁷

Lastly, science and fiction linked to future technologies build spaces for presentation that re-shape the industrial fairs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, promoting narratives and aesthetics of enchatment, critique, dialogue and learning, all the while presenting futuristic space-time experiences designed for ever-widening audiences: entrepreneurs, experts, users.³⁸

To summarize, current futuristic narratives, in contrast with previous scientific presentations and artistic creations, appear to move in an arc that has almost completely abandoned dissemination and cultural extension purposes, in order to configure meanings and symbols concerning life’s present future, of what is human and non-human,³⁹ as well as presenting, manipulating and presentifying future technologies.

Technopolitics: Entrepreneurial Corporatization and Time Acceleration

The most visible link between politics and future technologies has to do with the design of frameworks conditioning technological developments. In this sense, the public policies of science and technology, incentives and taxation stand out, as well as all those implicating or affecting various areas concerning the deployment or restriction of said science and technology (energy, communications, etc.), which not only consider the efficiency, productivity and effects of technological developments, but also the ways in which they may incorporate or potentiate—through their design or through their use—specific forms of power and authority. For their part, the plot that future technologies impose upon politics implies the entrepreneurial corporatization of what is public, as well as the temporal acceleration of socio-political coordination efforts and decision-making.

The displacement of innovation and technological development (R&D) from the public realm—understanding this as the common good—to the realm of corporate privatization⁴⁰ hides the entrepreneurial corporate power game, blurring the deepest sense of the political as a form of social organization and action, making human intervention invisible, turning its values into a source of technological development—programming and data—, of criteria and steps that enable the intelligence and/or creativity of machines—software and device—, as well as of the applicability of their use. This power game reorders society by including or excluding individuals, collectives and geographic zones.

In turn, the strength of the entrepreneurial corporation turns laboratories and places of technological development and experimentation into spaces where decisions are made regarding what gets researched, what gets designed, how it gets configured and made operational and what the consequences of future technologies are for life on Earth, and potentially outside of it. Thus, the public is initially reduced to a mere consumer of what the entrepreneur, its board and developers decide, who not only own the risk and any financial gains, but also the power.

On the other hand, the temporal acceleration due to communications and transportation technological development has a contradictory impact on politics: while individuals and groups may increase the connectivity, interaction and exchange—of information, finance, consumption—in real time, political systems that respond to different processing times (ordinary, extraordinary) and do not adjust to the logic of acceleration, find themselves under pressure and collide with the dominant efficiency and efficacy expectations, i.e. the immediate result. Discrepancies and lags emerge between the accelerated decision-making and the rhythm of the world of politics, its structures and synchronization expectations.⁴¹

The high speed of current capitalism, potentiated by the technological development of information networks⁴² especially affects democracy, its institutions and procedures—which is organized under the logic of the analog clock⁴³—by accelerating the time available for processing demands, organizing and making decisions, which results in an elimination of steps, or asynchrony, options to which authoritarianism and populism are abler to adjust.

Technopolitics, that is the use of devices, such as cellphones, tablets or computers, with communications software, geo-localization, social networks, among other digital codifications for exchanges between citizens and government, turns into an adaptation of politics to an accelerated pace of life. This changes the orientation of public administration and governmental communications, as well as the interaction of citizens, eliminating certain traditional intermediaries (political parties, mass communication media, leaders of social organizations) from the equation, generating rapid government responses and/or collective actions.

In this sense, Facebook or Twitter, to mention but two social networks, conceived as potentially democratizing applications, are private technological spaces that offer their services in exchange for personal information that allow them to improve their algorithms and grow their profits through the selling of said information to private and state customers, while generating bubbles or biased sounding boxes that prevent users from encountering the different other. Thus, they end up being a private public space implying the sometimes undistinguishable fusion of person-citizen-consumer-user.

Also, algorithms weigh on realms such as surveillance and security, the procurement of justice or the implementation of social programs, thus reducing the state’s bureaucratic apparatus, generating savings and attaining efficiency, although this provokes imbalances by subsuming the values and criteria implicit in the operability principle to a supposed efficacy, causing undue detentions, deaths and unjustified exclusions. The source of power is further modified by the property rights over the code and the information consumed/produced: government becomes a user without knowledge of the process of development and without the capacity to modify or control the instrument. Thus, freedom of expression, freedom of thought and free will can be much more exposed to control by private agencies than by government entities.