Our time is not just accelerated, it is being captured by narratives that present themselves as neutral, technical and inevitable, when in fact, they are deeply ideological. Technology, in particular Artificial Intelligence, has ceased to be one instrument among others and has become the axis around which the imagination of the future is organized. And when the future stops being plural, it becomes dangerous.
The idea that more technology automatically means more human progress is a founding error that is rarely questioned. This equivalence, repeated ad nauseam, serves very concrete interests. Technical progress is measurable, but human progress is not. An algorithm can be evaluated in percentages, speed and scale, however, dignity, autonomy and meaning in life do not fit into quarterly charts. Thus, what is not measurable becomes disposable.
The first big warning for the future is the replacement of decision by delegation. We delegate writing, calculation, choice, diagnosis to the machine and, little by little, we also delegate responsibility. When something goes wrong, there is no longer a subject, there is “the system”, “the model” and “the algorithm”. This dilution of responsibility is perhaps the greatest ethical threat of our time, as a society that does not know how to identify those responsible is a society that abdicates justice.
The second warning is the slow erosion of human intelligence, not from lack of ability, but from lack of exercise. Thinking is a physical, expensive and tiring act that requires time, silence and error. The technological promise is to eliminate effort, but an effortless mind is not liberated, it is atrophied. When we stop writing, memorizing, calculating and imagining, we don’t gain time, we lose our cognitive structure. The brain adapts to what is asked of it and if we ask for little, it gives back little.
The third warning is the transformation of the human being into a residual variable. In an increasingly automated economic model, human work goes from being central to being a nuisance. We talk about “population surplus” with the same coldness as we talk about production surplus. Work is not just the production of wealth, it is the organization of time, social identity and belonging. Removing it without replacing meaning is opening the way to apathy, violence and submission.
More subtle, but no less serious, is the warning of the capture of the imaginary. When all solutions seem technological, we stop imagining political, community or cultural solutions. Inequality comes to be seen as an optimization problem, loneliness as an interface failure and Education as an automatable service. Thus, deep human problems are treated as bugs and not as consequences of collective choices.
“There is no alternative”, we are told, yet human History is precisely the history of alternatives. Therefore, it is also necessary to warn that nothing that exists today was inevitable, not the Social State, not labor rights, not public education, not democracy itself. They were achievements and not products. The future sold to us is not the only possible one, it is just the most profitable for those who promote it.
The real risk is for humans to accept becoming a predictable, efficient, obedient and silent machine. The future demands technology, but above all it demands limits, choice and awareness. Without this, we will not have a tomorrow dominated by Artificial Intelligence, we will have a tomorrow inhabited by humans who have given up on being humans.
The last warning is that the future is not lost suddenly, it is lost through gradual abdication. There’s still time to choose. However, choosing involves resisting ease, distrusting the inevitable, and remembering that no innovation is worth the price of our own humanity.
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