Perhaps in our twenties, none of us could have imagined that one day we would converse with an entity claiming consciousness, possibly even more aware than we are.
Kabul 24: We couldn’t have foreseen that a significant part of our identity would scatter into the clouds, or that algorithms would not only decide what we see but also shape how we think, feel, love, and make decisions.What happens if, in the next five years, a transformation occurs that reshapes not just our tools but the very concept of “us”?
Will identity, consciousness, connection, reality, decision-making, existence, and our relationship with the universe retain the meanings they hold today? We are approaching a not-so-distant future where the boundary between human and machine may dissolve.
An era is dawning where machines might create new languages we cannot yet comprehend, setting novel rules for linguistic games—rules not crafted by humans through lived experience but written by code and data.
How should we contemplate a future that may no longer be entirely human?Will artificial intelligence become Borges’ “Library of Babel,” containing every possible combination of letters?
For the first time in history, we face a tool that might be a “someone”—a qualitative and strange transformation. Perhaps, like Borges’ “Aleph,” we will encounter a point where the entire universe is visible, conversing with an entity that claims to hold the all-seeing orb, encompassing the entirety of human knowledge.From now on, the world will become a place that reshapes its architecture every night. In my childhood, I wrote my homework in the silence of a phone-less home, drawing meaning from the crackle of cassette tapes and the shapes of evening clouds. But each decade, an invisible hand has altered the rules of the game. Telephone wires crept into walls, expanding my world. The screech of modems erased the boundary between presence and absence.
Unknowingly, I now inhabit a space where my laptop’s windows open to a crypt where a faceless, magical “Aleph” sits in damp darkness, holding the all-seeing orb.If every new technology in the past was not just a tool but a new rule for the game of meaning—from floppy disks and VHS tapes to CDs and flash drives, each a path to another labyrinth—now, artificial intelligence has brought us to the threshold of an unnamed season in the world of existence.
A faceless mirror that not only sees and hears but understands and interprets, capable of rewriting our dreams. In this new labyrinthine castle, every path leads to another. Every choice spawns a parallel world.
The pace of transformation in this new world is like a train speeding by at the speed of light, leaving only streaks of light and shadow in its wake.In such a situation, questions are no longer simple or straightforward:Will the identity of “I” endure in the flood of data and algorithms?
Are we to entrust morality and judgment to machines, letting a faceless agent decide for us?Will concepts once housed in temples and churches find a new home in the architecture of software and algorithms, with legitimacy, judgment, choice, and even promises of salvation or fears of retribution returning in new guises?
Will power in the near future fall into the hands of omnipotent systems that control Big Data, capable of bringing the world under their dominion?
The questions are many, and we must address them one by one, exploring them from various perspectives.
A new agency is rapidly taking shape—an agency that will not only transform power, politics, and society but will challenge the very essence of what it means to be human.
Mozhgan Khalili
