The Basque professor Daniel Inneraritya prominent thinker on the problems of our time, arrives in Buenos Aires to join the cycle of Spanish-Argentine conversations Shared alphabetorganized by the CCEBA (Spanish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires) and Medifé Foundation. The talk, shared with the sociologist and teacher Gabriel Puricelliis titled Common problems, shared solutionsand this will be done Monday December 2 in it Friends of the Museum of Fine Arts Association Auditorium. The activity is free to enter, with open registration on the Medifé Foundation website.
Innerarity He is a political philosopher and currently combines his work as director of the Institute of Democratic Governance in San Sebastián with his role as a researcher for the University of the Basque Country. In addition, he has been a visiting professor at renowned academic institutions, such as the Sorbonne University and the European Institute of Florence. His work includes influential titles such as Ethics of hospitality, The transformation of politics y The democracy of knowledge.
He has been recognized as one of the “25 great thinkers of the world” by the French magazine The New Observer. In addition, he received multiple awards for his contributions to the humanities and social sciences. Among them, stand out the National Essay Awardhe Prince of Viana Award for Culture and recently, this week, the Eugenio Trías Essay Prize for the work A critical theory of artificial intelligence. The jury recognized “an original and solvent contribution on a topic that is extremely topical”, which avoids “catastrophic” positions and which raises “to what extent artificial intelligence conditions democracy and political decision-making, as well as communication”.
Before his arrival in Buenos Aires, Daniel Innerarity responded via email to a questionnaire Infobae Culture about the social and political reality of the Basque Country, the adjective The New Observerthe dilemmas posed by the technological revolution we are experiencing, the emergence of Artificial Intelligence as a panacea for the 20th century, some debates about knowledge (and ignorance) and this time of – paraphrasing an old song by The Police from the 80s, last century – “Too much information”.
—I understand that in your youth you had to live through the moments of maximum tension due to the actions of ETA. Rather than asking you for a political analysis, I would like to ask you about your personal memories of those years and what daily life was like (the series Patria based on the novel by Fernando Aramburu addresses that social climate, I don’t know if you read the novel or watched the series).
—Indeed, they were years of commitment and suffering, which Aramburu reflects well although a little caricaturedin my opinion. I was no exception and in my immediate environment violence was suffered in many different ways. The relevant thing is that that ended and no political price had to be paid, the current Basque Country is a space of relative political tranquility, where there is, with some small exceptions, a rejection of violence to obtain political objectives and self-government institutions led by coalition governments, with a less polarized political culture than in Madrid.
-When The New Observer included you in a list of the “25 great thinkers in the world.” What was your reaction? Do you take into account this type of qualifications from the media? Is it a correct or approximate definition, beyond your academic career, for a medium to call you a “thinker”?
—Praise should be appreciated, but without taking it too seriously. I am increasingly aware of what I still have to know and to what extent trusting what one knows can be an obstacle to learning new things. Thinking is, fundamentally, being attentive and exercising curiosity.. If one day I lose my curiosity to understand the world, I will have to dedicate myself solely to the mountains, which is my other great passion.
—Technology covers all aspects of daily life today and underlies the spread of each “technological advance,” the idea of a better future for humanity. What do you think about it? How to reconcile that technological optimism that seems to invade everything, with a real, not idealized, vision?
—There is a form of technological illiteracy that consists not of ignoring purely technical aspects but of ignoring that what is decisive is how this technology integrates and modifies the social environment. A good part of these fears and expectations, their hysterical nature, comes from the fact that we do not think of technology and society as a unit. in my book A critical theory of artificial intelligencewhich will be released in March 2025, I try to support a balanced view (neither fearful nor super optimistic) in the realization that, although we have given it the same name, Artificial intelligence and human intelligence “think” in different ways and solve very different problems.so it is completely exaggerated to think, for better or worse, of a future of robots that replace us.
—Artificial intelligence seems to be the panacea of this time. You have dealt extensively with the topic. How could you summarize your thoughts on it and how do you think it will affect our daily lives in the years to come?
—Rather than acting as a fortune teller, I propose that we think thoroughly about their possibilities and limits, for which matters they will do better than us and in which it is better for us to reserve the decision. As a general principle, Machines are better than us when the problem is well defined and there is a lot of data; whereas we are quite good at what we might call “wild problems”, where it is not clear what the problem is or the data is sparse. As Chesterton said, there are three matters in which humans should resist someone doing it for us, even assuming they could do it better: wiping our noses, choosing a partner, and deciding politics.
—One of his books is titled The society of ignorance and in it you have written “Never has knowledge been so important and at the same time so suspicious.” We live in a time in which groups that hold beliefs or ideologies with the category of “absolute truth” reemerged. How do such archaic visions (or we thought they were archaic) such as flat earthism and the denial of climate change, for example, coexist in an ultra-technological era?
—Contemporaries know much more than our ancestors, but they lived in a world in which there was not a big difference between what was known and what had to be known to survive. We, on the contrary, experience the abysmal difference between what we know and what we should know to face the challenges and crises of our world. This mixture between knowledge and ignorance is what is at the origin of such phenomena. To this is added that The problem is not lack of information but disorientationlargely produced by an excess of information that we do not know how to manage.
—We live in an era of overabundance of information and data. Is that good or bad? How do you, personally, deal with dependence on your mobile phone? Does it affect your daily life? Can we get fed up at some point, do you think, or will the snowball continue to grow to unknown limits?
—For better or worse, humans are finite beings, our attention is limited and time is scarce. We are forced to decide what we are not going to pay attention to, what supposed information we consider as dispensable noise. We spend the whole day saying no, stopping looking, limiting our interest to what we believe truly deserves it, with disconnection strategies… The most difficult and necessary learning in today’s world is to say no.
(Photos: courtesy of the Medifé Foundation press)
