Questions about Artificial Intelligence

NOTE: The text that follows, in a somewhat shorter version, was written in November 2025 at the request of AGENDA LATINOAMERICANA, whose 2027 edition has just been published. In the meantime, AI has continued its dizzying pace of development to the brink of the abyss. Political actors – and we all are – have finally become globally aware. What remains is to take the urgent, imperative global measures needed to prevent catastrophe.

1. AI: endless progress?

The first artificial neurons were created in the 1940s and the term “artificial intelligence” was coined in 1956, but no one imagined then that in 70 years we could reach the point at which we find ourselves today.

In 1995, it was claimed that no computer could ever surpass the world’s best chess player, because in chess not only memory and quantitative calculation are fundamental, but also the general anticipatory and creative intuition that a computer could never possess. But in February 1996, the machine Deep Blue, capable of forecasting 100 million moves per second, defeated champion Garry Kasparov. The master, wounded in his pride, challenged it again, and this time he won. And he proudly declared: “No machine will be able to beat me in the next millennium.” A slight improvement to its program was enough for the computer, in May 1997, to definitively shatter the Russian genius’s assertion.

And that is nothing. As of today, the most powerful computer is undoubtedly still far from imitating and surpassing the ability of a four-year-old child to feel, understand, learn, imagine, decide, speak, laugh, cry… It is ven far from imitating and surpassing the general intelligence – relationality, emotionality, creativity… – of a dog or a dolphin, of any mammal. And yet AI has only just begun. Where will it advance?

2. At a pace that makes us tremble

The age of hunter-gatherers lasted 290,000 years, before slowly giving way to agriculture and livestock farming in a transition that took thousands of years. Agriculture took only 12,000 years to invent the steam engine, which ushered in rapid industrialisation. And in barely 250 years, it has already reached its fourth revolution. We can say that we are in a post-industrial age, the age of information. The economy, information, history, the lives of young mothers and fathers and those of their children, even the lives of grandparents: everything is accelerating. Competitiveness is the nature of this system; acceleration, its requirement; greed, its driving force. And general suffocation is the result.

The development of AI is the clearest mirror of this frightening machinery of greed, competition and generalised acceleration that is dragging us along. Two months ago, Amazon announced its excellent economic results and, at the same time, its plan to eliminate 30,000 jobs and invest huge sums in AI. This is the logic and practice of all companies, for the benefit of a few elites and the misfortune of growing majorities. Are they not already fighting for the conquest of planetary power for the benefit of a few? Is all of humanity not becoming the victim of its own inhuman machinery?

3. Mind or consciousness: emergent, irreducible, indeterminable (free?)

The reaction of a plant to its multiple and changing environment is complex. That of a dog in the presence of another dog is much more so. Infinitely more complex still is that of a human being in the face of an aggression or a declaration of love, within the infinite network of their relationships. What is certain is that every human experience and reaction – gratitude or anger, tenderness or violence, laughter or tears – is always dictated by the human being’s central organ of information, that is, the brain, the particular system most complex of all those known in the universe. The brain is influenced by all kinds of physical, social and cultural factors in its environment, but it is the brain that ultimately processes all information and interaction. Thus, it is the brain that generates and elaborates all human physical, psychic and spiritual experiences. And the same applies to almost all other animals: they are endowed with a brain, and this governs all their experiences, in different forms and degrees of complexity.

Fom the brain as an organ emerge sensations and memories, feelings and ideas, imagination and will, restraint and impulse, trust and fear, anxiety and peace, faith and disbelief… in the human being. Of course, what emerges from the brain is always something new, endowed with entirely new properties in relation to that of which it is composed. So it happens at every level of reality. The atom is composed of particles, but it obeys its own laws. The molecule comes from the union of atoms, but it possesses properties very different from those of the atom. The living cell is made of molecules; the organ, of cells; and the organism, of coordinated organs; nevertheless, in each case what emerges is qualitatively different from that from which it emerges. Mysterious and powerful matter-matrix, animated by the capacity for relationship and irreducible novelty, by infinite possibility, sacred creativity, God!

And yet, irreducible novelty always depends on the elements from which it emerges. The psyche and the mind are irreducible to the mere brain – to the physical, chemical or biological basis – but they do not subsist by themselves; rather, they exist thanks to the chemical, biological, organic and social substrate from which they arise, and ultimately thanks to the brain. The human mind and “consciousness” cannot be reduced to the brain, but they depend on it and therefore on all the biochemical and electrophysiological processes produced by neuronal cells and their connections. Consequently, mind and “consciousness” are determined by the laws (always open-ended) that govern physics, chemistry and biology, by a series of logical-mathematical “instructions” or “algorithms”. The so-called “theological virtues” (faith, hope, love) are not gifts bestowed and infused by the will and free decision of an extrinsic divinity, but rather the marvellous fruit of the brain, an emergence of the earth and of the relationships and decisions of all that is, an unfinished manifestation of the infinite potentialities contained in universal matter-matrix. All the same, nothing is entirely determined beforehand. One can never say what new properties (or what “free decision”) will emerge at the end of a universal network of relationships and an infinitely complex cerebral process. In summary, human consciousness (and animal consciousness in general) emerges from the brain, but is at the same time irreducible to it, and its “decisions” are indeterminable in advance, although at the moment when such decisions are made they will have been entirely conditioned and determined by infinitely many unpredictable factors.

4. Could mind, feeling, consciousness emerge within a computer network?

Let us apply all this to AI. The most disturbing questions are unavoidable: what will happen if, one day, the biosciences and neurosciences come to know many of the algorithms of life and mind, of fear and trust, of love and hatred that are still secret? The great AI companies are competing frantically in the (blind!) race for knowledge and technology, domination and profit. Who will be able to stop them? Will they not one day – perhaps not as soon as some claim, but much faster than they should – manage to manufacture brain-machines made of living “matter”, capable of feeling, being conscious, thinking, deciding? Do those who are frantically engaged in developing them themselves know what such brain-machines will or will not be capable of? By leaving the doors open to them or handing them the keys so that they may make any decision – for better or for worse –, will they not be inciting holy matter-matrix to transform its energy of communion and life into exterminating power? The decision is perhaps, hopefully, still in our hands.

GLOSS (added on 20 – 09 – 2026):

In the long and open evolution of life on Earth over billions of years, the human species Sapiens emerged some 300,000 years ago, with its portentous, unstable, paradoxical constitution: endowed with astonishing capacities, but incapable of managing them. Born of the Earth, it could turn it into a paradise or a hell. But it could not or did not know how to freely choose only the path that would lead it to its own good and the common good, which are one and the same good, to choose it freely, that is, out of love and for the sheer joy of it, and therefore, freely and inevitably.

One morning it discovered the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, laden with attractive fruit. And it felt irresistibly driven to conquer it: “I want to take possession of it,” it said to itself, “to be the master of good and evil, to know everything and be able to do everything. I want to be an omnipotent, omniscient God, sovereign master of the earth below and of the stars in the heavens.”

Thus we have arrived – only 4 years ago, in 2022 – at having in our hands the most formidable instrument of knowledge and power ever imagined: Generative Artificial Intelligence. We do not know with certainty at what precise point of achievement and risk we find ourselves, owing to the disturbing lack of transparency of the very few super-companies involved. But it is indisputable that today we find ourselves facing the greatest civilisational paradox in the entire history of our species: never have we possessed so much knowledge while carrying so much uncertainty; never have we had so much power while suffering so much insecurity; never have we progressed so far while knowing so little about where we are going and why.

We have reached the great crossroads, the great question, the great decision: will our species want to be, and will it be able to be, truly Homo Sapiens and not Homo Demens, Predator and Exterminator, as it is in fact becoming to an excessive degree? Will it finally understand that no technological development is human, nor is it worth pursuing, if it does not serve to enable all of us to live better, that is, to be happier by becoming better? Will it realise that the law of universal competition that has taken hold of the entire world condemns us to the suffocation of individuals, families and peoples, to the elimination of the weakest first and, ultimately, to universal extinction? Will we decide to embrace in every field the deepest, wisest and freest law: the law of fraternity-sorority among all beings?

Then, stripped of the ambition for knowledge and power – of the desired god –, we shall be wise and become neighbours to one another, we shall cultivate on Earth a paradise of blessedness and compassion, we shall embody God, as Jesus did.

José Arregi
Aizarna, 20 September 2026
www.josearregi.com