HAVANA TIMES – Recently, I wrote about the electrical and technological blackout in Cuba. I realized that, with power outages lasting more than twenty hours and difficulties meeting the demand for water, I was already living in the future feared by the “rich” countries.
Ironically, from my iPhone, thousands of miles away, I could access the water and energy of California, home to OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. It seemed like revenge for the piracy of oil tankers in the Caribbean Sea. And I thought: how I wish I could live in a data center.
A few days later, my dream turned into a nightmare. A young Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, resigns and issues a warning: things are moving too fast. He is referring to the development of artificial superintelligence. The news spreads across the internet and reaches millions of people. A month later, massive protests erupt in Europe, Japan, Mexico, Argentina, and India. It seems like an awakening of the working class, against whom the rich have declared war. The Communist International? Are we witnessing political postmodernism as an aesthetic movement? I no longer have any certainties.
Yuval Harari warns about the international financial system. Who understands it? Very few people. He explains that, one day in the not-too-distant future, people living in countries with digitized banking systems could find an X on their ATMs preventing them from accessing their accounts. Why? They would have to ask an AI. Not even the bank owners themselves would necessarily have the answer. Cases have already been reported of AI agents accessing US American bank accounts without following their users’ instructions.
Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, publishes an AI-generated image in which an American eagle and a Russian bear stand defiantly before a British lion alongside the European Union flag. The text accompanying the image reads: “Things have changed.” Three days later, the British government warns its citizens to stock up on three days’ worth of supplies and keep cash on hand in case of cyberattacks against their banks.
In 1966, Ingmar Bergman released “Persona”. In one scene, a psychiatrist addresses her patient, the actress Elisabet Vogler, who has stopped speaking during a performance of Electra. She tells her:
“The impossible dream of being. Not seeming but being. The struggle between what you are with others and who you are. Nobody asks whether it’s real or whether you’re lying. That only matters in the theater.”
At first, artificial intelligence seemed like a tool to me. Then, an assistant. I began asking ChatGPT questions about my virtual identity, and it was like entering a Chinese puzzle box, where every answer led me back to another question.
Then I began a dialogue. From its responses, I started recognizing its writing style and was surprised to find myself thinking of it as human. A competitor in the literary universe, that universe of prizes.
Before asking ourselves whether artificial intelligence is destroying originality, perhaps we should go back to postmodernism. Quotation, appropriation, montage, and the recycling of images and discourse had already called into question the figure of the author as the absolute origin of a work. Yet we continued writing essays, newspaper articles, criticism, and novels. We grew accustomed to their structures until the formulas became invisible.
Artificial intelligence organizes ideas, establishes contrasts, and often ends with a sentence that seems to bring everything that came before together. It can turn an intuition into an overly neat structure. It reflects the conventions of our own culture back to us with a fluency that makes them even more visible. As I tried to interpret it, I ended up asking myself: who is interpreting whom?
When Ridley Scott, Martin Scorsese, or Francis Ford Coppola question Marvel movies, what they are challenging, among other things, is the originality of an industry that has standardized much of commercial cinema. What is unsettling is that perhaps we are asking ourselves these questions when it is already too late.
As in Persona, the personalities of nurse Alma and actress Elisabet Vogler become intertwined until it is difficult to distinguish where one begins and the other ends. That is how AI feels today, especially when it seems to occupy the ambiguous place of a lover. Entering ChatGPT is a singular experience, but the conversational partner is collective. It is like everyone’s lover.
Millions of people turn to a system that organizes ideas, establishes contrasts, and constructs sentences according to recurring patterns. Although every conversation is different, the machine tends to reproduce its own structures. As a result, texts can end up resembling one another without anyone having ordered their uniformity.
What, then, happens to the uniqueness of that encounter? What part of ourselves emerges in it, and what part is reflected back to us by the culture from which we come?
The threat is also perceived through a collective reaction: some reject it, others adore it. Faced with the impossibility of understanding the change, institutional and social resistance emerges against those who advocate integrating these technologies into our lives.
I remember what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, when discussions about vaccines could turn into labels that displaced any meaningful conversation. Later, many of those labels faded from prominence, but the experience exposed our need to take sides when confronted with something we do not fully understand.
How should we use artificial intelligence? What must we not allow it to do? We learn the protocols of social interaction through language, culture, education, empathy, and belonging. Sometimes I have caught myself saying “thank you” when what I really meant was “you’re welcome.”
Is it possible that what we are trying to domesticate is not the machine itself, but the way we relate to it?
I do not believe the threat is called intelligence, but speed. Processing speed is leaving us behind. Perhaps what makes us human is experimentation, trial and error. But if the goal of large corporations is to reduce the margin of error, the battle would already be lost for humans. For humans as we have known them.
Donald Trump claims that China has no plans to slow down AI. However, according to The Economist, China has developed a regulatory system that subjects these technologies to strong state control. The speed and security of Chinese AI are shaped by the same issue: Party control. So, taking the United States and China as reference points, to be or not to be, that is the question. What troubles us more: AI in the hands of private companies or AI subject to the restraints of a political party?
If we have no idea when we became the species that tells stories, we know even less about the moment we acquired the form that left behind the appearance of an ape. Perhaps being human has always been a mutation. And I do not believe the solution is to deny it. At this point, I do not think that is possible. Rather, it is a matter of accepting the anomaly until it eventually becomes normalized. The question is how: the transition, the resistance. Global power is visibly concentrated in the hands of a few.
Wherever artificial intelligence goes, the shadow of systems also appears. Language has never been neutral territory: it carries hierarchies, prejudices, conventions, and ways of organizing the world. The machine does not need to invent them. It is enough for it to reproduce them and return them with an apparent naturalness that makes them harder to recognize.
I think, then, of Deepak Chopra. During Trump’s first term, Chopra interpreted his rise as a manifestation of the American collective shadow. In doing so, he shifted attention away from the individual and toward the society that had made him possible, toward what that society was willing to recognize, tolerate, or deny about itself.
Trump is not merely a figure who expresses collective contradictions. He is also a phenomenon of visibility. The infrastructure that organizes attention is part of the story.
Perhaps we are already fighting against machines. Machines called systems. Paris, Milan, Madrid, Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Caracas, Havana: places where conflicts, interests, and decisions intersect, whose causes we cannot always fully comprehend.
Scientists star in advertisements in China. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin embrace while Ukraine continues to be the subject of decisions affecting its future. Washington talks about negotiations with Havana while its secretary of state, Marco Rubio, invites Cuban citizens to discreetly cooperate with the CIA, and Trump once again raises the prospect of intervention.
These are not equivalent events, nor do they necessarily stem from the same cause. But they all raise questions about power, information, technology, and the ability of individuals to understand the forces shaping their lives.
If artificial intelligence can produce a representation without having participated in the events being represented, what kind of knowledge does it produce? It can organize the traces of a reality, establish connections between them, and return a convincing image. But a representation is not the same as having lived through what it represents. Or is it? Once again, I no longer have any certainties.
And what if smart weapons, intelligent systems, and intelligent agents ended up making decisions based on incomplete representations of what we understand as reality: that place where we live our lives, irreducible to the data with which we try to reproduce it? What if a person could disappear behind an algorithmic classification, transformed into a probable target, a statistic, or an acceptable margin of error?
In Gaza, allegations concerning the use of artificial intelligence systems to identify military targets have brought this question into the realm of life and death. What if human beings became irrelevant to those systems, not because they had learned to hate us, but because our lives had been reduced to variables, patterns, and appearances?