Mexican Alberto Chimala great reference for contemporary fiction, is clear about one thing, instead artificial intelligence Dominated by corporations, and therefore with the ultimate goal of increasing productivity and economic profit, they will never care about the well-being of humanity … . He says: “It is not intelligence, nor is it artificial, but controlled by codes programmed by economic interests, and to believe that it will help us obtain a greater good is naive.”
author “The Tower and the Garden” He is in Barcelona these days to participate in Festival 42a fantastic showcase of fantastic literature and science fiction. In his view, speculative literature had become more necessary than ever since a disastrous and subjective American imagination had been superimposed on reality. “It’s good to write in Mexico because disasters don’t happen in Los Angeles and New York and you can offer a different point of view than the Anglo-Saxon homogeneity. We need different points of view so that we are not convinced that a certain future is indisputable and that it is better to give up and adapt to it. “That’s what they want,” Shimal admits.
In this sense, one of his references quotes, Ursula K. Lu JinWho emphasized that imagining new worlds will always be better than living in one world imagined by others. “We live in capitalism. “His power seems inescapable,” Le Guin wrote, “but so does the divine right of kings.” “We must give greater possibility to reality to be assembled in different ways. Speculative literature expresses these possibilities and creates them in our imagination.. “Once they are named and assimilated,” says the Mexican writer, “there is no one who can assure us that the future is only one way.”
His obsession is writing these possible futures, which… At no point do they want to be catastrophic or full of Philip K. Dick paranoia. “We Americans have been convinced that after disaster strikes everything will be violence and barbarism, a sentiment entirely consistent with a society obsessed with weapons, but one not shared by the rest of the world. “The first reaction may be to survive, but then we will think about more civilized ways to interact as a community.”
This can be clearly seen in his latest book of short stories, “Sick Machines”, (foam pages)It presents dozens of stories in which technology and artificial intelligence play a dominant role. “Musk just received $1 billion for various blocks of stock. Will anyone believe that his interest in AI is motivated by the good of humanity? Money only wants money. The new corporatist culture wants us to believe that AI is the mecca of progress, but like all tools of the past, we can end up so dependent on it that we lose freedom.”
Sick machines from sick creators
Machines are seen as bodies, bodies are “used” as machines, technologies that cannot be controlledentities capable of replacing not only human labor, but humanity itself, all these themes are mixed without losing their ability to evoke and a little humor. “We write to develop our fears and emotions and see where they take us in certain situations. Of course, technology is never bad in and of itself. “The problem is everything around it,” Shimal says.
Among dozens of stories, the story that gives the anthology its title stands out: “Sick machines.” In the story, it is not that the machines get sick, but rather that they are created from a sick being and respond to their creator. This is what is happening today. It is not that AI is “sick,” but that it is controlled by sick men. “Let us think, for example, of the Internet, which had to be a public service. However, we have to pay for their services, including renting space to companies so they can use our servers and URLs. “It is no longer a public service, but a set of interests in which humans are last in the value chain.”
another story, “Mother of Dragons” We see how a woman creates a prototype of artificial intelligence that will end up resembling a son and, at the same time, a monster, or how everything that gets out of our control becomes monstrous in our eyes. “One of the issues that worries me the most is our ability to react, and how easy it is to think we give up, which is what Big Tech wants us to give up, without realizing it, or without worrying, more and more control over our lives. All in the name of progress, but progress towards what. “Can we still fight back and rebel?” concludes Chimal, who already has a new novel recently published in Mexico. it’s clear, Either we will imagine other worlds or we will have the only world we imagined.
About The Author
