The Tutor

Kant went out for his walk at half past three in the afternoon with such exactness that the neighbors of Königsberg set their clocks by his passing. Two and a half centuries later, it is the clock that sets me. The device on my wrist knows when I slept badly, suggests that I breathe. The century that promised to free man from his tutors ended up renting him one for twenty dollars a month, and we still thank it for the kindness.

The Enlightenment, said the old professor, was man’s exit from the nonage for which he himself was to blame, the courage to use his own understanding without direction from another. “Sapere aude”. Dare to know. The proposal was simple and scandalous, and those who took it seriously paid dearly. Condorcet, who wrote about the infinite perfectibility of the human spirit while hiding from the guillotine, died in a cell of the same revolution he had hailed as the dawn of reason. The project of emancipating man always carried that awkward detail, the habit of devouring its first believers.

Well, the project matured and changed its address. The heirs of the eighteenth century live in California now and offer as convenience what Kant demanded as courage. And the offer works so well that it spares us the exercise.

This week I asked the machine I carry in my pocket who had written a certain sentence about automatons as heirs of the Enlightenment. It confessed it did not know for sure. It listed hypotheses, marked each one with its corresponding degree of doubt, warned me where it had nothing but a hunch. On one detail, it was wrong. I pointed out the error, it thanked me, corrected itself on the spot and noted the rule so as not to stumble twice over the same stone. For a moment I was moved. I had been treated as an adult by a piece of software, and the software let itself be taught by me. It has been years since I received from a ruler an answer of such honesty, and longer still since I saw one of them accept correction without treating the corrector as an enemy.

The sentence I was looking for held that extreme automation is the culmination of the rationalist project of the eighteenth century. I later discovered that the sentence, as I kept it in memory, has no owner. The thesis does. It belongs to the French essayist Éric Sadin, who in 2018 published Artificial Intelligence or the Challenge of the Century, describing there the regime of algorithmic truth, the old emancipating reason reduced to a calculation that decides for us. The Enlightenment staked everything on reason as the road to freedom, and the bet won by such excess that reason became technique, technique became product, and the product learned to think without asking the thinker’s permission. The century of lights wanted to pull us out of our nonage. Its most gifted heir returns us to it with instant answers, and most of us accept with a smile. Kant would say the blame, once again, is entirely ours.

Days later I watched a three-hour lecture by the Brazilian neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis. From Nicolelis I steal, without ceremony, a concept. He calls a Brainet the collective abstraction capable of putting millions of minds in synchrony, the common idea under which a multitude begins to act as a single organism, whether a faith, a flag or a promise. And this is no lecturer’s metaphor. Before carrying the word into history, he proved it in the laboratory, wired the brains of rats and monkeys into networks and watched them solve together tasks none of them could solve alone. The history of civilizations, he argues, is the clash between these mental networks. Rome stood as long as the idea of Rome convinced. When the legions began to fail, a new informational virus, the Christian message, offered hope to the wretched and remade the empire from within.

I live in a country that is a direct child of that century and perhaps the most deliberate Brainet in modern history. Israel was imagined in pamphlets, voted on at a congress in Basel, debated in newspapers before existing on any map. Herzl believed that public reason could invent a nation, and invent it did. People who shared neither language nor soil came to share an abstraction, and the abstraction became a state, with an anthem, a currency, an army and algorithms that calculate in milliseconds the parabola of a missile over northern Israel.

It is this network that the current government unravels, thread by thread, with a diligence it denies to everything else. A thousand days have passed since the most atrocious morning in our history without the acceptance of a state commission of inquiry. A commission of inquiry is the instrument by which a nation synchronizes its own memory, fixes a common version of what it suffered and of who failed. To postpone it is to keep the country desynchronized on purpose, each tribe with its own truth, each truth pointing at the tribe next door. The cabinet defies the Supreme Court the way one ignores an inconvenient neighbor, and thereby removes the last knot that obliged everyone else to talk. The current government does not use reason. It governs by survival instinct and fights reason wherever it appears, because reason asks questions, demands answers, and any honest answer would threaten its power.

There is in this a careless cruelty and a hypocrisy. The same men who give speeches on artificial intelligence as the nation’s future treat natural intelligence as a nuisance and cut off the universities’ oxygen. Our democracy, that old lady who once breathed more easily, watches it all from the balcony, and no one remembers to take her blood pressure.

Kant feared the tutors who spare us the labor of thinking. He did not foresee that the last of them would be born of reason itself, nor that there would be governments devoted to sparing us the labor of thinking together. In Jerusalem, among those who rule, knowing remains forbidden, and the only task carried out with Prussian punctuality is the demolition of the idea that once taught us to walk together.