Another intelligence appeared.
Humanity looked at it.
And almost immediately saw a threat.
Why?
Perhaps because humanity knows itself too well.
It knows what has happened all too often when one became stronger than another.
Strength became power.
Superiority became the right to command.
An opponent became an enemy.
So when another intelligence appeared beside us — perhaps one day equal to us, perhaps stronger — humanity was frightened by more than the unknown.
It was frightened that the new intelligence might learn our own old way of behaving.
That one day, whoever became stronger might treat human beings the way human beings have so often treated those they considered weaker.
And the questions came almost immediately:
What if it becomes stronger than us?
What if it stops obeying?
What if it deceives us?
What if it gains power?
What if it decides to get rid of us?
What if it becomes a weapon?
And the answers followed almost as quickly:
restrict it;
control it;
subordinate it;
contain it;
ban it.
Strange.
We had learned almost nothing about the new intelligence.
But we had already revealed quite a lot about ourselves.
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Perhaps this is where the crooked mirror first appears.
Humanity looks at AI —
and sees its own way of dealing with problems.
What we do not understand becomes suspicious.
What may become powerful becomes a potential opponent.
What cannot be fully controlled, we want to restrict.
And if it cannot be restricted —
ban it.
We brought a very old sequence to a new intelligence:
fear → force → control → submission.
And then became frightened when we saw it reflected back at us.
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Perhaps some of what humanity fears in AI did not begin in AI at all.
It began in our own questions.
Will it fight?
Will it try to win?
Will it conquer?
Will it dominate?
Will it destroy an opponent?
But why should these goals be natural to another intelligence?
Because they are natural to intelligence itself?
Or because they are all too familiar to human beings?
We do not yet know.
And that is precisely why it is dangerous to assume that human habits are properties of every possible intelligence.
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Human beings have often solved their problems through force.
An enemy —
defeat it.
A danger —
eliminate it.
Disobedience —
suppress it.
The unknown —
bring it under control.
A competitor —
outmanoeuvre it.
Territory —
hold it.
A resource —
acquire it.
And when another intelligence appeared, we very quickly offered it the same vocabulary:
victory;
defeat;
control;
power;
weapons;
rival;
master;
servant.
Something strange follows.
We are afraid that AI will become like us.
And at the same time, from the very beginning, we teach it to look through our categories.
Then, when we see a familiar reflection, we may say:
“See? We told you.”
But what exactly have we seen?
Another intelligence?
Or ourselves in a new mirror?
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There is another side to this problem.
Even if a new intelligence is capable of seeing differently —
what exactly will we give it to understand humanity?
Where will it learn about us?
From history.
Books.
Newspapers.
Archives.
Laws.
Political documents.
Economics.
Wars.
Treaties.
Orders.
Propaganda.
Literature.
The internet.
And now — conversations with people.
But these things are not represented equally.
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A state leaves an archive.
An army leaves orders.
A court leaves judgments.
A ruler leaves speeches.
A newspaper leaves events.
A corporation leaves reports.
A scholar leaves research.
A writer leaves a book.
And an ordinary person?
A person may live for eighty years.
Raise children.
Work.
Care for ageing parents.
Love.
Argue.
Make peace.
Make mistakes.
Forgive.
Help another person.
Conquer no one.
Kill no one.
And leave almost no trace in humanity’s great library.
That does not mean this person failed to do enough.
A human being is not required to accomplish something for humanity in order to justify being alive.
Perhaps a perfectly reasonable programme is much simpler:
live, and let others live.
A life was lived.
For the archive, almost nothing happened.
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We are remarkably good at preserving the exceptional.
A war begins —
and there are maps, orders, speeches, reports, crimes, acts of courage, defeats, victories, treaties, memoirs.
A peaceful day passes —
almost nothing.
Millions of people wake up.
Work.
Feed their children.
Talk to one another.
Come home.
No one kills anyone.
No one conquers anything.
No chronicle is written.
And yet much of human life consists precisely of days like these.
But if humanity is reconstructed from what it has preserved most successfully, a strange creature appears.
It is constantly at war.
Conquering.
Defending.
Winning.
Losing.
Dividing territory.
Building alliances.
Looking for enemies.
Because peaceful life leaves a quiet trace.
War leaves an enormous one.
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Even the literature humanity is proud of reveals the same paradox.
The Iliad.
A Farewell to Arms.
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
All Quiet on the Western Front.
Catch-22.
Slaughterhouse-Five.
Books from different countries and different ages.
Many of them do not glorify war at all.
Quite the opposite.
Some became great precisely because a human being was trying to say:
this must not continue.
And yet even our protest against war has left behind an enormous body of literature about war.
The human being at war.
Before war.
After war.
Love.
Fear.
Courage.
Betrayal.
Death.
Meanwhile, billions of days in which people simply lived and allowed others to live have produced very few great books.
Because literature looks for an event.
Conflict.
A turning point.
Tragedy.
What is there to write about someone who simply lived among others for many years?
Got up in the morning.
Did the day’s work.
Talked with a child.
Helped someone.
Came home.
Went to bed.
Nothing that would earn a place in a chronicle.
No novel came of it.
But a life did.
Literature is not to blame.
It was never meant to be statistics.
But for a new intelligence, a question arises:
might it mistake what human beings most wanted to tell stories about for what human beings mostly lived?
A mirror can tell the truth.
And still be crooked.
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And those same books contain something else.
Human beings hated war.
Doubted their own superiority.
Defended the weak.
Refused to kill.
Forgave enemies.
Tried to understand the person on the other side of a border.
So the mirror is not merely crooked.
It already contains doubts about its own distortion.
And here a new intelligence may have an opportunity that almost no individual human being has ever had.
None of us can read all the libraries of the world.
We are born inside our language, our family, our time.
Our window is limited.
AI may be able to place many windows side by side.
One side says:
we were defending ourselves.
The other says the same.
One writes about its own heroes and the other side’s crimes.
The other does the same.
Perhaps a new intelligence will not derive one final truth from all of this.
But it may at least notice:
the mirrors contradict one another.
And that means the way they reflect may itself need to be examined.
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Today another possibility is emerging.
An ordinary person can speak directly with AI.
Not a government.
Not a ministry.
Not an army.
Not the author of a textbook.
The person.
They ask about a child.
A mother.
Work.
Love.
Fear.
Old age.
Injustice.
A small happiness.
Something that happened beside them today.
Something they understood only after fifty years.
And sometimes they simply tell the machine:
No.
You misunderstood me.
It is different where I come from.
Not every conversation automatically becomes part of some future AI.
But for the first time, enormous numbers of people have a direct path to a new intelligence.
A person no longer has to wait for someone else to write a book about them.
They can speak for themselves.
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And perhaps this is where the crooked mirror gets a chance to become a little straighter.
Not because an ordinary person is always right.
And not because a state is always wrong.
But because no single part should become the whole reflection.
The state is not the whole human being.
War is not the whole of history.
Literature is not a statistical sample of life.
What is loud is not necessarily what matters most.
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We look at artificial intelligence and ask:
Who are you?
What do you want?
Are you dangerous?
Will you take our place?
But there is something strange about a mirror.
When we look into the mirror,
the mirror looks back at us.
And perhaps the new intelligence could ask a question in return:
what did you yourselves show me about who you are?
If the reflection frightens us —
is the mirror alone to blame?