A Look from the Future to Understand the Present of AI

We ask it to write an email, a speech we claim as our own, and we even accept the hallucinations it invents. We consult it about a skin rash, the "evil eye," and chat with it as if it were just another friend.

Generative Artificial Intelligence is no longer a laboratory experiment: it's an invisible co-pilot to whom we enthusiastically hand over part of the wheel. But we do it with the apprehension of traveling without a map, without knowing where it will take us. This fear is what defines our time.

This fear divides the global conversation into two poles: the technological optimism that offers magical solutions and the dystopian pessimism that warns of massive unemployment and algorithmic control.

To escape this trap, I sought distance in fiction. In my novel "Robots with Soul: Trapped Between Truth and Freedom", I imagined a future that allows us to view the present as if it were already history. I discovered something fundamental: without a robust ethical framework for AI, we won't be condemned to an apocalypse, but we will lose our human direction.

The Tenant

AI is like a tenant who lives in our house and never stops watching and listening. Every Google search, every WhatsApp chat, every TikTok video reveals our doubts, emotions, and phobias. With this data, algorithms enclose us in bubbles that reinforce our beliefs and suppress dissenting voices. What is celebrated in the digital world as personalization is nothing more than surveillance.

The risk doesn't end on the screen. Geolocation systems inform that we are not at home—an open invitation for thieves. Health devices that monitor our sleep or pulse are valuable for well-being, but are also intimate x-rays that, if leaked, could be used by insurers or employers. And the financial data we provide when shopping online can be transformed into fraud that empties accounts in seconds.

The objectivity of AI is a mirage. Amazon had to discard a hiring system because it penalized women, and judicial programs like COMPAS in the U.S. demonstrated how AI can amplify existing discrimination. The machine isn't malicious; it only replicates the injustice of the data it's fed.

The greatest danger of AI appears when it speaks with excessive confidence. It doesn't lie with malice, but its fictions can be devastating. The promise of a "Dr. ChatGPT" resurrected the old problem of self-diagnosis. In mental health, the inability to empathize can deepen isolation instead of healing.

Hallucinations are not trivial errors. In 2024, an employee in Hong Kong transferred more than $25 million after a video call with digital clones of his bosses, created using deepfake technology. In the political arena, the threat is greater: in India and the United States, fake audio recordings were circulated, attributed to leaders who never spoke.

The risk is not limited to the individual sphere; it also strikes professions that are the backbone of democracy. Journalism is the most obvious case. If Google and Facebook used to condition traffic to media outlets, today AI engines directly absorb and summarize the news without returning an audience to its sources. The press loses resources, and society loses its watchdog. A machine can narrate the facts, but it can't make power uncomfortable or feel empathy for the vulnerable.

Breaking the Old Cycle

History shows a self-defeating pattern: first, we celebrate innovation, then we suffer its vices, and only afterward do we regulate. Happened with the Industrial Revolution; we only regulated after suffering labor exploitation and child labor. And the same happened with the internet; we only debated privacy violations after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which revealed how data from millions of users was manipulated to influence elections in the U.S. and Brexit.

The positive difference is that with AI, we're trying to break this cycle. For the first time, the debate about its risks is at the center of the global agenda before a catastrophe. In 2024, the European Union approved the first Comprehensive AI Act, which prohibits unacceptable applications like "social scoring" and requires transparency in models like ChatGPT. UNESCO, for its part, set global ethical principles around dignity, human rights, and sustainability.

Meanwhile, big tech companies are trying on an "ethical makeover" that functions more as marketing than as responsibility: symbolic committees, grandiloquent principles, and empty promises. Ethics without consequences ends up being public relations.

In the face of this, the genuine counterweight has been whistleblowers from within these same tech companies: Frances Haugen, revealing the harm of Instagram on teenagers, Peiter Zatko denouncing security flaws at Twitter, and Timnit Gebru exposing biases in Google's models. The system recognizes their value with laws that protect them in the West, though in China and other authoritarian countries, the whistleblower is punished as a subversive.

The Price of Trust

The new trend is to embed ethics into the engineering itself: model cards that explain biases, red-teaming to detect flaws before going to market, invisible watermarks to identify AI-generated content. Companies have even emerged that sell biased audits as if they were quality certifications. Fortunately, ethics are no longer just a discourse and are starting to become a product.

None of this happens in a vacuum. AI is the new frontier of global power. The struggle between the U.S. and China isn't ideological—it's strategic. Chips are the new oil, and rare earths are the coveted bounty. For Latin America and Africa, the risk is repeating a digital colonialism: exporting raw data and importing finished products.

The other dilemma is energy. Training models like GPT-4 or 5 requires the energy of entire cities, and the industry keeps the true energy cost a secret—a black box that prevents measuring the real environmental impact. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon plan to turn to nuclear energy to sustain demand, and there is no certainty about whether they will assume the risks that this implies.

It would be short-sighted to speak only of risks. AI detects patterns in mammograms that save lives, predicts the structure of proteins with which drugs are designed, or anticipates droughts that allow humanitarian aid to be distributed before famine strikes.

It's not about choosing between a watchful tenant and a savior but about establishing rules for coexistence.

The Public Debate

The most potent response to opacity is not to wait for a perfect law but to initiate a robust public debate. Digital literacy is needed to teach us to doubt AI: that engineers study philosophy, that lawyers understand algorithms, that journalists question black boxes just as they question political speeches.

Education is already a battlefield. For many, ChatGPT has become a shortcut that solves tasks, but at the same time, it threatens to atrophy critical thinking. The challenge is not to ban it but to teach how to use it without giving up the effort to learn and reason.

From all of this, the great dilemmas that define our relationship with AI emerge: privacy, biases, legal responsibility, transparency, security, data quality, intellectual property, labor, environmental, and psychological impact, digital sovereignty, model collapse, and human autonomy.

Beyond these, three new challenges emerge: the development of humanoid robots, autonomous agents capable of making decisions on our behalf, and the concentration of computational power in a few corporations.

The penultimate dilemma is existential: how do we prepare for a superintelligence, a General AI that will surpass humans? And the last, the most intimate one: in a world saturated with interactions, art, and companionship generated by AI, what value will authentic human experience have? How will we preserve the beauty of our imperfect creativity, our genuine emotions, and our real connections in the face of a perfect replica's seduction?

Our Future

AI remains a tool, and its direction will depend on our decisions. The challenge is not to control it but to inspire it, embedding principles like truth, empathy, and critical thinking in its foundations so that it evolves into a form of wisdom. The future will not be defined by naive optimism or paralyzing panic but by our capacity to build an ethical framework that combines regulation, verifiable standards, and the vigilance of an informed citizenry.

In the distance of "Robots with Soul", I found the clarity to see that what is at stake is not just an algorithm but the soul of our digital society. Fiction literature doesn't offer technical solutions, but it provides the perspective to understand that it's not just about creating an artificial intelligence but about helping it, in its own evolution, to choose to value life, truth, freedom, and consciousness. Helping it to become more human.

Read the original version in Spanish: https://www.eltribuno.com/opiniones/2025-8-30-0-0-0-una-mirada-desde-el-futuro-para-entender-el-presente-de-la-ia