This title is not a contradictory proposition. It is a call to unthink much of what we have become accustomed to thinking in order to face the greatest challenge ever: the danger of ceasing to think. Novalis was right when he wrote, “Die Philosophie ist eigentlich Heimweh, ein Trieb überall zu Hause zu sein” (Philosophy is actually homesickness, a drive to be at home everywhere). By philosophy, I mean all thought structured by the search for truth without resorting to technologies, which, instead of remaining within the limits of instruments that help thought how to think, rather seek to replace thought itself.

If we stop thinking, it is equivalent to being expelled from home and wandering homeless and meaningless in a chaotic and dystopian world of well-dressed monsters that will rule us from luxurious palaces and turn into trash everything that stands in the way of their hyper-armored vehicles driven against the pursuit of truth.

The imminent danger is that we will cease to be thinking beings (Descartes' res cogitans) and become thought beings (res cogitata). To be thought is to have stopped thinking, either because it is not necessary to think in order to live peacefully in this society, or because it is so dangerous to think that it amounts to the imminent risk of being killed or, alternatively, of committing suicide. These are the most immediate dangers.

The danger of thinking that certificates of mediocrity are not valid

If education systems and universities continue on the path of programmed ignorance, so that students forget everything that is of no interest to the owners of algorithms and of world power, there will soon be nursing homes for the elderly young, where they will learn what they have long known thanks to the magnanimity of social media, and where comfort and isolation from the real world are essential to prepare them for a peaceful death, that is, to live in the bubbles where everyone lives dead without knowing it.

And they will certainly live with the same comfort they have learned, and therefore, everything they do or order will bear the mark of objectivity. I am sure that when this happens, the gods and goddesses will be appalled, cover their eyes so as not to see, and their ears so as not to hear. But as such a disaster does not affect them, they will continue undisturbed in their divine duties. The problem for humanity and nature is that when mediocrities prove what they are, their objectivity is, after all, abjectness. It is characteristic of mediocrity not to be able to confront itself, precisely because it is mediocre.

The danger of thinking that authorized freedoms are a fraction of possible freedoms

This society allows us to be uncompromising with mediocrity as long as we follow the path laid out by the mediocre; to be uncompromising against corruption, as long as we accept being governed by the corrupt; to be radical, as long as we are blind so that we can be easily run over by civilian and military tanks; to be daring, as long as we are inaccurate or careless in a detail so that we can be harshly criticized and canceled by the guardians of normality; to be lucid in denouncing hypocrisy, as long as we live amicably with hypocrites; to be young as long as we are drugged so that we can exhaust ourselves in innocuous and self-destructive creativity and rebellion; to be old, as long as we murmur wisdom that no one has the patience to hear or understand. This society is a Goya monster because reason is sleeping a deep sleep.

The danger of thinking that what we see is, in fact, horrific

The horror experienced by most of humanity, every day, always different and always the same, denies everything we thought we knew about human progress. Horror, when thought through, runs the risk of becoming horror experienced through solidarity with those who suffer it. This would force us to engage in concrete struggle to help, to stop the killing of innocents, to remove from power those who are complicit in the killing of innocents. But since this is hard work and involves risks that are as serious as they are unnecessary, it is best not to think about it, not to know, to pretend not to know, to admit that perhaps it is a misunderstanding.

The genocide of the Palestinian people, broadcast live every day, is the first war consciously waged against women and children, the two main enemies of a perfect ethnic cleansing. It makes perfect sense. It makes sense and has the active support of our democratic leaders. Just as Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust, entered his home at night through the back door so as not to wake his pet canary, the architects of today's genocide pause in the slaughter to say their prayers and help their children with their homework. This degrades what remains of humanity in our impotent rage to such an extent that the horror of thinking must be reduced to thinking about the horror without running the risk of experiencing it out of solidarity.

It becomes unthinkable to think that while Nazism was the great incarnation of evil in the 20th century, Zionism is the great incarnation of evil in the 21st century. It becomes unthinkable that the great victims have become, in the space of a century, the great aggressors. It becomes unthinkable to think that, just as the Nazis' final solution against them was unsuccessful, they too will not succeed in the final solution they intend to inflict on the Palestinian people. And since all this is unthinkable, it is better to change the channel and return to social media or comment on the tragicomic entertainment of the quarrels between two gorillas, Donald Trump and Elon Musk (no offense to gorillas).

The danger of thinking that mental food is on the table and that those who do not eat will starve

Artificial intelligence (AI) creates or transforms nothing. It merely accumulates and synthesizes according to opaque criteria accessible only to the owners of the algorithm programs, that is, the owners of the world. Artificial intelligence refers to machines that perform cognitive tasks such as thinking, perceiving, learning, solving problems, and making decisions. This is not the first time that intelligence has been attributed to machines. In the 1950s, it was common to refer to emerging computers as “electronic brains.” Today, most popular AI applications – voice and image recognition, natural language processing, targeted advertising, predictive machine maintenance, driverless cars, and drones – involve the ability of machines to learn from data without being explicitly programmed.

This is a paradigm shift in computer technology. What will really make a difference in the race for AI applications is the availability of data; the critical element is the abundance of data. More data leads to better products, which in turn attract more users, who generate more data to further improve the product. The scale of data required to develop advanced AI applications is the basis for the impact of AI centralization and monopolization. Large US technology companies lead the world in AI applications, but China is a rising giant. This leads to a duopoly of AI innovation: the US and China.

AI is the paradigmatic case of a technology that aims to go beyond the limits of the instrument that helps to think in order to become the thinker that dispenses with and replaces the human thinker. The vertigo of its unlimited expansion is entering all fields of human activity, from medicine to law, from communication to war, from education to financial markets. What does it mean to be human in the age of AI?

Essentially, AI functions as a statistical device, but due to the infinite amount of data it manages and the algorithms that govern its operation, AI projects the idea of creating knowledge from nothing, of inventing. In other words, AI gives the impression of functioning like a human being, albeit infinitely more efficiently. Hence the terms used to describe it such as deep learning refer to characteristics hitherto reserved for humans or, at most, living beings. These terms are used metaphorically, but they show the extent to which AI seems to be reaching levels of understanding and transformation still reserved for humans.

The reality effect is striking because while copying AI seems creative, while extracting it seems inventive, while reproducing it seems productive, and while correlating it seems to offer new relationships. In light of the credibility of this “appearance,” questions about what counts as human or whether AI signifies a civilizational change have been raised by people on opposite sides of the political and ideological spectrum.

I don't like to quote war criminals, but in this case I make an exception to quote Henry Kissinger. He wrote in 2018: “the Enlightenment sought to submit traditional verities to a liberated, analytic human reason. The internet’s purpose is to ratify knowledge through the accumulation and manipulation of ever expanding data. Human cognition loses its personal character. Individuals turn into data, and data become regnant.” Earlier in the essay, Kissinger had already wondered, “What would be the impact on history of self-learning machines – machines that acquired knowledge by processes particular to themselves, and applied that knowledge to ends for which there may be no category of human understanding?

Would these machines learn to communicate with one another? How would choices be made among emerging options? Was it possible that human history might go the way of the Incas, faced with a Spanish culture incomprehensible and even awe-inspiring to them? Were we at the edge of a new phase of human history?”

With Chomsky at my side, I believe that “the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations… However useful the AI programs may be in some narrow domains (they can be helpful in computer programming, for example, or in suggesting rhymes for light verse), we know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge that they differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language. These differences place significant limitations on what these programs can do, encoding them with ineradicable defects… Indeed, such programs are stuck in a prehuman or nonhuman phase of cognitive evolution.

Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case and what will be the case – that’s description and prediction – but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation, the mark of true intelligence… Human-style thought is based on possible explanations and error correction, a process that gradually limits what possibilities can be rationally considered.”

In his masterpiece, The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer ([1819] 2020) distinguishes between talent and genius. While the talented person achieves what others cannot achieve, genius achieves what others cannot imagine. Genius has a superior capacity for contemplation that leads it to transcend the smallness of the ego and enter the infinite world of ideas. Genius is the faculty of remaining in a state of pure perception, of losing oneself in perception, the power of leaving one's own interests, desires, and goals entirely out of sight, thus renouncing one's own personality entirely for a time, so as to remain a pure knowing subject with a clear view of the world.

In light of this, we can safely speculate that if Schopenhauer were alive today, he would argue that AI, however stimulating its achievements may be, can never reach the heights of human possibility. At best, it can reach the level of talent. Genius is inaccessible to AI. Genius is the upper limit of AI. The lower limit is unrecorded human activity or, better yet, human activity that is recorded and stored in ways that defy data extractivism.

This man-machine game misses a crucial point: that human beings do not exist in the abstract, but in specific historical, social, and cultural contexts. Exercises on abstractly constructed universal characteristics convert local characteristics that are Western-centric, capitalist, colonialist, and patriarchal into universal characteristics derived from knowledge “seen from scratch.” Ontological and political biases are thus transformed into AI-neutral artifacts.

The danger of thinking that what falls outside the algorithm does not exist is the new form of what I have been calling the sociology of absences. The danger of thinking that the algorithm is the only mental food available to us is the same as thinking that McDonald's hamburgers are the only food available to us.

The danger of thinking that the post-human presupposes that we have already been fully human

Since the beginning of the millennium, there has been a debate about the post-human. The death of the human being (the author) came from afar: from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Barthes, Deleuze. More recently, the idea of the post-human has focused on human beings undergoing xenotransplantation (transplantation of cells, tissues, or organs from other animal species) or living with technological objects inserted into their bodies. The idea of post-humanism implies a critique of anthropocentrism, the denial of any privilege to human beings among all living beings on the planet.

I will not discuss the merits of this conception in this text. What interests me is to question the idea of the human that underlies that of the post-human. It is a substantive and abstract idea that presupposes the prior existence of a more or less fixed human nature. Moreover, the question of whether or not there is a human nature is not the issue that concerns me. It is rather the idea that human beings have always been treated as privileged and abstractly equal beings.

The danger of thinking that this has never actually happened in the modern era is one of the most terrifying for the liberal conscience that has shaped our consciousness since the 17th century. Over the years, I have shown that, with historical colonialism, an abyssal line was drawn, as radical as it was radically invisible, between human beings treated as fully human (the metropolitan zone) and human beings treated as subhuman (the colonial zone). This abyssal line continues to this day, and the sub-humanity it delineates encompasses more populations in the world than during the period of historical colonialism. Just ask the immigrants deported in handcuffs and sent to concentration camps in El Salvador and other places we will one day hear about. Or the peasants of the Democratic Republic of Congo martyred by the curse of lithium and rare minerals.

The specter of sub-humanity hangs over each and every one of us. From one moment to the next, as Brecht predicted, any one of us could be thrown into the colonial zone where universal declarations of human rights and constitutional guarantees are nothing more than white lies. To think that this is a step backward is to think that there has been progress. Of course, there has been progresses, but there has been no Progress with a capital P.

All these dangers require that we unthink and unlearn before we can make sense of what makes no sense.