Beware of unmitigated digitalization

“We’ve lost those computers with?all of the 13th century in them” Rollerball (1975)

Risk of losing of information is a nightmare, whose everybody with digital archives is familiar.

There are many solutions available to address this risk, ranging from self-managed hardware to cloud computing, but the risk remains. In fact, the larger the archive, the more difficult is the challenge to ensure that nothing is lost, degraded, or stolen.

Whatever is chosen to mitigate the risk, the moment of truth will only be in the event there is the actual attempt to recover searched data.

Of course, this nightmare is not peculiar of Digital Age.

The Library of Alexandria, in Egypt, was built under the patronage of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (309 BC- 246 BC) and remains a world benchmark for the attempt to create a unique repository for human knowledge. Such library, before her final destruction in 642 AD, underwent fires, accidentally or intentionally, and purges of her inventory, especially for religious motivations.

So, what makes today different the scenario?

In our view, in these days, humanity is going to fully entrust own knowledge to an immaterial entity named AI.

AI might soon have the power to decide what to do with any media in any electronic format.

In short, AI might extend the reach of “cancel culture” not only towards the future productions of culture but also backward in the past, by affecting texts, images, music, which are considered not appropriate for the arbitrary standards of sort conceived by AI.

History itself, like in the book of George Orwell, might be rewritten at AI’s will, with the difference that, in “1984”, it was the job of those like Winston Smith – the main character of this novel – to do manually the task, while in the future computers will search and modify instantly - all around the cyber world - what is no longer considered appropriate.

Which could be a mitigation?

In “Fahrenheit 451”, Ray Bradbury invents the book-lovers, each of them responsible for propagating – by heart – the text of a book, for future memory. Maybe a more practical action could be for each human being and institution to preserve as many as possible all available non-electronic records.

However, in this age, the crucial and core challenge is - at a higher level - the on-going deterioration of intellectual ecosystem.

As Ray Bradbury himself pointed out, it is not necessary to burn all the books, if we create a humanity that is simply unable to reason and not interested in reading.

Unfortunately, phenomena like Reverse-Flynn Effect and functional illiteracy are emerging dramatically, and this might create the vicious loop in which AI may rapidly raise and potentially dominate humanity, by influencing its core differentiators, from the rest of living creatures, which are human free-will and spirit of search beyond own horizons.