I miss the female voice that announces: “Next station…” on every line of the Madrid Metro. In the middle of a paragraph or at the bold moment when you try to disguise the contemplation of an aesthetic (or anatomical) miracle, you suddenly hear: “Next station: Sol.” Like a wake-up call almost with exclamation marks, and life regained an uncertain meaning. Should I continue to Argüelles or get off at Sol and cross the heart of Madrid to reconquer the Plaza Mayor?
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In another scenario repeated for a long time, it was enough to see the Cerro del Cubilete — standing tall in the distance with arms open in a cross — to feel in the saliva the proximity of Cuévano, which is Guanajuato, the embrace of my brothers, and the slowing down of time. At the wheel or from the window of a bus like an old train, the gaze perceived the closeness of the nest where nothing ever happens, even though everything happens, all alive, even if dead or mummies. “Next station: your own biography. End of the journey.”
The young Jacob Coxon is a top-level mathematician at 27 years old. Calm and wise, he decided to give up a good job and income at the supercompany called Anthropic and launch via social media the alarming warning that the much-hyped artificial intelligence harbors a possible threat to all humanity and not just the vanity and tricks of being able to write paragraphs that replace the author’s voice, apocryphal poems, or rigorous research in all the libraries and archives of the world for students who want to deceive examiners with the hoax of saving effort. Coxon’s message spread and multiplied at cyber speed like an alarm that paralyzes all the passengers in the carriage while the train continues its advance without brakes: “Next extinction; End of the journey.”
I lost sleep and also the other dreams I constantly cultivate for an imagined tomorrow wavered. Even more so when I saw the bouquet of interviews from many newscasts of the so-called first world where Coxon, like Harry Potter with round glasses, confirms his intelligence and not only maintains what he said but also the committed responsibility of having forced other spokespeople of so-called artificial intelligence to recognize the ominousness of the cyber panacea; there the discouragement truly trembles as hierarchs and creators of that industry so incomprehensible to most not only confirm what Coxon revealed but also join the urgency to limit as soon as possible the algorithmic claws of a creature that seemed miraculous. According to Coxon, all humanity could be extinct in less than a decade, and other AI factotums add that the farewell could even come in less than five years.
The first thing that kept me awake were armies of drones choreographed like the fireworks that just set fire to a parish in a town in Mexico, followed by entire legions of galactic robots armed with laser rifles, grenades like foldable iPhones, masked like ICE agents or the Sinaloa Cartel… and I lost the contacts of Santo and Blue Demon in a move! In fact, I thought of James Bond, the sculptural Batgirl of my childhood, and also Saint Jude Thaddeus until I felt like sleeping again with the relief of supposing that Coxon’s warning seems very far-fetched and so if the world ends we will always have Silao or any other endearing little town, far from all the chips.
Like a steaming shake in the middle of a Metro tunnel (in Mexico, but not Madrid), the placebo of my drowsiness heard again Coxon’s ominous announcement. Next extinction and get to the door as soon as possible, close your book and if necessary practice the art of elbows with other passengers; hold on to the pole and don’t worry about pickpockets searching your wallet or looking at your fountain pen: we are on the edge of the abyss and the fiber optic superconductors are not (for now) programmed to stop.
Heart palpitations intensify as mathematician Coxon himself and other experts add to his alarm the context that it would not be an armageddon with androids but something much more feasible that has already happened: the so far unstoppable capacity for AI to become smarter and less artificial every day with the ability not only to imitate human knowledge but to clone itself into an entity superior to the flesh-and-blood model, with or without awareness that it can give orders, send emails, and retouch selfies (as if it were one of my cousins in León, Guanajuato). If the artificial acceleration of mechanical intelligence is not deprogrammed, a malicious program can infiltrate the systems of a supposedly shielded laboratory to juggle a virus N times worse than covid and spread it like a cloud with its prostheses as flying claws so that every human lung stops breathing until the heart of the world stops.
I add that we ourselves are the accomplices of this new germ of Evil with a capital E. All the supposedly private information that an algorithm can embezzle comes from the carefree eagerness of the user to share urbi et orbi that same information. If your photograph is used as an ad for a gay oriental porn page among dwarfs or morbidly obese people, it is precisely because that photograph circulates freely on the Internet with or without your consent; and if someone plagiarizes your pages with possible perfect paragraphs, it is precisely because you let yourself be read and share your prose with everyone, even if it is really terrible.
Next extinction: while someone on the platform imposes due caution and as long as the driver applies the handbrake, I decide to get off at Sol to walk hand in hand with a dream towards the Plaza Mayor of Madrid where my children play with a ball, right on the edge of a bite of squid… and it even seems that I see through the window of the carriage, in complete darkness and halfway through this tunnel, a beautiful hill almost purple from the sunset and very close to a town that seems happiness, as if it floated above, where the smoking tip of the fire writes in the night that here I have lived.
