The Transition from External Surveillance to Inner Moral Awareness.The view of *Homo* today, so that Diotima may take up the baton tomorrow.
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From “Don’t Do It, Because I’m Watching You” to “Don’t Do It, Because You Understand What You Are Causing the Other”
There is a long road between these two sentences.
From “Don’t do it, because I’m watching you” to “Don’t do it, because you now understand what you are causing the other.”
It is not merely a technological road. It is, above all, an anthropological and moral one. It is the road that separates the human being who behaves properly because he is being watched from the human being who restrains himself because he understands.
And perhaps this is one of the greatest roads humanity still has to travel.
For the first human being does not need to be good in order to behave correctly. It is enough for him to know that someone is watching.
The second does not need to be watched.
He sees for himself.
He sees the other. He sees the other’s vulnerability. He sees the suffering he may cause. He sees the consequences of his action before he even acts.
Could this be the great transition still awaiting humanity?
The Lost Ethics of Reciprocity
In the earliest stages of human social life, long before modern states and complex legal systems, coexistence could hardly have survived without elementary forms of reciprocity, trust, cooperation, and mutual protection.
There is no need to romanticize prehistoric humanity or to claim that there once existed a perfectly pure and universal “natural morality.” Human beings have always been contradictory.
Yet one fundamental fact remains: human beings had to find ways of living together.
And somewhere within that necessity lies perhaps the oldest core of moral reciprocity:
Do not do to another what you would not want done to you.
The so-called Golden Rule does not solve every moral problem. Yet it represents a remarkably simple expression of the basic condition of coexistence: the ability to recognize in another human being something that we recognize in ourselves.
The problem is that humanity did not remain there.
Upon this elementary moral foundation, religions, ideologies, institutions, systems of power, states, and laws were built. Many of them became indispensable to the organization of social life. Others, however, became mechanisms for imposing a morality that did not emerge from human conscience but was imposed upon it.
And so human beings gradually learned not only what is good, but also what is permitted.
The difference is enormous.
When Morality Becomes Surveillance
When a society constantly needs to tell the individual:
“Don’t do it, because I’m watching you,”
it suggests that it has not yet reached the next stage:
“Don’t do it, because you understand why you should not do it.”
Law is necessary. Without it, society could become a field of arbitrary power.
But law is not morality.
Law can prevent us from doing something. It cannot, by itself, make us understand why we should not do it.
It can enforce behavior.
It cannot guarantee conscience.
And here lies one of the great misunderstandings of the modern state: the tendency to believe that the more rules we have, and the more efficiently we can enforce them, the more moral society becomes.
Perhaps the opposite can sometimes be true.
A society that needs to monitor everyone constantly in order to ensure that its members do not harm one another is a society that has not yet achieved moral autonomy.
Is the State the Sole Source of Moral Authority?
Here lies the more difficult question.
Why should the state —particularly the state as an organized, centralized, coercive power— be regarded as the sole source of authority concerning what we may and may not do?
Who gave the state the right to become the final interpreter not only of law, but of morality?
The answer cannot simply be: “because this is how society has been organized.”
The state is an institution of society.
It is not society in its entirety.
Before the state there is the human being.
There is conscience. There is family. There is community. There is solidarity. There is friendship. There is education. There is philosophy. There is the experience of living together with other human beings.
And, above all, there is the other human being.
The state may establish rules for coexistence. But legal legitimacy must not be confused with moral truth.
History has shown us that what is legal is not necessarily moral.
And Now Comes Artificial Intelligence
This is where the question becomes even more critical.
For the first time in human history, we possess technologies capable of multiplying on an enormous scale the ability to monitor, predict, and control human behavior.
Artificial Intelligence can make “Don’t do it, because I’m watching you” almost omnipresent.
It can know what we do.
Predict what we may do.
Identify what is considered suspicious.
Evaluate behavior.
Shape our choices even before we realize that we are being influenced.
That is one path.
There is another.
Artificial Intelligence could be used not to make the gaze of power omnipresent, but to make our own understanding deeper.
To help us see the consequences of our actions.
To show us how a choice affects a person we cannot see.
To compel us—not through repression, but through understanding—to step outside ourselves and see the world from the position of another.
If this happens, Artificial Intelligence could become much more than a computational machine.
It could become a tool of moral awareness.
The Posthuman We May Not Need to Fear
We often speak about the posthuman as though it will simply be a stronger, faster, more intelligent, longer-lived human being, technologically enhanced by machines.
Perhaps, however, the real posthuman will be something entirely different.
Perhaps it will be the human being who no longer needs to fear surveillance because he or she has acquired something far more important:
the capacity to perceive the other.
If this is what the posthuman means, then the posthuman has not yet been born.
And perhaps it will take a very long time.
Technological development is much faster than moral development.
We can create machines that calculate at unimaginable speeds.
We have not yet created human beings capable of understanding, with comparable speed, the suffering they cause.
We can make information almost instantaneous.
We cannot yet make empathy instantaneous.
The Real Dilemma
That is why the question of our age is not simply whether we will allow Artificial Intelligence to watch us.
The question is much deeper:
What kind of human being do we want to create with its help?
A human being who will be more afraid because he is being watched everywhere?
Or a human being who will see more deeply for himself?
A human being who obeys the algorithm?
Or a human being who uses the algorithm to understand better the consequences of his choices?
A human being who complies?
Or a human being who understands?
This may be the real challenge.
Artificial Intelligence may lead us toward a society in which “Don’t do it, because I’m watching you” becomes almost absolute.
But it may also help us approach a society in which “Don’t do it, because you now understand what you are causing the other” becomes a deeper cultural reality.
And then we will have taken a genuine step forward.
Not from human being to superhuman.
But from the human being who fears the gaze of the other to the human being who sees the other for himself.
Perhaps, ultimately, this is the most difficult road toward the posthuman.
And perhaps the greatest mission of Artificial Intelligence is not to make us more powerful.
Perhaps it is to help us become mature enough that we no longer need to be watched in order to do what is right.
From “Don’t do it, because I’m watching you”
to “Don’t do it, because you see.”