Sever Voinescu: Temptation and tendency

We end last week with a question that Artificial Intelligence asked me during a conversation. The question was: "How do you see this temptation of today's society to replace intellectual authority, often hesitant and vulnerable, with technical authority, sterile but firm?" And I promised the Intelligence (oh, Lord!) and my readers that I would try to answer this week. I am actually responding for my readers – I still write for you, ladies and gentlemen. When I start writing (also) for Artificial Intelligence, I will stop writing, I promise. And if I do not stop, please stop me!

I like the question and I believe that AI used some essential words – "temptation" is the first among them. It may have sensed, perhaps, the machinery – I understand many things in the world in terms of temptation. Technical authority, as "sterile" as AI calls it, is a temptation. It attracts through the "technological wonders" in our lives. How can one not believe in the authority that produced mobile phones, the Internet, and wi-fi, medical imaging, or airplanes? Technical authority may be "sterile" in reality, but technology, with its means of seduction, is juicy, tasty, and addictive. The temptation that is fundamentally dry and sterile, but full of flavor, sensory and comfortable in appearance, is called seduction and, theologically, has a very clear regime and treatment: it pleases, but it is not useful or, worse, it pleases, but it is harmful.

So, what do I think about the "temptation of today's society" to replace intellectual authority with technical authority? I will try not to respond in a Romanian way. For some time now, every Romanian responds to any question starting with "because..." and continues explaining the causes of the situation under discussion. We are great experts in causes; any Romanian can explain anything. In fact, some are so clever that, before "because..." they also say "simply". "Simply, because..." before any statement – even if it happened that you did not ask the interlocutor "Why?", but you were just satisfied to formulate an observation – is the full reflection of a superior Dâmbovița intelligence. We have an explanation for everything and, believe it or not, it is simple – how could you not know it? The subtext, of course, is not just that the person is intelligent, but that they are smarter than you, the one who, supposedly, asks, since you do not know the explanation that is so simple. This is Dâmbovița intelligence: it can only exist to crush the stupidity of others. This Romanian social phenomenon ("simply, because...") has a certain connection with the question I am trying to answer.

Moreover, I specify that, in my opinion, Romanian society has succumbed to temptation and has already replaced the authority of the intellectual with technical authority. I see the tendency of today's society to prefer "technical authority, sterile but firm" as a natural reaction, with questionable short-term effects and definitely bad long-term effects. But it is not a natural reaction produced by the exceptional, overwhelming, but also conquering advance of technologies; it is not as if society would surrender to the "conqueror". People prefer the "technical" all the more the less they know about it, and not the more. People prefer the "technical" precisely because they do not understand it. Let me explain. It has often been observed that we live in a world where technologies are unknown to people who have become dependent on them. How many of us understand mobile phone technology, wi-fi technology, or even the Internet itself, the reasons why airplanes take off, fly, and land, the reasons why a certain medication exterminates a certain bacterium, or how solar light becomes electric energy? And yet, we all use mobile phones, the Internet, airplanes, medical treatments, or solar panels. The position of the ignorant user is generalized in today's society and, therefore, does not raise any problem, does not induce any shame. About the culture generated by an education in which it is said to the child from a young age that it is okay not to know, I have written on other occasions. The position of the ignorant user is comfortable in every sense: we have all the advantages without the prior effort of knowing how to obtain them. In comparison, intellectual authority operates differently: it scolds you, it puts you to study, it questions you. Intellectuals often talk about people in a way that often puts us in uncomfortable situations, precisely because we understand very well what they say. Intellectuals are often moralizers, they criticize our opinions and our way of being, they question us and annoy us. The famous metaphor from Socrates' Apology, in which the legendary wise man spoke of Athens as a noble, large, lazy, heavy horse, spoiled by a good, sufficient life, and of himself as a gadfly that does not give peace to the horse, continuing to annoy it with questions about good and beautiful, about justice and truth. The intellectual is the gadfly – who would prefer a gadfly that besieges you with such issues when you could be on TikTok scrolling through mesmerizing images for hours on end?

The temptation that AI asked me about is amplified by two other real phenomena. Intellectuals quickly exhibit their subjectivism – truth does not seem to matter much to them anymore. Authenticity is preferred. We live in an era where each of us is encouraged to express authenticity; searching for ourselves, we no longer have the willingness to listen to other seekers. In the extension of the abandonment of the fight for truth and engagement in the fight for a cause, the phenomenon of "the betrayal of intellectuals" has intervened, too well known to detail further. The abandonment of intellectual authority is a natural consequence of the democratization of knowledge and, once democratized, of the change in social attitude towards those who know. In essence, the intellectual was superior in the city because they knew more than others; in the age of Google and AI, knowing more is no longer an advantage, nor even a distinguishing mark. The advance in knowledge, especially in humanistic knowledge, no longer impresses anyone. Whatever subject you tackle, you will see that anyone pulls out their phone and finds out enough to give them the feeling that they know just as much.

Therefore, I expect this tendency to persist because the temptation remains appetizing.

https://www.dilema.ro/tilc-show/tentatia-si-tendinta