“In the imperturbable universal disorder, life is an exception,” he writes in his newspaper Bruna Husky towards the end of Difficult animals (Seix Barral), the closure of a police science fiction tetralog that the Spanish writer Rosa Montero It started with Tears in the rain (2011) and extended with The weight of the heart (2015) y Hate times (2018). Bruna’s farewell, which is no longer a powerful technohuman combat, but an android calculation fragile, takes place in Madrid in 2111, when it is hired to investigate an attack in the facilities of a large technological company. The novel explores the irresponsibility of humans by endangering the species itself because of our inability to control a superintelligence that can be the most lethal weapon created.
Montero, who will present Difficult animals This Saturday at 17.30 at the Book Fair, he emphasizes that Bruna Husky resolves the criminal case “more twilight and distressing” and that the novel that closes the tetralogy is the “most epic” and the “greatest major” for the writer who has received the National Prize for Letters in 2017. “I decided to leave Bruna very well placed; life ends much better, accompanied and with a different conscience”says the author of Cannibal’s daughter, The heart of the tartar, The crazy house, Transparent King History, Instructions to save the world, the ridiculous idea of not seeing you again y The danger of being rope, among other titles that have been translated into more than twenty languages.
-Bruna admits, at the end of the novel, that it is possible that he has lost his fear of dying. Writing “difficult animals” also allowed you to lose the fear of your own death?
-Bruna stop counting the days missing for death. I write because I don’t know how to do anything else. When I woke up to life, literature was already there, paraphrasing (Augusto) Monterroso. I realize that I write to lose the fear of death. I have had panic attacks from 16 to 30 years, which was actually fear of death, although I did not know. When I was 20, I looked at people over 60 with horror: “They go to the cinema and eat a paella and are there in the cafe so happy and laughing, when they are so close to death,” he thought and said: “If I had that age, I would be put under the bed howling of fear.” Now I have much more than 60 and I am not under the bed howling of fear. I have done something good. There are three books that have helped me especially to lose my fear of death: HIstoria del Rey TrSaving, that this year there are twenty years of its publication; The danger of being rope y Difficult animals, that has given me a kind of incredible serenity.
-A question that emerges from reading the novel is how to think about the human?
-One of the great problems of the human being in life is to know what really wants. There are people who have a colossal self -ignorancewho dies without knowing what they want. The vast majority tries to be what their parents want it to be. Beyond parents, if you overcome this stage, identity is always a product of the gaze of others. We literally depend on the eyes of others to be us. Social networks are going crazy to the planet and contribute to hate policies. The easiest way to get an identity is to hate someone.
-A subject that is present in the current debate is the fear that artificial intelligence can supplant human thought. How do you analyze this issue?
-The Homo Sapiens has been on the planet for 300,000 years and only in the last 70 we have put ourselves three times at risk of extinction for our poor management of nuclear energy and atomic bombs; We are at risk of extinction for global warming and we are at risk of extinction for artificial intelligence. Technological evolution is so brutal that we do not have the ability to responsibly manage our discoveries. There are three huge risks: the first is the loss of employment, but I don’t care because despite social pain, every technological revolution destroys employment, but creates another new one. The second risk is much more serious: artificial intelligence has a monstrous capacity to manipulate our thoughts, something that is already happening, to get into our heads and make those who control that artificial intelligence tell us, without realizing it at all, what we want to think, what we want to vote, what we want to buy, what we want to be. The third risk is that this new technology is not distributed equally, because another thing that will be implemented is that the brain of human beings can be connected to computers. But who are going to connect? The rich. Then a superclass will be created and everyone else will be silly slaves, manipulated by artificial intelligence. We are creating a superintelligence that will be inhuman. What do I mean with Inhuman? Simply we are not going to have an idea of what he is capable of doing. Artificial intelligence can end the human species. The good news is that the future is not yet written and that we can control it.
