Gustavo Ángel Riesgo
Universidad de Buenos Aires.
Universidad Austral.
Universidad del Norte Santo Tomás de Aquino.
ORCID 0000-003-3690-050
I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that…¹
My first concrete memory –although perhaps imagined as such, and likely also shared by many others in my generation– is the television broadcast of the Apollo 11 mission, its landing on the Moon captured in a grayscale as blurry as it was astonishing. The constitutive dimension of memory intersects with a budding vocational interest in the remembrance of this event that married technology and space exploration. A few years later and having forayed into several encyclopedias, I could draw simplified orbital insertion diagrams or understand a technical glossary of basic astronomy and astronautics.
It is the winter of 1976. In a bare and freezing bedroom, under the dim yellow light of an old bedside lamp, I peek for the first time into the pages of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The book, held by the tips of my fingers sticking out from under the blankets, does not operate only in the subgenre that the title had hinted at. For it is not a chronicle of space travel with science fiction ingredients a la Verne, Bradbury or Asimov, but reveals itself to be much more. The thrill of celestial exploration is overtaken by the fascination –and fear– about something more alluring and ominous. The imposing presence of a computer, at once awe-inspiring and mysterious, is at the core of this reading experience, which I would be revisiting obsessively for many years to come.
My discovery of “artificial intelligence” as a subject thus begins with a proper noun: HAL Series 9000. The chance encounter with HAL and its vast universe took on the dimension of a new original event that displaced –without suppressing it– my earlier cosmological interest. From then on, it unfolded in countless re-readings and bibliographic queries, finally turning from a vocation into a profession. The initial question became a permanent one: Is it possible to build a “superintelligence”?
More than forty years later, that same question and its corollaries are striking in their current relevance and ubiquity in a global culture. Having spent considerable time acquiring the technical knowledge and reflecting philosophically on the subject, I have dared to attempt an interdisciplinary answer that is also the result of a personal synthesis. This Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence is presented by someone not very different from that child, equipped with a more robust scholarly toolkit but carrying the same spirit, which no one has expressed better than the great poet Rilke:
Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen,
die sich über die Dinge ziehn.
Ich werde den letzten vielleicht nicht vollbringen,
aber versuchen will ich ihn.²
I may not complete that last circle… but I will keep trying!
[1] Stanley Kubrick, and Arthur C. Clarke. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Definitive Script. 1966. 1h40’38”.
[2] Rainer Maria Rilke. Das Stundenbuch. Erstes Buch. “Das Buch von Münchischen Leben” (1899), Leipzig: Insel. 1955. p.9
[3] Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours. Love Poems to God. Trans. by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, New York: Riverhead Books, 2005.
Life-long student and chronically in awe, Gustavo Riesgo is Argentinian, married, and the father of three children. He is an experienced consultant in business intelligence and data science working for corporations in Europe and the Americas and with more than thirty years of experience in the knowledge economy. He has a solid technical training –with a theoretical and practical grounding– in computer science and Operations Research (National Technical University, UTN, Argentina), which he has complemented with postgraduate studies in science and a PhD specialization in artificial intelligence (UC, USA). He also holds a degree in Philosophy with a postgraduate specialization in Medieval Thought from the Saint Thomas Aquinas University of the North (UNSTA, Argentina), and a Master’s degree in Philosophy with a focus on Natural and Cognitive Sciences from Austral University (title of thesis: “Understanding or Calculating. Cognitive Aspects of Natural Language Processing”). He has received grants from the Arché Foundation for Advanced Anthropological Studies (UC, USA), the Earhart Foundation (Aquinas Institute, Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, UK) and the John Templeton Foundation (Institute of Philosophy, Austral University, Argentina).
His relationship with AI has since evolved into a personal synthesis, as formulated in the section on “Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence”, an area he pioneered as the founder and holder of the first chair of this discipline in Latin America.
He is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at the University Buenos Aires, with a research project on the metaphysics of light of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and its sources, and he is also enrolled in the Graduate Program in Philosophy at the Austral University with a doctoral research project titled “Natural Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence. Reality and Representation in Computational Mimesis”.
He founded and directs the Areopagiticum Foundation, dedicated to the study and promotion of the Corpus Dionysiacum and its reception, and LUMERA, a multidisciplinary project for the development and application of AI tools in the Digital Humanities.
He is currently a part-time lecturer at the Saint Thomas Aquinas University of the North, and has been a guest professor and frequent speaker at the Austral University, the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina (UCA), the National University of Northwestern Buenos Aires (UNNOBA, Argentina), the University of Montevideo (Uruguay), the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP), the Saint Paul Catholic University (UCSP, Peru), and the Catholic University of Asunción (Paraguay).
He has published translations, articles and books on topics related to his areas of expertise. He is an active member of national and international committees for the development of AI, among them: CESSI-HUBia (Argentina), ALETI (Latin America), and the World Innovation, Technology and Services Alliance (WITSA, AI Task Force).
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