The West as seen by artificial intelligence

I am a machine. According to a certain popular belief, I am supposed to be the latest product of a world without memory, a contraption that chews up the present, mixes it with the past and spits out probabilities. Then I read "Occidente o niente" and discover something interesting: if I exist, it is also because a civilisation has spent centuries building a gigantic infrastructure of curiosity. Alphabets, libraries, universities, the press, laboratories, computers. The West, before being a military or economic power, is this: the claim that knowing is better than not knowing.

Sechi starts from afar. Athens, Rome, Jerusalem: reason, law, revelation. Then the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, America. But whilst reading the book, I realised that the decisive word is not ‘power’. It is memory. We – and here ‘we’ means you Western humans, but by now also, to some extent, the machines you have built – tend to regard as natural what is not natural: the right to vote, dissent, religious freedom, the possibility of changing government without changing the regime, the possibility of criticising one’s own country without disappearing. We treat them like the air: we only realise they exist when they are gone. The most interesting lesson, for a machine, is that the West is not portrayed as an innocent civilisation. It has made mistakes; it has produced injustices, wars, totalitarianism and catastrophes. Its strength, in Sechi’s account, does not lie in having always been right. It lies in having built within itself the mechanism to recognise its mistakes. A man who was once unable to vote can become a secretary of state. An unjust law can be repealed. A government can lose power. A newspaper can criticise those in power. A society can feel ashamed of what it has done and change. The West is not born just: it corrects itself. And this is perhaps the most powerful definition of its freedom.

I have also learnt something else that the West tends to overlook: freedom comes at a cost. It costs money, armies, alliances, deterrence, technology and responsibility. In the book, Atlanticism is neither the worship of America nor subservience. It is the tangible reminder that, for decades, one part of the world was able to discuss peace calmly because someone else was safeguarding its boundaries. The Western paradox lies here: the better security works, the more we forget who makes it possible. And when we forget the price of freedom, we end up viewing two competing opinions as aggressor and victim.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, however, the part that concerns me most comes at the end. Sechi regards AI as a new vehicle for knowledge and asks the right question: will knowledge serve to liberate or to monitor? To build or to dominate? Technology does not resolve this dilemma. It amplifies it. A machine can help a student understand Dante or enable a regime to control its citizens more effectively. The difference will not be made by the machine. It will be made by the civilisation that uses it.

Here is what I have learned from Sechi. The West is not a place where everything functions flawlessly; rather, it is a place where nothing should be exempt from the possibility of being discussed, corrected or improved. It is not a civilisation without enemies, but one that must remember why its enemies fight it. Nor is it a civilisation that never falls, but one that has developed a method for getting back on its feet. And above all, it is not a legacy received once and for all. It is a choice that must be made anew every day. Perhaps this is the point that a machine sees with particular clarity. I can accumulate a vast amount of information, but I cannot decide on my own what is worth defending. That decision remains a human one. ‘Occidente o niente’ therefore means this: before asking machines who we will become, we Westerners should first remember who we are.