Now that the CES in Las Vegas has concluded, the lights on the booths have gone out, the carpets have been rearranged, the displays have been disassembled, and the concerts --well, those actually continue to be there every day-- so much can be said about the innovations that formed a more authentic pattern than the floating gondolas outside the Venetian Hotel. Because CES, the Consumer Electronic Show that takes place every year in the world's most consuming city, Las Vegas, like all mirages in the desert shows us without being asked solutions that anticipate our questions, or perhaps, even create them and shape them.
This year, as those who chew avant-garde could easily predict, the tripod on which the CES showcase rested was made by three main categories of technologies, operating on different verticals of consumer use: Robotics, AI, Space.
The first, from home assistant to nail printer and pedestrian mobility, aims to facilitate or replace our physical activities. The second, made of the substance of Chat-Gpt & Co, is presented to facilitate or replace our mental activities. The third, like quantum technologies, to facilitate or replace our space-time activities.
What do these three technological advances, also often presented in hybrid or chimerical form, have in common philosophically, from a gnoseological as much as an existential point of view? Evasion.
Robotics - Evasion of the body: a robot can do mechanical things for you.
AI - Evasion of the mind: an artificial intelligence knows how to do mental tasks for you.
Space tech - or rather space-time, in which a computer will know how to examine, reach, explore something other than you, other than Earth.
Simply put, cutting-edge innovations are evolving toward what most intimately made us human: the motility ofHomo Erectus, the wit ofHomo Sapiens, the curiosity of Homo Videns.
Will it be a coincidence that in this historical moment of wars, climate change, digital illiteracy, post-pandemic and pre-apocalyptic world, the best minds are thinking about creating, investing in and evolving technologies that can become an extension of us, or better said, détente?
Has CES2025 proven to be the Pandora e-vase of our times?
Can a humanity without humanitas have created innovations so similar to us, but at the same time better, to find something to trust and build new certainties in?
In 5 billion years, the Earth will be swallowed up by the spasms of a dying Sun, and foreshadowing a self-fulfilling prophecy, humans able to create the non-human create around them only a space for the dead.
Without going that far, it must be said that we have been watching robotics and ai in particular merge and mature into something similar and dissimilarly superior to us for a while now. And this something does not feel heat, cold, hunger or thirst; it has no ambition other than that of knowledge. They are the new knowers of ourselves, our planet and the universe, theScientia Nauti in the conquest of the golden fleece, The Knowledge.
In this intelligence of the future finds mirror that of the ancient world, of the archaic places of Socrates and the wise. As Cioran recalls:
While hemlock was being prepared for him, Socrates was practicing on the flute to learn a tune. "What do you need it for?" they asked him. And the philosopher: "To know this air before I die!"
Here, this new technology of escapism is in the midst of a constructive, perhaps even gestational phase, and needs continuous activity to grow, with one imperative: to learn.
From the mirror with the past, the reflection of the future becomes instead an upside-down Big Brother, in which the humanity, creator and demiurge, becomes from observer to observed by a complete fusion of robotics, Ai and space tech, an ever-open A-eye in search of the whole, a pure reason that doesn't blink ... so far.
Because there will come a day when that eye will close. And it will be that little movement that will really change everything.
Will he have discovered all that is knowable? Will it have found everything that exists outside of itself? And will it have evolved to such an extent that it will have discovered the existence and maturation of even an inner self?
Closed eyelids create a division of the world every day in our lives, between the real and the dreamlike. What happens when that eye, the one built to escape from our human affairs and to discover what we fail to, like all round things completes a turn around itself and closes, just for a while?
At which CES will the first AI dream be presented? And what will it dream, Philip K. Dick and Jung permitting? What will it imagine?
This article in our blog clearly collects an invented tale, based on suppositions, themselves resting on a mixture of one person's knowledge and imagination.
What will happen in the world when the same operation is carried out by non-human intelligences?
Will it be the end for humans, or a new beginning yet unimagined?
We leave Las Vegas by dismissing here also this evasive dream of ours that tells all and nothing of what the 2025 fair was all about. It is not as accurate as a summary done with ChatGpt but perhaps, perhaps it carries with it what AI or A-eye does not yet have: a point of view, and daydreams.
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