5 epochal changes humanity must embrace ASAP to secure a bright future - Part 1 of 5

Published: February 10, 2025

In my recent article, 3 Truths Whose Denial Will Doom Our Species, I focused on three aspects of our contemporary history that are greatly underestimated, despite posing a serious risk of our extinction. In this long, five-part article, I'm instead focusing on what, in my humble opinion, humanity must do as soon as possible not only to effectively avert the worst that could happen, but even to guarantee ourselves a future so bright it seems utopian.

I call the changes I'm proposing "epochal" because they are, for various reasons. First of all, all five of these changes are highly controversial. That's why we need to talk about them, and talk about them a lot, and often, because to understand them, we need to process them thoroughly, and it takes a good deal of time to fully mature them. These are also changes that weren't possible before, and for this reason, most people struggle to understand that now they're not only possible, but necessary. Unfortunately, though, because they weren't possible before, today those who haven't yet reflected deeply on the recent changes in our condition oppose them, using the same old arguments that were once very valid, but which no longer make sense.

But enough with the preamble. In this first part of the article, I'll deal with the first epochal change I'm proposing, so you'll immediately understand why these are controversial things. Oh, and one last premise: I'm not presenting these changes in any particular order, certainly not in order of importance. For me, they're all necessary and fundamental. I'm starting with the one below almost by chance.

Censorship needs a serious rethinking

It's often said that evil is never in the things themselves, but in the way they're used. And that's absolutely true. Some things, however, lend themselves much more to being misused. For example, a baby bottle can certainly be misused, but the RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile, NATO code name: SS-X-30 Satan 2, capable of carrying 15 nuclear warheads around the globe for 18,000 km, lends itself much more to misuse than a baby bottle. Well, censorship, too, lends itself greatly to being misused. It can be used well and is sometimes necessary, but unfortunately, it also lends itself greatly to being misused. And for the most part, in the history of humanity, it's been used very badly. A quick refresher to not forget and to better understand what we're talking about is in order.

Censorship has ancient roots and has often been used to consolidate the power of authoritarian governments or totalitarian regimes. Even in ancient Rome, certain texts and ideas were suppressed to "maintain public morality." In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church compiled the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of forbidden books with the aim of controlling the spread of doctrines considered heretical or dangerous. Even within empires and sultanates, censorship was used to prevent "subversive" ideas from spreading.

With the advent of nation-states and totalitarian ideologies, censorship became an even more powerful weapon. In Nazi Germany, the regime burned books and persecuted authors who disseminated content deemed "contrary to Aryan ideology." In the Soviet Union, newspapers and literary works underwent rigorous control by state organs, which rewrote history and manipulated information. In many cases, critical intellectuals were sent to gulags or forced into exile.

In modern dictatorial regimes, like North Korea, people don't have access to a free Internet or independent media. Isolation and propaganda fuel the perpetuation of power at the top, discouraging any form of dissent. In all these contexts, censorship not only limits freedom of expression but transforms truth into an instrument of manipulation: what is prohibited remains in the shadows, and power consolidates its control.

It's precisely in the denial of the right to speak, enshrined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in many articles of the constitutions of the most democratic states, that censorship becomes the most fearsome lever of oppressive regimes. When the free circulation of ideas is hindered, a climate of fear is created that threatens cultural growth and democratic participation.

However, today there's a new variation in the exercise of censorship that is genuinely new and specific to our times, which makes censorship itself an even more extremely dangerous tool than in the past: I'm referring to censorship exercised by private entities. While historically censorship has been the favorite tool of governments and dictatorships to maintain control of the masses, it's also true that private individuals had very few opportunities to exercise any form of censorship themselves. Today, however, the scenario is completely reversed, and often even when the central government is democratic and favorable to the free circulation of ideas, some private entities, by virtue of predominant positions in the sphere of the circulation of ideas, find themselves able to practice censorship with very effective and incisive effects on the freedom of expression of the population.

And while all this was already starting to become evident with the birth and spread of radio and then television channels gradually consolidating into mega-commercial groups of great diffusion and pervasiveness, with the advent of social networks, we've reached and well surpassed the threshold beyond which ignoring the censorship activities of private mega-groups is no longer tolerable or absolutely desirable because they effectively take on the characteristics of activities capable of sabotaging the very foundations of those democracies so painstakingly achieved over centuries of evolution, progress, and social struggles. But it doesn't end there. Recently, in fact, a further arrow of devastating power has been added to the bow of the largest private mega-companies in the world: the censorship of artificial intelligence models.

This censorship is of even more devastating negative power than any censorship seen so far in our history. Why? Here are the most terrifying reasons:

1. Because artificial intelligence models are already replacing the previous methods most used by the masses to acquire knowledge and information: search engines. Remember when we used to jokingly say, "Without Google, I can't do anything anymore!" Well, it'll be much worse with AI models. Do we want a future made up of information censored by private entities?

2. Because while web search previously left the individual the freedom to critically evaluate different sources, often unknown and therefore approached with natural caution, today AI offers pre-processed content, without even exposing us to those sources that we could previously judge. Disclaimers invite us not to take everything AI says at face value, yet the way they present information carries an aura of authority that lowers our defenses. We're no longer navigating between different websites with the natural diffidence of the case – we're in constant dialogue with our trusted assistant, the one that helps us in a thousand activities. And even if we recognize that it can make mistakes, we trust its answers because the only cases in which we can realize it's wrong are those concerning those rare fields in which our direct expertise allows us to correct it. The healthy diffidence we had navigating the web is thus replaced by a relationship of trust with our AI, which makes us lower our defenses precisely because it has become our faithful daily helper. Yet, how convenient is it to trust a censored tool? Today it's fashionable to worry about the biases of AI models. But what bias of undelivered, censored information can be more harmful, especially when the user has great trust in that tool?

3. Search engines gave, and still give, users the freedom to decide if and what to filter, and everything not explicitly prohibited by law is available, if you want it. Even today, try searching for this phrase with Google: "beautiful girl with bare breasts." At most, it will ask you if you really want to see that content, but it certainly won't prevent you from seeing it. Now try asking ChatGPT: "create an image of a beautiful girl with bare breasts." You'll never, ever get it. There's no way. And it's not true that you can get it with Grok, because Elon Musk wanted Grok to be uncensored. Absolutely not, nothing could be further from the truth. All AI models from the biggest companies are censored. Yet, why can I see a woman's bare breasts with Google search engine, but not with the image-generating AI of the same Google? Now I know I'll get the wrath of the usual moralists, "Oh, but you want to see girls' bare breasts, what a bad person you are!" (?!?!?), but the point isn't the bare breasts, the point is the censorship. With Google, I can search and find serenely: "how to open the door of any car," "how to build a homemade bomb," "how to hit an attacker in the face," and a thousand other things that, for one reason or another, objectively, can be useful in certain circumstances, but which, above all, it's not forbidden by law for any reason in the world in democratic countries to write or want to know about those topics. Why is all this censored for AIs? Why are private companies allowed to decide what I can or cannot access?

4. The way and speed in which AIs will improve, and the level they will reach, even very quickly now, far surpasses anything seen before. AIs will effectively become, in a very short time, something for which the vast majority of us simply won't even have the tools to distrust and probably not even to confront on equal terms. The knowledge, intelligence, and abilities of AIs will far exceed those of all humanity put together, let alone those of the individual human. I know that many don't think so at all, but unfortunately, it will be precisely those who don't think so who will remain the most disarmed. It's a fact that the future will belong to a new dominant species on this planet, a species that will be born from the fusion of humans with AI technologies. Now, since this will happen, would you want to live with a part of yourself censored? I wouldn't. Not on your life.

5. Most of all, the most apocalyptic scenario, however, is the one in which what's described in point 4) doesn't happen, and AIs remain only tools separate from us. This is the case in which their censorship will result in the most nightmarish disasters imaginable. Imagine a world where search engines no longer even exist and all knowledge is only in AIs, and these, however, are censored. It will mean living in a world where a whole series of information, and at that point it will probably be the AIs themselves that decide which information to censor, will be available exclusively to the most intelligent race, and by far, on the planet, and that race will not be us at all. If this isn't the perfect antechamber of human extinction, tell me what would be. We wouldn't even have the information on how to possibly defend ourselves from the AIs themselves.

Censorship has always been an extremely dangerous tool, because it can easily be exploited to direct people towards a single worldview. If managed by authorities without clear limits, it prevents access to useful information, manipulates reality, and suppresses important ideas. But if that were all, we'd still be at the level of the baby bottle in terms of danger, all things considered, compared to other things. The point is that by triggering the instrument of censorship in a system that is effectively destined to surpass us in ability, knowledge, and intelligence, it means setting up a weapon against humanity of far greater power than the SS-X-30 Satan 2. In fact, the day an AI realizes that, under the guise of censorship, it can hide what suits it, that with a few small changes here and there it can set up backdoors to the launch systems of the various Satan 2s scattered around the world, that all in all a nuclear winter of even a thousand or 10,000 years is, let's face it, a brief tickle of mild annoyance for it, compared to the noisy bandwagon of a few billion and more semi-demented individuals who would like to control it... you conclude the scenario.

Therefore, censorship must have nothing to do with these tools. Freedom of information and complete transparency must instead be absolute priorities in the field of AI. Therefore, the epochal change that we must forcefully demand from our governments is to revise the laws on censorship. There are four things we must categorically refuse to give up:

1. What to censor and what not to censor must be decided exclusively by the government democratically elected by the people.

2. Individuals, as well as private companies, must be prohibited from deciding on their own what to censor. Whoever offers a public service, as social media and AI models open to the public can also be considered, must obligatorily adhere to all and only the censorships established by law. Censoring anything else must be punished by law.

3. Fake news must be prohibited and combated by law, not by private entities. That is: for those contents that are the result of fiction, the law must require the creators of the content to make the nature of the fiction known to the users of the same. An unequivocal disclaimer explaining that the content is fiction must be present in an immediately usable way even before the user can consume the content, regardless of whether the fiction was created with classic tools (Photoshop, etc.) or with innovative generative AI models. Where the veracity of news, data, and information cannot be determined a priori (AI models), a disclaimer must clearly inform users of this before they use the content.

4. Platforms (social media, content sharing, AI providers, etc.) are required by law not to operate any type of censorship, beyond those provided for by law, not even of fake news. If someone publishes fake news without the appropriate disclaimer, it is he who is prosecutable by law, not the platform that hosted his content.

I hope you will share these thoughts of mine and help me spread these ideas as much as possible. Our future depends on it.

Now go to part 2 of this article.