Science fiction does not base its meaning on experience, but through the method of thought experiment develops a hypothesis to its ultimate consequences. In this way, the reader/viewer can understand the meaning of the potential fulfillment of some of the most idealistic ideas. From Plato’s “State” through Aristotle’s “Politics” to Thomas More’s “Utopia” and Tommaso Campanella’s “City of the Sun”, the history of human thought is filled with attempts to make the perfect construction of a society in which there will be full reflection and symmetry of justice.
That is why Plato’s work “State” bears the subtitle “On Justice”. In the middle of the 20th century, the emphasis changes from a utopian narrative to a purely dystopian narrative. That is, it is no longer a question of creating and blatantly expressing the idea of the appearance of a perfectly just society, but consequences are drawn from it, whether if we manage to implement that utopian scenario into reality, human life will have meaning.
In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley says that a society that is perfectly just, in which everyone gets what they deserve both as a form of reward and as a form of punishment, is a society in which people’s every move is predictable and control is maximally present. A condition for there to be an assessment of one’s work as something to be rewarded or punished is that there is an abstract system of control (mostly the state) or, as Michel Foucault calls it, a “panopticon” that will constantly monitor what people do in each unit of time.
When control becomes stable, human behavior becomes predictable, the possibility of error is eliminated, but also the possibility of making a free choice that would lead to a certain error.
In his essay “On Disobedience”, Erich Fromm says that it is in the act of disobedience that the free man is born. Blindly following the rules ensures that life will be completely sinless, but in that case man will not be able to demonstrate his free will. Therefore Fromm says that mistakes and sins (according to Christian terminology) do not necessarily have to be treated as destructive. For example, Adam and Eve committed an act of disobedience in Eden, but their expulsion from Eden created human existence on earth. In a Christian context they have sinned, but their sin cannot necessarily be said to be destructive or bad in itself.
In modern science fiction scenarios, the hypothesis is usually put forward whether AI can, according to its objective criteria, create a perfectly fair system of functioning and what the world would look like in which there is no room for error, and if it statistically happened, it would be immediately eliminated. In a society where control reigns, there is no place for ethics either.
Immanuel Kant claims that an action can be subject to ethical scrutiny only if it is the result and an indication of one’s free will. This concept is partially mirrored in law, persons who are not aware of their actions are freed from criminal responsibility because their actions are not a reflection of their choices. Hence, the biggest danger is not whether artificial intelligence will create a perfectly just world, but whether in the pursuit of absolute justice we will sacrifice the very imperfection that makes us human – the freedom to choose, to make mistakes and to build the meaning of our existence through our own mistakes.
Magdalena Stojmanović-Konstantinov
