June 30, 2025 (EIRNS)—Here are the remarks of Helga Zepp-LaRouche to the China-EU Human Rights Symposium in Madrid, Spain on June 29:
Topic: “The Development of Artificial Intelligence and the Value of Human Subjectivity”
Title: “What Constitutes a Beautiful Soul”
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
Because of breaking developments, I had to change my text.
The extraordinary dangers coming from careless or malicious application of AI has just been demonstrated in the most dramatic way possible. The International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, published a resolution on June 12, that it could not trust Iran’s renewed claim that it pursues nuclear enrichment only for peaceful purposes. The former British diplomat and analyst Alastair Crooke reported on “Conflict Forum” on Substack on June 20th that this IAEA resolution was not based on human intelligence, but was drawn from IAEA software, namely Palantir’s “Mosaic” platform, an AI system that predicts nuclear threats. The model repeated, based on its algorithms, allegations which had been made and debunked over and over again for years, flagging “anomalies” at Fordow and Lavizan-Shian. The algorithm looks at metadata, patterns of behavior and signal traffic, and on that basis postulates what suspects may be thinking or planning, not facts. That report was then cited by media and politicians in the U.S. and Europe as the justification for Israel’s all-out attack on Iran two days later.
IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi corrected the assessment on CNN on June 17, but too late: The tragic events had occurred, including President Trump’s dismissal of DNI Tulsi Gabbard’s findings that Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons, and his subsequent order to U.S. forces to bomb nuclear sites in Iran. So we may be on the short road to World War III as a result of careless or malicious use of AI.
Artificial Intelligence has opened, in one sense, the window to an entirely new chapter in the universal history of man: It is a disruptive technology, that increases the effectiveness of man’s action in the universe by orders of magnitude. On the other hand, it poses moral questions, that are not so entirely new, namely, what is the relationship between man, and the objects he creates. In literature and art, there are several examples portraying the dream of human beings to create something which has the features of his own creativity, for example, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or the Jewish “Golem,” a figure made of clay, made alive through magic, and naturally the “Frankenstein’s Monster,” of Mary Shelley.
Human beings are distinguished from all other living creatures by their creative reason, which enables them to again and again discover axiomatic-revolutionary improvements in the knowledge about the physical principles which govern our universe. The human mind is the faculty in which the creative hypothesis formation occurs.
AI is not the discovery of such a revolutionary new physical principle, but an appended instrument, which can gather data at a quasi-speed of light by the method of either deduction based on past experiences to arrive at a new concept, or by the method of “generative intelligence” arriving at a new conception, but within the setting of previously established rules. So the often-asked question, if AI will ever surpass human creativity, can be clearly answered negatively.
The usefulness of AI lies in the fact that it is freeing man increasingly from all repetitive forms of labor, it increases our extended sensorium to operate in domains presently inaccessible to man, such as tasks related to space travel, for example, thus it will enable man to have the free energy for axiomatic new discoveries, but it will not inspire them itself. As all other technologies, if it will be used for the benefit of mankind, or the contrary, entirely depends on the moral and aesthetic quality of the human being who is applying it.
The above-mentioned misuse of AI, which has brought mankind to the verge of potential self-annihilation, underlines the urgency that we, as a species, must invest much more care into the aesthetic education of the beauty of the human character. We should make the concept of the “Beautiful Soul,” which Friedrich Schiller established as the highest ideal of man, the subject of a dialogue among civilizations, for which President Xi’s Global Civilizational Initiative would give a perfect setting.
A beautiful soul, according to Friedrich Schiller, is a person, for whom freedom and necessity, duty and passion have become one, and who has educated his emotions so much to the level of reason, that he can blindly trust them, because they would never request anything from him, which would be different than what reason commands. The beautiful soul is obviously also a person who has fully developed what Schiller names as the most important requirement of his time, his Empfindungsvermögen, his all-encompassing empathy. And how much more are we today in need for a passionate, or maybe tender love for humanity. And this love, ren, according to both Confucius and Schiller, can be actualized by will.
