Last January 28, Elon Musk announced the first brain chip implant in a human being. Obscurantism surrounds the alleged breakthrough, and I say alleged because for several years, research centers around the world have been experimenting with neuroprostheses, especially in China.

Significantly, the Asian giant's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has declared its latest breakthroughs in "brain-computer interface" an "iconic innovative product". Find here an important clue as to why the European Union is not being more restrictive in its proposal law for the regulation of Artificial Intelligence - essential for the chips to achieve all that is promised. The U.S. and China are vying for technological supremacy, and in this degree program the EU is lagging behind.

What's at stake with the chips? Musk presents them under his own messianism: the panacea for the sick of today and the tool to "unlock the human potential of tomorrow". This statement carries an underlying idea that should concern us. Musk is the grandson of Joshua Halderman, leader of the Technocratic Movement from 1936 to 1941. According to this movement, democracy was to disappear and its politicians were to be replaced by engineers and scientists; they wore gray and had numbers for a name; their symbol (a red and white circle) can still be seen on the walls of some Silicon Valley labs.

It's not water under the bridge. Elon Musk tops the rich list, according to Forbes, and his youngest son is named X Æ A-12. It adds fuel to the fire to know that what Joshua N. Haldeman presented as fervently anti-communist will end up looking, paradoxically, like what is today a communist state with Economics market. Perhaps the next great war will not be between blocs with clashing political systems but simply a war between tyrants.

Aldous Huxley, one of the first to propose, almost a century ago, that the development of technologies capable of opening breaches in the privacy and autonomy of citizens could become the main catalyst for the decline of democracies, warned about this risk. Of course, the problem is not in the technology itself, but in the proven historical fact that, every so often, an evil man comes to power. The author of Brave New World knows that the danger is not imminent, but warns that when it is, we may no longer be able to avoid the point of no return, that is, the most dreaded singularity, when technology makes it impossible to overthrow the tyrant.

Other evils bring this fearsome technological singularity closer. I am not only referring to transhumanist fashions, but also to the humanist humanisms that insist that everything is solved with a correct Education in the healthy use and manager of technology. Under this slogan they started giving cell phones to minors twenty years ago, and today they also use the same slogan to teach our students, at classroom, the advantages of ChatGPT. Why learn to write if the machine can do it for you? Is it still understood that in this skill lies one of the instructions of critical and creative thinking? ChatGPT is a useful tool , yes, but not for the teaching. The technocratic elites will not carry chips and will know how to write.

Cool humanism is achieving less than nothing. The strategy of the lamb in wolf's clothing playing rhetorical misdirection and games of thrones is counterproductive. As Friedrich Nietzsche writes, back in 1886, in Beyond Good and Evil: "He who fights with monsters, beware of becoming a monster himself." And monsters are neither happy nor democrats -interpret that last sentence at will.

Publius Ovid Nason tells that Phaethon asked his father Helios to allow him to drive the chariot of the sun across the sky. According to the Roman poet, he made three mistakes: he mistrusted his divine parentage, he undervalued his father's work, and he believed that good intentions were enough to control the sun. Under his leadership the chariot wreaked havoc in the sky and scorched the earth.

Is it possible to stop future Phaethons? We need to go back to trusting in truthful and direct speeches. Perhaps the solution lies in a new subject of humanism, let's call it true technological humanism, which offers convincing solutions, but without violence or manipulation, on how to avoid the point of no return. Is it possible to achieve this goal without stopping technological progress? The answer is a whole challenge; I am sure very much to the taste of billionaire visionaries looking for original ways to spend their money or wishing to become true saviors of humanity.