– The motto of the Enlightenment was ‘sapere aude’, or ‘have the courage to be wise’. We need to ask whether the price of the benefits of artificial intelligence is not to give up wisdom. Just as we must ask whether the price for the benefits of cloning capabilities is not, or one day will not be, giving up humanity,” Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki stressed during the World Copernican Congress in Toruń.

On the second day of the Copernican World Congress in Toruń, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki met with Nobel Prize winners participating in the conference – astronomer Prof. Didier Quelozo, physicist Prof. Arthur B. McDonald, astronomer Prof. Michel Mayor, physicist Prof. Barry C. Barish, and astronomer and cosmologist Prof Phillip James Edwin Peebles.

The Chief Executive’s speech also opened a panel with Nobel Prize winners on the importance of science in the modern world and current international issues.

Below is the full text of Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s speech and the recording.

Honourable Minister, Honourable President, Your Excellency, Honourable Nobel Laureates, Professors, Ladies and Gentlemen,

One of my favourite anecdotes about Albert Einstein concerns a student who, after finishing an exam, was surprised to approach the professor and say that the questions were the same as last year. To which Einstein replied: “Yes, they are the same, but the answers are different”.

My conviction is that we, too, in 2022 had to give ourselves new answers to old questions. The pandemic, then the war in Ukraine and the massive economic crisis shook the whole world. For many, Putin’s decision to aggress against Ukraine was as difficult to accept as Copernicus’ thesis that the Earth revolves around the Sun. The warming conditions in which many Western politicians and Western elites lived have put minds to sleep.

The main principle of classical economics, which in simple terms was supposed to be: “Money moderates manners”, has fallen into ruin. The last thirty years have been marked by the dominance of neo-liberalism, which has claimed itself as the only rational description of the world, especially of economic and political relations. At the very least, neo-liberal theory was treated like one of the iron laws of physics, as if social theories described not people but atoms.

We know that knowledge can often be a tool of power and, according to this thesis, neoliberalism was a tool of domination in a system where massive inequalities and injustices prevailed. Anyone who raised doubts was treated as someone out of his or her mind, questioning neoliberalism was treated almost like questioning the law of gravity. As it happens, my father was a theoretical physicist, and as a physicist he knew full well that even a scientific theory is always only an imperfect attempt to describe a nature that remains a mystery.

I had the great pleasure of talking to our Nobel Prize winners about the origins of the world and the various phenomena of the cosmos, listening to fantastic information and knowledge. I would like to say a few sentences about the paradox of knowledge. Hannah Arendt wrote in 1958, in her famous work on the ‘Human Condition’, that modern technological advances had for the first time become a threat to humanity itself. She pointed out that ever since we possessed the atomic bomb, humanity has been capable of annihilating itself. This makes it all the more necessary for us to think about what scientific discoveries will be used for and how we can harness them. We spoke to the Nobel laureates about artificial intelligence and the regulatory challenges in this area.

And today’s world is full of paradoxes – the invention of the internet was supposed to unite us into one global village, but it has also become the start of many problems and the beginning of a new isolation. When the ‘Arab Spring’ erupted, many believed that it was the internet that would open the way to freedom and democracy, and not a few years have passed and it has turned out that the internet has also become a powerful tool of surveillance and enslavement, on a scale we have not known before, if it ends up in the hands of dictators, autocrats, and this is also happening.

Some time from now, although here we disagreed, the age of artificial intelligence is upon us. Personally, I don’t fear that robots with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face will take over, but a teacher friend recently told me that a student brought him a paper that had been written by a program available on the internet. And this creates powerful challenges for the whole education process as well.

The motto of the Enlightenment was ‘sapere aude’ – ‘have the courage to be wise’. So we need to ask whether, for the benefits of artificial intelligence, the price is not to give up wisdom. Just as we need to ask whether, for the benefits of the ability to clone, the price is not, or one day will not be, giving up humanity or a part of it.

Robert Oppenheimer used to say that he needed physics more than friends. I hope that this is not true of every physicist. Many scientists, especially astronomers, after years of studying the cosmos, ask themselves about their relationship to God. Some become atheists, seeing only an infinite void in the cosmos, while others start to believe even more deeply. Nicolaus Copernicus, the patron saint of today’s meeting, did not lose his faith after his groundbreaking discovery, and the paradox of Copernicus’ discovery is that the knowledge that allowed him to make such a great discovery also brought the realisation that the world does not revolve around man. In short, the more we know the more we realise how small we are in relation to the universe.

The history of human civilisation is the history of human civilisation’s trials with the awareness of our frailty. Religion, our traditions, family, friends – these have always been ways of coping in a world full of danger. It could be said that people were able to live like this before technology allowed the world to take over, but hasn’t the last year proved that even the best technology
cannot protect us from viruses? Hasn’t the last year proved that even the best technology will not protect us from the sick ambitions of tyrants – as we see today with Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine?

My father loved physics, but he loved people even more. That is why, despite his great scientific prospects, he gave priority to the fight for freedom. In the free world, scientists do not have to choose – either science or friends, in the free world, science serves to make people’s lives in the world safer, better, more dignified.

True knowledge arms great men with great humility. It is my hope and conviction that the advances of knowledge in the 21st century will in parallel help us to grow and make us more humble towards the world. For it is only the combination of these two great qualities that push man forward, humility on the one hand and the desire to seek truth and new lands, as we say figuratively, on the other, that is the greatest of virtues that help us build a better world together.