In a few weeks, artificial intelligence (AI) has gone from being a fascinating novelty to a worrying threat to almost everything that weaves our societies together. Not so long ago, it was seen as the ideal helper for doctors, researchers, administrations (and, of course, cheating students): what opportunities were going to open up to save everyone time. world on the ancillary tasks and allow to make more abundant and more useful the quality time, prerogative of the human being. Studies were soon published by research centers or major financial institutions estimating hundreds of millions of job losses resulting from the only real major replacement that we have seen with our eyes: the replacement of man by machine. . Far from being an appendix to human work, AI will therefore become its main engine.
The man will be retired long before he turns 64, as our proud nags once did after the invention of the internal combustion engine. We will end up in stables, having become beasts eating hay. It is written. The platform led by nothing less than Elon Musk expressing the desire that the developments of the AI type ChatGPT be interrupted for six months, the time that a regulation is imagined, only confirms the worst fears generated by the machines for the human activity, its usefulness, its dignity, not to mention an exponential increase in the criminal use of AI. What was a vague suspicion, or the dark side of a coin whose bright side is so alluring, has become a warning cry.
It is almost certain that it will not be followed by effects. Progress has never been stopped, especially when it pushes back the frontiers of humanity. We can do without a few chemicals that kill the bees, materials that, released into the air, into the water, into the subsoil, pollute them irremediably. But we can no longer do without AI, because AI is not a scientific revolution, but an anthropological revolution. AI changes the vision that man has of his place in the world. Exactly like the nuclear weapon, the development of which no one has ever been able to stop, not because it is technically impossible, but because the nuclear weapon is an excess of man, a tool which not only makes him master of nature, but owner of the destiny of the world.
“While God calculates, the world is made”
The nuclear weapon is the thunderbolt of Zeus captured by humanity. Artificial intelligence is the spirit of the God of Leibniz, of which the German philosopher said: “dum Deus calculat, fit mundus” – “While God calculates, the world is made”. In other words: the world is only an immense mathematics and not a simple metaphysics. AI is also a huge calculation. When you ask a question to ChatGPT, within a few seconds the machine tells you that it is “thinking”. She calculates. Here we are, possessors of the ability to bring together the abstraction of computer calculation and all of the knowledge of the world, then to use this junction to modify reality. God, honestly, hasn’t done anything else since the dawn of time. So here we are all little gods in our particular.
Nevertheless, a problem remains. According to all religions, at some point, God created man. And what are we going to create? Is it necessary that, now having absolutely supreme power, we set out to bring out some new creature, an appendage and proof of our superiority? Why then did the divinities, in their perfection, bother themselves in their time with a creature as weak as Man? Is it because, foreseeing the future, they thought that our takeover would allow them to enjoy a peaceful retirement? Or is it because, in this world, there is nothing so boring as perfection and nothing so precious as fragility?
Intoxicated today with his omnipotence, exulting to see the constellation of knowledge forming at will without giving himself too much trouble (the God of Genesis also loved rest), Man could perhaps tomorrow find his senses and the taste for what, far from the prowess of its hubris, is weak, temporary, changeable, mortal. Through this immense and perilous detour through the all-divine power of his intelligence, Man could perhaps finally, one day, we do not know, regain a taste for humanity.