It’s already back to school and everyone’s back to the office. In person or remotely, artificial intelligence (AI) is creeping into our places of study and work. But are we really ready? And are we still up to par in terms of technology?
With the arrival of generative AI, amplifying the capabilities of digital technologies, we have embarked on a race for speed and performance that may well catch us off guard.
It’s about reading, analyzing, writing, calculating, drawing, even coding, faster and more efficiently than before. Even if it comes at the expense of mastering our tasks and increasing our skills.
From the end of primary school, students are tempted to use ChatGPT for their writing assignments, which makes parents and teachers increasingly worried. And we, adults, are not left out.
Just look at how ChatGPT is used to translate words, search for synonyms or explore references, when a simple classic search engine, combined with our critical mind, would do the job just as well.
Have we become lazier with technology? This is certainly true, and it is nothing new. Calculators have been doing addition and multiplication for us for decades. But with AI, we may well unlearn or never learn many of the skills that are essential to our survival and integration into the social and economic world.
Solutions
How to fix this? For decades, the transhumanist movement has proposed augmenting humans through technology, with a view to ensuring the growth of their potential and the maintenance of their existence beyond a standard lifespan.
One of the most famous promoters of this vision is certainly the entrepreneur Elon Musk who, in addition to X, SpaceX and Tesla, runs the company Neuralink, whose mission is to design electronic chips to increase the capabilities of our brain.
It is not just a question of compensating for a handicap or a deficit (hemiplegia, aphasia, memory loss, etc.), but of augmenting the individual through the machine in order to allow it to accompany the increase in the prowess of AI.
I don’t know about you, but this technological hybridization seems both frightening and aberrant to me. Frightening first, because it involves the experimentation of invasive technologies by humans on behalf of a company that is not a public research institute, but rather a commercial adventure.
Aberrant too, since science clearly demonstrates to this day that the improvement of our cognitive capacities in their entirety can never be done by a single technological intervention. The brain is an organ far too complex and convolutional to be augmented by a single electronic chip.
Reading
Apart from the transhumanist delirium, what is left for us to improve ourselves as humans in the face of technology? In his book The augmented manthe French psychiatrist Raphaël Gaillard offers another way: reading.
Reading to prepare for AI, really? you might ask. Well yes, because reading, and its counterpart writing, constitute the first form of technological hybridization that human beings have known. A primordial form of storage and discovery of knowledge, which preludes any other encounter with computers, cell phones and conversational robots.
As Gaillard so aptly puts it, 3,000 years ago, we made the book the first prosthesis of our brain, a prosthesis filled with knowledge, thoughts about ourselves and the world, which remain available when we need them. In other words, the book was our first external hard drive, our first cloud of memories, images and ideas.
Today, the imperative is not to get to the level of AI by technologically augmenting our bodies, to better understand it and support its developments. In fact, AI is a very human technology, which remains and will always remain the result of our development choices and our modes of use.
To interact better with technology and feel ever more in control, we must then pursue the very classic ambition of developing our own cognitive and sensory capacities: our memory, our reflection, our expression, our sensitivity and our critical mind. Because all these capacities determine the way in which we interact with technology: with passivity and dependence, or on the contrary with distance and creativity.
As we head back to school, reading and writing could well prepare you for AI better than any action, because you will continue to develop your ability to imagine, feel, analyze, project yourself into the future and express your ideas, emotions and identities. Isn’t that what makes us superiorly human?