Twice a month, The duty challenges enthusiasts of philosophy and the history of ideas to decipher a topical issue based on the theses of a prominent thinker.
According to Sigmund Freud, the development of the sciences would have inflicted on humanity three humiliations, which constitute as many narcissistic wounds, in accordance with his psychoanalytical theory. These three humiliations suffered by human beings called into question the anthropocentrism on the basis of which “man” thought of himself until then.
The first humiliation is cosmological, it is personified by Copernic: the human being is not the center of the universe. The second humiliation is biological, it comes from Darwin’s theory of evolution: the human being is also an animal, in that he participates in the animal kingdom from which he comes. The third humiliation is psychological, as Freud revealed with the unconscious: the human being is not master in his own house.
To these three great humiliations, Pierre Bourdieu added a fourth, of a sociological order: the socialization specific to the concept of habitus breaks with the myth of the individual who creates himself freely, just as the theory of evolution breaks with the Genesis myth.
And if the human being suffered at this moment a new humiliation, his fifth? In fact, this humiliation has been going on for a few decades already, and ChatGPT is just the latest manifestation of it.
This humiliation, which could be called cybernetic humiliation, is based on the rapprochement between human beings and machines. Even more, it is embodied in the replacement, if not by the overcoming, of the first by the second.
The defeats of chess (Garry Kasparov) and go (Ke Jie) champions against Deep Blue computers in 1997 and AlphaGo in 2017 are significant milestones in the ongoing humiliation. Added to this are autonomous car driving, the power of computing, the development of nanotechnology, robotics, quantum and, of course, artificial intelligence, including that at work with ChatGPT. Even more, with the GAFAMs, the humiliation deepens: Google and Microsoft define what we think, Amazon defines what we want, Facebook defines what we are and Apple defines what we have.
The father of cybernetics
Formed from the meeting of several disciplines (mathematics, engineering, biology, zoology, computer science, anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, neurology, physiology, sociology, philosophy, education), cybernetics assimilates human behavior to that of the machine, and vice versa. poured. If it were necessary, as for the previous humiliations, to associate a name with this new humiliation, it is undoubtedly that of Norbert Wiener that it would be necessary first to invoke. During the 3e International Congress of Cybernetics, held in Namur in 1961, the engineer and mathematician Georges Boulanger expressed himself as follows: “An immense domain is offered to us, which is still unexplored. And after the names of Galileo and Darwin, it is that of Norbert Wiener that I propose to write. »
Just as the name of Galileo could be associated with that of Copernicus with regard to cosmology, Wiener would not be the only possible representative of cybernetics. Just think of Alan Turing and other people who contributed to the development of the computer and computing. But Wiener is the one who, in 1948, published a work entitled Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (which was translated as: Cybernetics. Information and regulation in the living and the machine), in which he writes: “Until recently there was no word for this complex of ideas, and in order to designate the whole field by a single term, I saw myself in the obligation to invent one. Hence the word “cybernetics” which I derived from the Greek word kubernetes, or “pilot”, the same Greek word from which we ultimately make our word “Governor”. »
Then a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Wiener led interdisciplinary work that sought to construct a “new science.” According to him, there is no reason why machines cannot resemble living beings insofar as, through communication and learning, they also have the ability to direct their action based on the information received. . The notions he formulated, including those of feedback (feedback) and black box (black box), remain relevant today to think about the functioning and the insufficient transparency of algorithmic governance.
The thesis of cybernetic humiliation was not formulated by Wiener himself. On the contrary, he was rather optimistic about the possible progress offered by technologies. What Wiener provides us with more are the conceptual frameworks for understanding and explaining this cybernetic underworld in which we live today. Our computers, our watches, our phones and other connected objects change our relationship to others and to reality, which is becoming more and more virtual. However, the effects of cybernetics should not be seen only in the fields of engineering, computer science or technology; all disciplines are affected. The cybernetic empire extends its network on law and management, among others, with the help of its conceptual tools and its mechanisms of regulation by instruments, indicators, nudges, etc. Domains such as education, health and justice are transformed under the action of cybernetics, with control rooms, algorithms, as well as strategic plans and action plans. The governing machine is not only governed by laws, but also by programs, while computer scientists sometimes replace lawyers in governance by numbers.
Technology regulation
In the early days of cybernetics, the visions of cyberneticians exceeded the possibilities then offered by technologies, even if the chess machine and the idea of artificial thought were already present in the early 1950s. Since then, technological developments have been subject to significant criticism, sometimes very violent (think of the terrorist acts of Theodore Kaczynski, nicknamed “Unabomber”). The need for the regulation of technologies remains immense to this day, in particular because ethics and the law have difficulty in regulating phenomena that are evolving so rapidly. And now cybernetic humiliation risks experiencing an even greater acceleration with transhumanism and, in the longer term, posthumanism.
Norbert Wiener did not only study mathematics, he also studied philosophy, notably during a postdoctoral internship with the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. By combining the sciences of computer science and information, it is therefore a question of adopting a philosophical attitude and a model of human activity bringing together cybernetics and pragmatism. Hence Wiener’s interest in regulation, notably through ideas such as information, communication, feedback, reflexivity and learning. Note that Wiener, who refused to participate in the Manhattan Project on the development of the nuclear bomb, started from his own research carried out during the Second World War, when he was looking for how to direct the shots of an anti-missile gun. Direction, control and guidance are fundamental elements for retroactive adaptation following information intake – which defines a learning process. The behavior adopted, which is in fact the response, must itself become information, in a circular causality, for the self-correcting transformation and the change of conduct. Wiener writes that “feedback is the control of a system by means of feeding back into that system the results of one’s action. If these results are used only as numerical data for system examination and tuning, we get the simple feedback control engineers are familiar with. If, on the other hand, the information relating to the action performed is capable of modifying the general method and the model of the latter, we have a process that we can well name learning “.
By introducing “feedback mechanisms” to capture the circular causality involved in goal-directed behavior, the realization of which requires feedback and error correction, cybernetics makes regulation a central aspect of its theory. The discussions around ChatGPT lead us precisely to the issue of the regulation of technologies. In this field, it seems more and more impossible to prohibit completely, nor to authorize completely, hence the importance of reflecting on the ethical and legal issues in order to adequately regulate the uses that can be made of them depending on the circumstances. and situations.
By claiming to write in place of humans, and perhaps even think for them, ChatGPT contributes in a non-negligible way to this cybernetic humiliation of human beings. Unlike previous humiliations, however, this one is the direct result of human intelligence, which itself created the conditions for the advent of artificial intelligence. By now having the choice of the uses he will make of artificial intelligence, the human being will determine the depth of his new narcissistic wound.
This text was written without using ChatGPT.
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