The magic of the human mind is a spectacle in itself, a spark in dialogue that sparks thoughts, inspirations and ideas, nourishing even the most mundane conversations. And now I find myself hoping that artificial intelligence, despite its dazzling advances, will never manage to match this complexity.
I prefer that it remains in its artificial domain, precious for our societies, and leaves us the richness of our intellect, essential to our humanity.
Allow me to tell you the story of Talos, this bronze colossus forged on the orders of King Minos to guard Crete. Every day, he went around it three times, watching over the borders, keeping curious people away. Even today, it is cited as the first robot, a crude imitation of man, but providing an invaluable service: freeing us from a repetitive and sometimes dangerous task.
From civilization to civilization, the idea behind Talos evolved, becoming, in 1206, a musical robot marvel under the fingers of its designer Ismail al-Jazari, then, at the end of the 18the century, the famous mechanical Turk, the illusion of an autonomous chess player hiding in reality a grandmaster. A deception, certainly, but a harbinger of what its future would be two centuries later.
Over time, Talos became dematerialized, first becoming a calculating machine in the hands of Charles Babbage, mathematician, philosopher and engineer, then an algorithm in the pen of Ada Lovelace, British mathematician and writer. His journey led him to transform into a digital computer in the heart of the 20the century, questioning his own intelligence. Alan Turing offered part of the answer with his famous test, putting Talos on the path to artificial intelligence, a term coined by John McCarthy during the Dartmouth summer research project.
Talos, coated with rich vocabulary such as “neural networks” and “natural language processing”, is adorned with the latest trends: “reinforcement learning” and “machine learning”. In the era of “big data,” it seemed ready to challenge the intelligence of its creators.
Yet Talos’s pretension has met its limits. He had not understood that life, far from being reduced to equations, is also constructed through dreams, imagination and spontaneous reactions.
Despite his appetite for data, he could not match human vivacity and ingenuity, although endowed with imperfections, unlike him supposedly, but which are all engines of life.
The Age of Enlightenment, which Talos believed to be over, has resurfaced with force. The ideas of Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu and Diderot, who questioned the foundations of the society of their time, inspired a renewal, placing tolerance and progress at the heart of concerns.
Talos ended up understanding his true place: to serve humanity, and not seek to control everything or appropriate all the wealth. He then dressed himself in the trappings of democracy, the environment and ethics, recognizing that the Age of Enlightenment, always in search of scientific and economic progress, would otherwise continue on its path without him. For Talos, a long and harsh winter was ahead… to the great happiness of our societies and those to come.