What surprises me most about our relationship with generative artificial intelligence (AI) is not that we are capable of developing such powerful technology, which once again surpasses faculties that we believed to be unique to humans. , but rather that so many of us are interested in it and use it without questioning it too much. I mean that most of us see what our critical thinking skills and thinking are becoming without feeling any shame, without seeing any hurt pride, without having our pride piqued, in short, without seeing any problem with what we used AI while thanking science for making it easier for us to do what for some still remained too heavy a task: thinking for themselves, using their own abilities.
Because this is what most seem to like, the “ease” that it offers us in the domain of thought, if we can still call the use of such a tool “thinking”, also appreciating the simple process of which before its conception required judgment work, a critical, reflective exercise, a journey of memorized knowledge, introspection efforts, study time, repeated and varied exercises.
In other words, I am surprised to see again how most of us trade the pleasure of effort for the boredom of ease. Most will then be content to verify answers after the fact with other results provided by a third party or a technique, and then will decide to answer without reasoning, without using their own research and deductions, but with a construction of proofs well outside the schemas. that they themselves could have conceived, with their knowledge, with their experiences.
This effort of thought will be nothing more than a well-emptied form, a flat method of assembly; failing to have been able to create a technology that can recreate thought, does the user’s thought not appear as a simulation of the computational process? Would you be willing to say that thinking is calculating? I do not believe. Doesn’t replacing the long and difficult work of deliberation based on one’s own senses, one’s own perceptions and one’s own analyzes of evidence open the door to a very naive belief in a simulative technique that one copies? yourself? Will we not believe that we have thought when all we have done is assemble a result like blocks that are still opaque?
I do not see any “augmented man” in the use of generative AI, but rather the opposite, the average man, a man with sufficient abilities, with utilitarian abilities, those which only require a simple function, but nothing more. Wouldn’t it be like a leveling towards a happy medium easy to reach by everyone, by the most disadvantaged as well as the most intrepid? A happy medium which, recalling Nietzsche, is the noble concept of mediocrity.
“To think is to weigh”
“To think is to weigh,” said Alain. Thinking is not just calculating, assembling, schematizing, naively categorizing and then rendering a pre-constructed result by the solution of an algorithm. To think is to weigh the value of one piece of information rather than another, it is to gain an understanding through theoretical and practical knowledge of the facts that we want to measure and evaluate, it is to grasp a fact on the spot and overturn it on all sides, place it back in an obscure diagram (much more obscure than the learning levels of learning machines), obscure since it draws its effort not only from neuronal work, but above all from the body, from the sensitive body, of the action of the individual in his environment, in a changing environment.
To think is to weigh in relation to one’s entire body and its past, the past of the body and of perceptions, especially memory, which contains all the readings that we have done, all the work of reasoning that we have accomplished, all the exercises which will have allowed us to have well-honed reflexes, and all our emotions which are involved in the evaluation process, because the values come. Thought is hot, boiling, unlike the calculation of generative AI which leaves all value alone, “understands” nothing, grasps nothing, and leaves the result cold.
Thinking is difficult and remains constant work. It feels like it’s getting too heavy today. Finally, does this really surprise me? We get tired of it… We don’t want to force it too much, we’re no longer used to it and, when we force it, we want to reward ourselves immediately. Our body forces less and less and everything becomes comfortable, without too much risk.
“Could we not have great comfort in our thinking, like comfort in our life? » This is what we seem to be asking, so we innovate to make our mental life comfortable. Ah! Spirit, what a funny word today! We reduce this life of the mind to diagrams and give it to calculators.
Perfect ! We only have to enter a few words whose definitions and concepts increasingly elude us, and then we cross-check with other instructions later; if everything works, it works, it holds together, we don’t really know how. We respond, and it’s all cold, because there is no thought, no weighing, no heat, no value.