Like all teachers, recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) challenged me. After ecoanxiety, will we fall into the traps of robotanxiety? More seriously, if anxiety is managed by confronting our perceptions with a more objective assessment of reality, this exercise does not reassure. Today we must recognize an acceleration of changes within our civilization, what I would venture to call a real “mutation” in our ways of learning, of thinking, of interacting with our fellow human beings, or quite simply of our ways of being.
Some time ago, I watched with my students a report by Discovery titled “Love in the Age of Robots” (2020). We meet a handful of great Japanese researchers who are very enthusiastic about the idea of being in the process of creating humanoid robots with a human face. Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro seeks to design his perfect junk look-alike and even goes—well, that’s a little disturbing—to undergo cosmetic procedures to look more like his creature.
A breath of protests was heard in my class, combined with weird !…” well felt, which initially swung this episode into the category of wacky techno-scientific frenzies. The images of Doctor Ishiguro’s robot and Doctor Ishiguro in the flesh merging in similarity came to my mind a few days ago, however, when a thousand experts, including Yoshua Bengio and Elon Musk (not science fiction authors !), co-signed a letter calling for a moratorium on AI development.
Two of the questions raised in the text are: “Should we develop non-human minds that might one day outnumber and outsmart us, obsolete and replace us? and “Should we risk losing control of our civilization?” » Aren’t we swimming in the middle of science fiction? It seems at least feared or anticipated here.
The latest advances in AI may lead us to think that the face of a robot juxtaposing, or even replacing, a human face, is no longer so far-fetched. There was a time when such an idea was really pure fiction, insofar as humans were still fully human. The fact is, in a gradual and now accelerated way, humans are changing and our minds are slowly becoming alienated by digital and technological substitutes.
GPS, correctors, automatic readers and personal assistants of this world were still only small transplants to our cognitive universe. The wave that is coming is rather a tsunami that will inexorably transform us. In our great blind collective march towards limitless technological growth, we all forget that we are collectively immersed in a denial of comfort and indifference. Yes, the risk that robots will replace us and threaten our civilization is very real.
Why be so alarmist? Because the characteristics that distinguish us from them—our conscience, our creativity, our critical thinking, our intellect—are fading at breakneck speed. Robots, the future masters of sameness and camouflage (we work so hard on this), will tend to look like humans, and humans — and here’s the rub — will look like robots. There will be no more worry, pride, scandals or weird !…” released in front of the spectacle of the robotization of the world. The machine and the humans will have joined at a meeting point where we will no longer distinguish one from the other.
Some will answer me “But where is the problem? noting, no doubt with some truth, my conservatism and alarmism. I would reply to them that, in absolute terms, perhaps there is indeed no problem. After all, you can’t stop progress… However, before we succumb to the temptation to write everything with ChatGPT with our eyes glued to our screens — from emails, love notes to professional communications, writing essays and to correct (nothing more thrilling than a dialogue between robots) — and thus continue to develop at great speed substitute intelligences for our own, should we not, with our conscience and our aspirations as human beings, ask ourselves collectively what we want for the future of our children and our civilization?