Not a day goes by without someone talking about artificial intelligence (AI). On the one hand, we seem excited by its immense potential, its unparalleled ability to enrich our various daily tasks, whether they are related to the “serious” fields of research and creation or to the more modest ones of the very personal activities that we somehow manage to keep at the heart of our hectic lives.
“Without AI, I would never have found this source,” one can hear in some knowledge dispensary; “It helps me better understand this novel that I am forced to read,” replies the teenager who is caught in the middle of a conversation with ChatGPT; “I was finally able to establish an optimal flowering plan,” affirms, for his part, the budding gardener. If, thanks to AI, the success of each of these tasks is rewarding for the person who accomplishes it, will it, at the same time, provide him or her with a fruitful opportunity for learning and evolution?
“This artificially generated story has no soul!” we now hear in the creative writing class; “That grade my colleague got is unfair: he did it all with AI!” the student protests in the school hallway; “We know full well that he outsources his work plan to the machine,” complains the worker overwhelmed by technological advances. While artificial intelligence undoubtedly raises important ethical questions about the value of the work that results from it, it seems to me that we are running out of steam trying to attack a force whose megalomaniacal ambitions we can only curb. Whether we celebrate this all-powerful human invention or rebel against it, the angle from which we grapple with the beast always seems to be the same: that of the result.
Of course, our student’s reading report will have more depth since he will have largely exceeded his own understanding of the work with a wealth of information and analyses provided by the AI following his request. His classmate will be right to cry injustice, he who, perhaps, will have toiled over the text all night. That said, one of the two will have invested in an authentic way a stage that we no longer seem to take into account in the different tasks that we are called upon to carry out each day: the process.
So, it may be time to rethink what we focus on when we approach the issue of artificial intelligence. No one will object to entrusting AI with the boring task of noting, compiling and synthesizing the discussions of a team meeting that has strayed from the strict agenda. However, from a more global perspective, it seems to me imperative to change our relationship with efficiency and performance, by putting the process back at the center of the valorization of our success.
“But what is happening that is so important in this process?” my own mind, corrupted to the bone by this desire for performance, results and A+ (and proud, moreover, by my neighbor’s lower grade), now asks me. Well, my dear, it happens that at each stage, there are mistakes and small victories, there is a form of learning by trial and error, a slow, certainly, but profound appropriation of what makes up our personal reality.
There is, if we become seriously aware of each of the things we do, an enormous potential for expanding our own knowledge and our capacities to act on the world, no matter what we are working on. There is a multiplication of opportunities to perceive the famous results, not only at the moment of the completion of the work, but in each increment of our actions, in each of the small advances of our process, in each micro-shift of our attention towards the next step.
We must stop seeing this attitude as belonging to the idealistic dreamer wishing to live outside a capitalist world thirsty for efficiency and celebrate any process leading to the accomplishment of a task, however banal or important it may be. We must evaluate or evaluate ourselves otherwise than at the level of the result of the races and rather try to understand how and at what precise moment our action succeeded or failed. “Learning to learn”, the pedagogues would say. The student who has understood nothing of an arid reading will gain more and in a more lasting way from struggling alone or accompanied by his teacher on each of the obscure sentences and on each hermetic concept of which he will perhaps pierce the mystery.
Our society celebrates great achievements and is particularly amazed by the first works produced by natural genius, seemingly emerging from nowhere. Good for this innate genius, but since the vast majority of us will have to work hard to survive the ages allotted to us, I call for a profound overhaul of our concept of success.
I would like to read this first book, full of incoherence, but still filled with the freshness of the first gestures; I would like to dive into the second, a reworking of uncertainties and deployment of a newly assumed tone; I would like to continue reading until the last, a privileged witness to the evolution of its author. Thus, I would celebrate, as is fitting, the journey, rather than the destination, of the great and small achievements of existence.