It fascinates or frightens, depending on each person, as the possibilities of artificial intelligence (AI) seem limitless. Since the launch with great fanfare of the ChatGPT online software at the end of 2022, AI is today considered a real technological revolution, like electricity or the arrival of the automobile. From the environment to science, including education, finance, astronomy and military questions, it is now shaking up all our fields of knowledge.
But the tool would already have its limits, and a significant one, if we are to believe Raphaël Enthoven’s new work, The artificial mindwhose title is paradoxically a reference to the book The artificial uterus by Henri Atlan. Because yes, for the famous French philosopher and writer, an artificial intelligence, however sophisticated and complex it may be in terms of its technological faculties, will never be able to think. Even if the committed essayist admits the scale of the revolution that the irruption of AI on a large scale constitutes in our daily lives, he firmly believes that it is incapable of competing with a human, particularly in a particular field. , that of philosophy.
According to him, the machine cannot under any circumstances become a mind. “She finds herself like a chicken in front of a knife when we ask her to conceive of a problem”, since transforming a question into a problem to make it the pivot of a reflection is totally foreign to her. Human intelligence is therefore a matter that no machine is able to synthesize, he believes. Not only does it have the capacity to sort, classify and explain data or phenomena, but it results from doubts, fears, uncertainties, memories of a multitude of experiences which make up existence, as many elements hermetic to AI, mentions the author in his work.
Enthoven also does not believe in a so-called clash between man and AI. He also finds the idea absurd. That the machine is stronger than man is both obvious and absurd, he emphasizes. The hammer is more powerful than the fist and the calculator counts much faster than the synapses of our neurons. So what ? These tools were created with the aim of improving skills.
Basically, the work, which can be read in one sitting – drawing both on popular culture and ancient modes of thought – denounces this old fantasy stimulated by science fiction of a humanity replaced by machine. “The question is not to know when the machine will produce thought, but rather where our old fear of it comes from, which goes from the Golem to ChatGPT via Frankenstein or Terminator…” writes- he.