Paul Jorion's Blog

Category: A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES

A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. XV. Updating the “us” within a technological context

Illustration by DALL·E

Updating the “us” within a technological context

In the same way as Linnæus positioned us among the anthropoid apes, now the existence of intelligent machines sets us in a family of intelligent beings where living creatures and machines…

November 12, 2024
A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. XIV. Intelligence: A defining feature of our pride

Illustration by DALL·E: “The human being worshipping his own intelligence”

Intelligence: A defining feature of our pride

Humankind’s intelligence has always been praised by humans as maybe their defining quality. Animals around us display some of this intelligence but to a lesser…

November 9, 2024
A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. XIII. Scaling up

Illustration by DALL·E

Scaling up

A second source of our unpreparedness for an artificial intelligence better than ours is that the very way the overtaking occurred was unexpected being almost entirely due to a process of gain in size – the extra…

November 8, 2024
A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. XII. AI has the great disadvantage of being … artificial

Illustration by DALL·E

AI has the great disadvantage of being … artificial

This does not mean however that scientific research had become an easy pursuit in the West from the 16^th century onwards: the image of the tree of knowledge’s forbidden fruit…

November 3, 2024
A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. XI. Why were we caught off-guard by AI?

A portrait of Tycho Brahe, Royal Astrologist of Danemark, by Stable Diffusion

Why were we caught off-guard by AI?

Despite artificial intelligence having been a field of research…

November 2, 2024
A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. X. The rise of the LLMs

Portrait of Geoffrey Hinton by Stable Diffusion

The rise of the LLMs

This is the way things stood before some recent events that led Geoffrey Hinton to make a disturbing statement. Geoffrey Hinton is the mastermind behind Large Language Models such…

October 31, 2024
A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. IX. Freud: The soul in the realm of suspicion

Illustration by DALL·E

Freud: The soul in the realm of suspicion

What Linnæus and Darwin had forced to reconsider was the notion of Man as having been created entirely separately from the “the beast of the earth according to its kind, cattle…

October 31, 2024
A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. VIII. Darwin: Man in a sequence

Illustration by DALL·E

Darwin: Man in a sequence

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was the thinker who added a historical perspective to the picture Linnaeus had painted: animal species that look like each other in their skeleton necessarily evolved from a common ancestor.…

October 30, 2024
A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. VI. Linnæus: Man taken down from his pedestal

Illustration by DALL·E

Linnæus: Man taken down from his pedestal

The biblical representation of Man as a creature special in the eyes of God suffered a first serious blow in 1735, when Carl Linnæus (1707-1778) classified the human species along animals,…

October 29, 2024
A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. V. The New Testament: Reciprocity

Illustration by DALL·E

The New Testament: Reciprocity

In the East, with totemism, which Durkheim and Mauss identified with China’s thought of archaic times there is no crucial divide between Man, the chosen creature in the eyes of God, and the other…

October 26, 2024
A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. IV. The Old Testament: Creation

Illustration by DALL·E (+Animé)

The Old Testament: Creation

For almost two millennia the dominant view of humankind in the West was grounded in the biblical account: Adam and Eve being made in the likeness of God, while nature was defined by God…

October 25, 2024
A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. III. East and West

Illustration by DALL·E of Marco Polo discovering China

East and West

In the conceptualisation of the advent of artificial intelligence on a par with human intelligence, there are major differences between the West and the East: between the civilisations and the range…

October 24, 2024
A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. II. Decentring and refocusing the definition of “us”

Illustration by DALL·E from the text

Decentring and refocusing the definition of ‘us’

Who do we think we should protect as a last resort, the members of a strictly defined ‘us’ with some and a vaguely defined ‘us’ among others, when things…

October 20, 2024