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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 rub shoulders and share similar brain architectures. The better we understand how these LLMs…
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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 degree, what Rousseau called in a non-disparaging way, the “stupidity” of the animal.…
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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 element being the ‘transformer’. The route to synthesising human intelligence which turned out…
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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 16th century onwards: the image of the tree of knowledge’s forbidden fruit maintained its lingering presence, manifesting itself in particular through an endemic denigration of…
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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 since the 1950s and the achievement of software of the type of LLMs having been an objective clearly stated from the outset and the research effort having…
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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 as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or LLaMA3. In the press he goes often under the…
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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 according to its kind, and everything that creeps on the earth according to…
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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. Hence the caricature of viewpoint which was quickly adopted by conservative Christian opinion: ‘Man…
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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, labelling it in accordance with his newly devised system of naming using Latin words,…
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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 creatures placed at his disposal quite the contrary, humans as a whole are distributed…
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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 as being put specifically at the service of humankind. The Bible states: “Then…
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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 of cultures born, on the one hand, in the Fertile Crescent and, on…
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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 go wrong, as they unfortunately do time and time again on this troubled…