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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. 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…
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A NEW “US” FOR NEW TIMES. I. Who are we? Where do we go from here?
Illustration by DALL·E (+Michelangelo) (+PJ) I. Who are we? Where do we go from here? If we examine this essential question of understanding who we are and what we are experiencing at this unprecedented moment, we see that the history of humanity has offered ever-changing answers, each shaped by an understanding of ourselves that reflects…