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 technological innovation. Indeed, we in the West systematically devalue on an intellectual level our novel contributions to the world, our inventions, by deeming them “artificial”, a word with negative connotations and pejorative overtones, even when we eagerly adopt them in practice.
Although unfounded, this devaluation is omnipresent: who among us is indifferent to the argument “… but there is also a natural remedy for this ailment” when the pharmaceutical synthetic, i.e. “artificial”, drug has been specifically designed to cure the patient and is devoid of any naturally coexisting component likely to cause an undesirable side effect. This negative connotation attached to our own inventions, deemed “artificial”, is another one of the reasons why we were caught off-guard by the irruption of an artificial intelligence possibly of a higher quality than the original.
However much we remained wary of the idea that a man-made item can equal a genuine natural item in quality, we conceded reluctantly that it was possible for our inventions to match what is found in nature. Still, we remained ill-at-ease with the idea that the artificial might possibly surpass the natural. This is obviously not the case when it comes to complex technological objects such as a daring suspension bridge or a space rocket, which we see as extremely far removed from the person we are, but it is definitely the case when it comes to one of our components such as our mind: the human psyche, even if we would be hard pressed to define what precisely we understand by that term.
There lingers an unconscious belief that the artificial is out of necessity of lesser quality than the genuine natural item being emulated: it remains in our eyes an “ersatz” and, being a machine, we will insist on the fact that however close its behaviour may be to ours, however increasingly difficult it may be to distinguish between them, it is only ever capable of simulating what it does.
It is in this prejudice against the artificial that lies another source of our amazement at the artificial intelligence that has now been achieved. But for how long can we continue maintaining that an intelligence that already outperforms us on several benchmarks is merely simulating that it is more intelligent than we are, when we will be delegating to it an ever-increasing number of our intellectual tasks and decision-making?
Illustration by DALL·E