Abstract This article reflects on the transformation of personhood in the digital age, drawing on an invariant anthropological schema — the hermeneutical cross — which articulates an existential axis (natural person / transcendence) and a hermeneutical axis (corpus / interpretive keys). Three historical regimes succeed and stratify one another: the manuscript regime, centred on a Lire la suite…
My goal is to encourage teachers to mobilize collective intelligence (CI) in the service of learning and to take advantage of the new pedagogical possibilities opened by Artificial Intelligence (AI)—a tool our students are already using, albeit not always appropriately. I will begin by explaining why collective intelligence should be an integral part of our Lire la suite "Collective Intelligence…
Ignorant, we will be manipulated and misled by language models. By contrast, the more learned we are, the better we can master an AI which, make no mistake, is becoming the technical environment of thought, the new sensorium.
Ethical issues cannot be limited to models: they must extend to the creation of the data that drives them, i.e. to all of our online behavior. [...] We generally focus on the direct reception of our messages, but we must bear in mind that we contribute indirectly – through the models we train – to answering our contemporaries' questions, writing their texts, teaching students, guiding policies,…
Artificial intelligence is mysterious: we speak to it and it seems to understand what we say. Proof that it understands is that it responds with text or speech that makes sense, and sometimes more sense than an ordinary human could articulate. How is this possible? The Success of Language Models Certainly, research on artificial intelligence Lire la suite "Human Intelligence, the Secret of…
If humanism was born with the alphabet in a literate environment and was reborn with the printing press, what becomes of it when digital technology becomes the dominant symbolic technology?
By Pierre Lévy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada Abstract This article explores the nature of human consciousness through a comprehensive philosophical analysis, distinguishing between phenomenal consciousness, shared with animals, and discursive consciousness, unique to humans. Drawing on the philosophical tradition from Antiquity (Aristotle, Plotinus) to modern philosophy (Descartes,…
For more than thirty years, the majority of journalists, politicians, teachers, and all those who shape opinion have not stopped denouncing the dangers of computing, then of the Internet, and now of artificial intelligence. I would do nothing very useful if I added my lamentations to theirs.
This is the text of my keynote speech at the Knowledge Graph Conference, 8th of May 2024 If you want to watch the video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM-WB5kNv_A Today, the whole world is rushing toward statistical AI, Neural Models and/or Generative AI. But we know that, though these models are useful, we still need symbolic models or, Lire la suite "Knowledge Representation and Semantic…
The aim of this article is to elucidate the anthropological conditions of possibility for computing. I will first show how symbolic manipulation is constitutive of hominization. Secondly, I will examine the gradual widening of the gearing between the sensorial world (signifiers) and the intelligible world (concepts) during cultural evolution. Following on from these analyses, I'll comment some of…