iA, don't get the debate wrong
If you base your argument in a debate on whether or not to use AI, on the creations of YouTubers who have the misfortune of wanting to defend a creation based on AI, despite the wrath of their subscribers, or on two or three other statements as significant as the sonnet written with a trembling hand by Mrs. Jacobi one winter evening in 1953, the debate is likely to be quickly settled.
But far too quickly.
Of course, AI is one tool among many. And of course, it should be used as needed, and of course, in some cases it saves precious time. But it doesn't invent anything. It doesn't discover anything. It doesn't actually do anything in place of anything else.
AI is a major problem, and regardless of what we think (predictive, generative, prescriptive, or whatever), let's consider for a moment:
The considerable sums of money it requires: $1 trillion already spent;
The social projects that industry leaders have in their sights;
The invasive global strategy it serves (that's right, and it's coming from USA);
The crucial issue of energy availability and use...
The real cost of AI is exorbitant. It is totally unreasonable (because with this energy and money, we could, for example, definitively solve the problem of access to water for all humans on the planet), and above all, it is out of control.
I'm sorry, but humanity is not obliged to accept such a social project, which leads to the augmented human, to replacing human problems with standardized, calculated, and predictable solutions.
AI serves the ambition of those men who announce something to us every day, towards their goal, which I consider nightmarish: augmented humans, erased individuals, a sacrificial planet, and infinite conquest. It is a project imagined by madmen who will make us lose what we are ontologically.
"Algorithms produce a predictable, standardized, calculated reality, without exuberance or protuberance, without bifurcation or the unexpected, adapted to mass surveillance and formatted for profitability.
Do we want advertisements to be targeted to increase our addictions tenfold and pseudo-informational content to be chosen to reinforce our convictions? Do we want our resumes to be read by machines, global finance to be governed by programs that no one understands anymore?
Do we want our desires to be anticipated so that no excursion outside the expected can occur?
Do we want our assurances and vulnerabilities to be calculated based on objectified probabilities, our friends and lovers to be selected by standardized filters?
Do we want our creations to be supplanted by interpolations?"
(Aurélien Barreau) - comments taken from this post.
It is for all these reasons that a debate focused exclusively on the pros and cons of AI can only be disappointing. It is so far removed from what is important. Frankly, the creations of YouTubers... do you really think for a second that they could have any impact on our future? Similarly, persistent Manichaeism can only be very disappointing. In fact, most people who are so opposed to AI everywhere (because that's also the issue) do so because they sense the fundamental danger of such technology being entrusted to very few people on this planet. Leaders whose personal motives are also all too often questionable.
So, you and I are funding and listening to AI developers who are absolutely convinced that their technology, fed almost exclusively by the English language under a colonialist Western bias, will accelerate research and progress and ultimately enable us to find solutions to our greatest challenges. Yet languages spoken by more than 100 million people are not entitled to a single line of data in data centers. Similarly, the proven skills that our ancestors used to survive and adapt to different, often hostile environments, enabling them to ensure the continuity of their lineages, have no scientific publications to back them up. Nothing like this is exploited by AI.
So frankly, the argument put forward by YouTubers... no, really, no.
A comment posted on Next.ink, a french webzine, following an editorial that I considered disastrous