Since the “cat” version of artificial intelligence (AI) GPT, capable of mimicking human intellectual production, went online, the frenzy surrounding these technologies has brought the notion of “anthropological revolution” back into the debates .
However, what we observe beyond ChatGPT is that each new advance in so-called “disruptive” technologies is in fact part of this ambivalent technophilia, seduced by technoskepticism and oscillating between amazement and thrill at the rapid and impressive advances in computer science and cybernetics.
Since the victory of the supercomputer Deep Blue against a human in a chess game, the tone has been set: A “turning point in human history” is taking place there.
A variety of computing devices
Recent mathematical and technological advances have led to a rapid proliferation of the so-called “artificial intelligence”, a designation that specialists such as Luc Julia or Jean-Louis Dessalles dispute because this “intelligence” is actually present in a multitude of computing devices.
So there’s a jumble of decision-making algorithms, specifically law (CaseLaw Analytics), facial recognition like FaceNet, algorithm-generated music with Jukedeck, text-generated images with Dall E 2, wearable conversational agents (Siri), smart home automation, content intelligence of the refrigerator, humanoid robots capable of initiating and leading a conversation…think of the now famous Sofia, who walks from the television to the conference, or Ameca, whose gestures and facial expressions repeatedly show the limits of what is possible human.
Ameca, the humanoid robot conceived as a platform for AI and human-robot interaction (HRI). © EngineeredArts
An unbridled fantasy
The massification of technologies and their widespread introduction into today’s societies are certainly remarkable and give the impression of an unstoppable wave of mechanization and digitization of the human environment.
This trend feeds an unbridled imagination that inevitably sees itself as a break with the past, hence the fashion of “revolution” with transhumanist accents. So we would be at the “dawn” of a “new” humanity, caught up in a new technological “era”. A story that also forgets the many flaws of these technologies.
Is the “AI” or “digital” revolution an anthropological revolution? Strangely enough, it was entrepreneurs like Gilles Babinet, successful historians like Yuval Noah Harari, philosophers like Frédéric Worms who took up the expression (in more or less precise terms).
The first to strongly claim that this is indeed the case.
The second, with his book Homo Deus, to incorporate this revolution into a long-term model of human history, at the risk of oversimplification that blurs the traces between retrospective history reading and prospective imagination.
Finally, the third, with much more measure, in order to at least underline the relevance of an inquiry into the depth of the transformations taking place.
We regret that anthropologists are unfortunately little mobilized for a debate that primarily concerns the discipline whose name is in all but a few sauces. Emmanuel Grimaud has tackled head-on the essential question of the nature of AI versus the characteristics of a humanity that is increasingly being asked what makes it unique.
Pascal Picq has taken it up in a completely different genre, since the paleoanthropologist does not hesitate to go beyond the strict framework of anthropogenesis (human evolution). It inscribes the digital revolution in the long period of human evolution and, contrary to any intellectual reduction, invites us to think about the complexity of the forms of animal and artificial intelligence.
Questioning the notion of rupture
Anthropologists, accustomed to the long term through intellectual specialization and more inclined to view continuities as (often prematurely heralded) breaks in the order of societies and cultural changes, have every reason to be cautious.
First, because not every technological shift brings about a major cultural shift. According to Claude Lévi-Strauss, particularly in Race and History (1955), the term should perhaps be reserved for a phenomenon likely to profoundly (structurally) alter the order of thought and social organization.
Such was the case with the Neolithic domestication of fire and animal species, settlement, and agriculture, which are not all inventions (ex-nihilo) but very often innovations in the anthropological sense of the term: the improvement by humans of an already developed technique. And in this sense, AI and many digital technologies rightly deserve the term innovation more than inventions.
In this sense, the philosopher Michel Serres conjured up a “third revolution” to relativize the advent of the digital world after writing and printing. He echoes Jack Goody, who explains that graphic reason transformed oral reason and has structured human thought and communication for millennia. In other words, it will not be the only time, on the contrary, that humanity has faced a readjustment of its ways of thinking after changing its techniques.
What revolution?
Revolution so that this homo numericus is affirmed here and there with the power of conviction that the present explains everything?
If we follow the historian Adrienne Mayor, the ancient civilizations already thought up and even started to implement technologies that are currently on the scene, in an embryonic way for AI or more fully for robots. . His God and Robots exposes partial and one-sided readings of a monolithic and recent history.
So she tells the stories of Talos, “the first robot”, then Medea’s cauldron of immortality, man’s borrowings from animals and gods to increase his powers, the first “living” statues of Daedalus and Pygmalion, the creation of man more than humans from Prometheus, the automatons from Hephaestus, the first virtual reality embodied by Pandora… For Mayor, the digital revolution would only be an update in the presence of old technologies.
A reinvention, more than a revolution, and less profound an impact than it seems: the machines were there from the start in the imaginations of the people who (literally) tried to materialize them.
Admittedly, the technologies are far from identical – the difference between the Greek automatons and the active machines of Boston Dynamics is the same, and each technology can first be assessed in its context – but they were already invested in the hopes of humanity at its physical ones (for robots) and intellectual (for AI) tasks are supported or even supplemented.
The Atlas takes control. ©Boston Dynamics
How do humans absorb technology?
Also, is the revolution anthropological or technological? The tenet of anthropology is to think about how people develop technology and how it is absorbed by social and cultural systems.
The “digital” or “digital” revolution is undoubtedly generating transformations in technologies without being mechanically translated through changes in human behavior patterns. New uses are emerging, but patterns of behavior can influence techniques rather than being influenced by them.
According to the most critical AI and digital technology specialists, it is a matter of considering the uniqueness of each technology and its impact: while the social response to conversational agents seems rather positive and immediate (chatbots are easily taken over), facial recognition AIs give evasions on occasion computer counter systems.
According to Picq, we must undoubtedly give smartphones a special fate because they combine the materiality of a laptop and the technological virtuosity of AIs. This concentrated technology terminal that nevertheless changes the modes of communication, changes in human mobility, in relation to knowledge, etc. that Pascal Picq wants the real object of the current “revolution” to be distraction in the sense that it is a laptop rather than a phone becomes …
Mankind is having fun and scaring each other
In short, since fire, guns, magic – perhaps the first technology to transform human reality – that is, the first virtual reality in history? – down to AI and robots, humanity is having fun and scaring with their technological creations, whether useful or playful.
She sometimes takes pleasure in constituting them as creatures (without necessarily being anthropomorphized) as mythical thought portrays them. Not surprising in this context that some cheat with ChatGPT, for example.
In fact, man is a playful being, that is, who likes play, as claimed by the philosopher Johann Huizinga, but also Luddism, a form of fear of technology (alluding to the social conflict of the 19th century in which manufacturers against craftsmen, the Luddists, who denounced the use of machines).
The temptation of the fetish
Nevertheless, the temptation to give in to the intellectual fetish of the term “revolution” remains strong. A revolution is in most cases a cultural or socio-technical change, the premises of which are observed and the effects of which have not yet been observed are suspected.
However, a revolution (except undoubtedly when enacted at a political level) is measured by retrospective elements rather than extrapolations, which are fairly stable in science and technology but very unreliable in science.
However, if we look at current advances in artificial intelligence no longer solely in terms of a linear technological scale like Moore’s Law, but in terms of cultural absorption and social adoption of technologies, then we should undoubtedly speak ( in one voice with computer scientists ) of evolution instead of the anthropological revolution?
But at the cost of a major intellectual reversal: the move from technocentric thinking (which assumes that it is technology that transforms society) to sociocentric thinking about technologies (that is, the opposite perspective). A small “revolution” then…?