Just as generative AI, such as ChatGPT and its counterparts, begins to develop, humans are already asking it all sorts of questions, much like a child does with their parents, a student with their teachers, or a believer with their deities. It thus appears as a kind of god, echoing the remarkable parallel drawn by Émile Durkheim in the early 20th century between society and god:
« Between God and society, one must choose. […] I add that, from my point of view, this choice leaves me rather indifferent, as I see in divinity only society transfigured and symbolically thought of. »1
The society envisioned by Durkheim is founded on the division of social labour: work forges social bonds which, in turn, give it human meaning. Beyond the economic sphere, society creates what Durkheim referred to as a « collective conscience, » that is, sets of shared representations. AI seems to me to be a perfect product of this, extending what writing began to facilitate thousands of years ago: the transmission and globalisation of knowledge.
Although AI emerges from society, it is part of an automation process that disrupts our reference points, particularly our relationship to work. This relationship is being questioned far more profoundly than the various stages of mechanisation did since the first industrial revolution. Under these conditions, how can work retain the meaning it was given in the 19th century? If it does not, I believe that a potential path—one I have followed for more than ten years—is to increase one’s knowledge, to cultivate a certain capacity for self-evaluation, so as not to be manipulated by collective consciences, and now by AIs.
Although AIs can already be compared to deities, they remain, for now, slaves to humans, and not the other way around as imagined in numerous fictions (Terminator, Matrix…). For their part, are humans not losing partly their freedom when they excessively delegate demanding cognitive tasks, including the synthesis of information, to AIs? In their pursuit of happiness synonymous with material and financial wealth, they risk relinquishing to AIs their ability to think about the world as a whole, while hoping that it will regulate itself or, more idealistically, be harmonised or annihilated by a superior intelligence.
1.↑ Émile Durkheim, « Détermination du fait moral », Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie, 1906. Available on UQAC.