Lautréamont or Kung Fu Panda?

I have to talk to you about artificial intelligence again, that phrase carrying every fantasy and every fatigue. But I promise that technology and its vertigo will remain confined to the first three paragraphs of this agreeable text. There may be a final flourish, but no more than that. Afterward, the subject will be us, and us alone.

As artificial intelligence spreads into every field and finally receives the attention it deserves, the world is beginning to understand, vaguely, how it works. More and more people can explain that the large language models which changed everything have also changed the way we think about machines and their progress.

But the essential question comes before the machinery: who are we, and what do we want? Without an answer, we will keep discoursing into the void in front of systems that continue to advance. And if we decide that the best option is to let these omnipotent circuits pilot us, Favre writes, we might as well go straight to smoking joints.

The technology, in this view, is only the opening. The real subject is the human being standing before it, trying to decide whether progress should serve a purpose or replace one.