INTERVIEW
After "Philosopher's Journey to the Countries of Freedoms" (2018), the liberal philosopher Gaspard Koening, founder of the GenerationLibre think tank, publishes Wednesday "The end of the individual, a philosopher's journey to the land of the artificial intelligence "(editions of L'Observatoire). In this survey, the result of a hundred interviews with the big names in the discipline - the MP Cédric Villani, author of a report on artificial intelligence, or the researcher Yann Le Cun recruited by Facebook - he points to a real threat to our free will.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is "an old illusionist technique," says the author at the microphone of Europe 1. "Thanks to it you can put images in code form, to make recognize a machine a cat or a face, just show him millions of copies of the object, it could work with cancerous tumors, for example. "
AI leads to delegating our ability to choose
Highly efficient and comfortable, artificial intelligence techniques have the ability to stun and lull our sense of responsibility. "Artificial intelligence techniques as they are applied industrially today lead to delegating our capacity of choice to the machine," says Gaspard Koening. He takes the example of GPS: "We do not ask anymore the question of turning to the right, yes to the left," he says.
The philosopher has moved to China, convinced that the AI will restore economic progress on the United States. "The most fascinating part of the investigation was out there," he says. "In this country, the government and the people are very comfortable with the massive and limitless development of artificial intelligence techniques."
The author argues for private ownership of personal data
He sees it as a political reason: "AI is something that benefits the group: when your GPS gives the best ride, it gives you the best route to avoid creating a traffic jam that would upset others. utilitarian, communist and Confucian methods of the Chinese. "
How to reconcile technical progress in this field and preservation of free will? "We must keep the right to deviate from the individual, there must be people who make mistakes to move forward," advocates Gaspard Koening. This would be the sine qua non condition of progress according to him. "Today, these artificial intelligence systems make you behave like the norm." To restore control over the individual's destiny, the author argues for private ownership of personal data. In particular, this system would make it possible to monetize the information delivered by individuals to large digital platforms.