ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Mélanie Mitchell

Prologue – Terrified

summary
The context of the writing of this prologue is a conference that the author attends in the offices of
google, a company that is no longer content to be a web search portal, but to be a central element in
the research and development of artificial intelligence. An important name in this chapter is
Hofstater the author of GEB ( which stand for an Eternal Golden Braid) this book plays a
primordial place in the beginning of the research on AI, in particular because it questions it, what
are its limits, what can we anticipate from the progress of AI but mainly how a non-intelligent, non-
human entity can seize and reproduce what we think is characteristic of the human experience:
music, humor, consciousness. Secondly, this book has had a resounding influence in opening the
world of AI to young people, some of whom, like the author, will become promising researchers in
the field working besides Hofstadter. "I am terrified" are the words that were spoken in a Google
conference about AI. How can Hofstadter, a leading figure of research in this field be terrified by its
evolution? Several points explain this reaction, at the end of the GEB Hofstadter gave his
predictions for ai in the years to come, about severeal topics including chess and music.
nevertheless he seems to have at least underestimated or ignored the huge capabilities of AI. Indeed
if Deep Blue was able to beat the world champion Kasparov in chess, a game of strategy, what has
most disturbed Hofstadter was EMI, a program capable of recreating alike Chopin or Bach
composition. What Hofstadter was terrified of was not the science fiction possibility that AI would
become as or more intelligent than man and that this malicious super intelligence would want to
harm humanity. He is terrified that what he thought was the pinnacle of the human experience,
music, could be reproduced by a non-human entity. What do these AI achievements say about the
human being and the experiences we think are human? In GEB about the ability of AI to create
alike Chopin Compositions Hofstadter was talking about a grotesque and shameful misestimation of
the depth of the human spirit. » now, after thoses achievement he stated “If such minds of infinite
subtlety and complexity and emotional depth could be trivialized by a small chip, it would destroy
my sense of what humanity is about.”

questions

• Is it reductive to characterize humanity only by human abilities (creating music in our

example)?
• What is the difference between something performed by humans or by AI if the result is the
same?
• Is humanness is the subjectivity of experience ?