Who am I? Where am I going? AI promises to answer the two oldest existential questions. We are not far from the metaphysical G-spot.
Who am I? It is the quest for identity. Where am I going? It is the quest for immortality. Answering these two questions is our dual quest. This was our double quest I should say. Because we have delegated this task to AI, at lower existential cost. The project? Free ourselves from the anxiety of death by freeing ourselves from existing. It must be said that we have tried everything for so long. But the bi-quest remained wild, reluctant to the slightest attempt to approach it. The self remained mortal, and the mortal will never have known who he really was. Dead without having lived, we are a bug.
The quest for identity
Self-thinkers have always made a fuss of it. “Who is me?” Am I sure it’s me? Why is there a me rather than nothing?…” Yeah. The court of self has always been numerous. Everyone has been circling around me for far too long. They feel him (philosophers), probe him (neurosciences), torture him (psychiatrist). But the self never confesses. Perhaps the self is mute, or has nothing to say, or even does not exist. The self has been leading us on a boat from the beginning, but not just any boat. That of Theseus, cream pie of philosophers of identity. “If I take away a worn board and replace it, are you still the same? Or a little less the same? And if I start again until I have replaced everything, will you still be Theseus?…”, and if I change Theseus’ anus will he continue to spout nonsense? Or will his identity be altered by some amendment to his freedom of excretion. The quest for identity has failed in the toilet.
The quest for immortality
Living things have always been obtuse. Incorruptible. There had to be an end to his plan, and nothing could deviate him from his path. Death at the end and that’s all. Thank you good evening. Farewell instead. Charitable, the living will grant us a little boost in existence, with pills, prostheses, infusions. But a few more years on the scale of eternity, what’s the difference with the farts of a fly? So since the dice were loaded from the start, we had to make up our minds. We tried to convince ourselves that immortality was not so unbearable to live with after all. Pèle-melle, “how can we suffer from death since when it is there we are not there, and when it is not there we exist”, a classic, Epicure. More subtle, Lucretius, “if we worry about dying too early, why don’t we worry about being born too late? »… and the fatal blow, “is dying of boredom not worse than dying altogether? », the Makropoulos affair, indeed what guarantees us that the rest of life is worth living? So many pieces of string with the sole objective of consoling us, because obviously we have failed. We remained mortal.
AI at the bedside
But the bi – quest has regained momentum in recent decades. She ended up letting herself approach. By the automaton, the bit beast, the AI. The data center man began to believe that he could finally complete his quest for identity and immortality, in a few clicks. Because “technoscience does not eliminate the spiritual, it recycles it”, a sympathetic expression from Régis Debray.
We have allowed ourselves to be picked up by the area of time. The pulsation of the bit rather than the melody of the living. We are closer to Kraftwerk than to Mozart, but what does that matter. And since you know how to do everything better than me, perhaps you also know how to be better than me? Here, take everything. “I give you my notes, I give you my words”, as the other says. Optimize all of this for me, make me converge, I want to be your fixed point. You will be my new inner voice, my alter – algo, my stochastic parrot, will you think for me? You already know how to answer all the questions I should have asked myself, you will only retain the best of what remains to be experienced and will chase the errors into the trash. Warm in the Cloud, the best version of me will survive. In the meantime, I go straight to the sofa, spectator of my avatar. After all, what’s the difference, haven’t I just lived on the edge of my life, like Ermann Broch’s Virgil? And if the AI isn’t quite there yet, it doesn’t matter, a USB key in the butt will do the trick.
“Someone will die, but who will die? Perhaps the thoughts that constitute me will gradually fall one after the other into oblivion, so that I will disappear little by little, without realizing it, without dying, leaving room for the one who will die in my place”, Stéphane Chauvier
