Minerva’s owls are back. The thinkers of AI warn us of the beast they have produced. But it’s still too late. We are ripe for digital death.
However, trepanation does not deserve the aversion it arouses. There was a golden age of trepanation, in the Neolithic. It was a question of making holes here or there, in order to extract evil, chase the bad spirit, unravel the mystery. 10,000 years later, nothing has changed, or almost. We are always animated by the same intentions. And we still offer trepanation, a less surgical, more digital version. Digital trepanation. Nothing to do with the digital revolution, too dated. New information technologies already saturate the daily life of the Taverns man spilling on his sofa. Nothing to do either with digital prostheses, too kitsch. These brain – Machine interfaces have long been used in fantastic Bit Fantastic films. Digital trepanation is a bit above.
Trimation, a big word anyway. After all, it is only a question of extracting to heal, extract what we are in reality missing. Because man is unfinished, as Georges Lapassade had beautifully illustrated in his famous essay: the entrance of man into life. Essay on the incompletion of man, 1963. The man is sick of his imperfections. We suffer from irrational thoughts inhibiting our noblest aspirations. This is evidenced by the too many missed acts whose history testifies. But the neotian man has today found an unexpected parade. Realizing unfinished, he took the party to pass the hot potato with the binary man. Digital tourism allows you to kick the antinomies of our antinomies, our irrational choices, our inconsistencies.
And among our most twisted relationships that we have with common sense, there is one that would be likely to know a major revolution: language. Digital grammar could indeed restore the conditions of a syntax much more rigorous than that which we are used by. Not an ordinary folding, nor an anachronistic turning linguistic, but a real tabula raza of the world of signifiers. Like a sleek language of his poor workmanship, hollowed out by his misinterpretations, challenging the quirks produced until then. No more statements that bite their tails, paradoxes producing nodes in the brain, like the famous “barber who must shave all those who do not shave themselves; But who shaves him? Whatever. Pure and hard logicians (Jean Yves Girard: the ghost of transparency, 2016) think on the contrary that this digital path will lead us even more in the dead end, multiplying the blind points and other undecidable problems already identified by the illustrious Kurt Gödel then Alan Turing.
But digital death is even more ambitious. It promises us the digitization of our senses, our dreams, our possibilities, and why not our values. Yes, with digital death, we free ourselves from moral choice. It is no longer up to us to resolve the famous dilemma of the tram that has become crazy: “If I take the controller, the tram changes direction, and I save the elderly person who crosses, but I then crush the girl on her bicycle. What to do? The homuncule automaton will decide in our place, and he will not buggle, because he is programmed to choose. Whatever. Programmed how? From what scale of value? Today, some people think that the best possible solution would be to let the PLC choose at random, to avoid any ethical quarrel (Alexei Grinbaum: robots and evil, 2019). Except that digital chance is not trivial. Finally, man is almost better.
The brain molds in the bit
“Our brain is being reconfigured live, and we look elsewhere”, to paraphrase Jacques Chirac speaking of our indifference to global warming.
Do the gurus of cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence fight on details, are exhausted to decline the subtle nuances between the network of neurons of man and that of the machine: “Does the Turing machine have glasses or?” But the main thing takes place before their eyes. And they don’t realize it. Like an Overton window that slides imperceptibly, the brain is molded in the bit. Sooner, we will talk about bit, we will think bit, we will like bit, we will dream bit. And we will die bit.
So here we are walls for digital trepanation. Chatbots have already taken place on our lips, clicks have long punctuated our binary thoughts, and screens define our only horizons for reflection. We even think they are dreaming of more wild trepanation, that of the quantum bit. But here we are entering another world.
