Laurent Alexandre's quotes (sethmessenger.fr - Some short news to get away from it all).

#37922
If there is no link between DNA and intelligence... I'm going to give you a chimpanzee at birth and you're going to teach him mathematics! Since only the environment matters, and DNA has no role ... It's going to be easy.

Laurent Alexandre
(Source inconnue)

#37923
Natural and accepted, death will become scandalous. Just as it is no longer accepted that anyone dies of a disease for which treatment exists, the accident is no longer considered a risk of life but the effect of negligence or fault. Similarly, death will become unacceptable because, if there are ways to prolong life indefinitely, people will naturally come to demand that Social Security take over the existing means to avoid death.

Laurent Alexandre
(The death of death)

#37924
Technological advances are rapidly blurring the line between chemistry and biology, between matter and life. It must be understood that, at the nanoworld scale, there is no difference between a chemical molecule and a "living" molecule. The fusion of biology and nanotechnology will transform the physician into a life engineer and give him, decade after decade, an incredible power over our biological nature.

Laurent Alexandre
(The death of death)

#37925
Science had to eliminate the last pathology that still stood: the "mental illness" of bioconservatives and other bioluddite terrorists. The philosophical cancer of technophobes environmentalists, Islamists and other candlelight activists resisted cancer 2.0. The world was cut in half. The old ideological clash between communism and capitalism, which had determined the course of the 20th century, had given way to an otherwise more violent and devious conflict between transhumanists and ultra-violent technophobes. Winning this war was not an option but a necessity. The candidates for eternal life deserved a safe world, rid of scum 1.0. The good camp, of which Google and the U.S. government were the leaders, was working for this purpose by all means.

Laurent Alexandre
(The Man Who Knew Too Much)

#37926
The definitions of freedom and equality, law and justice will be upended. Our philosophical and moral benchmarks will tremble on their foundations: the exponential evolution of technological revolutions will not give us time to breathe. Paradigm shifts will be unrelenting, and in a few decades we will have to digest more radical changes than humanity in its entire history.

Laurent Alexandre
(The death of death)

#37927
For every child, national education must ask itself a question: at a time when AI is already a thousand times faster than a great cancer geneticist, what should I do with you and where should I take you? One certainty must guide us: to imagine that AI is just a fad would be a serious mistake. There is no turning back.

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#37928
A lotto player has a one in fourteen million chance of winning the jackpot. The chances of randomly falling on a genetic mutation that will better cope with one's environment and survive are even lower. This is why the natural balance is based on the shortest possible lifespan, depending on the species, and a rapid succession of generations. Second, it is based on a high number of dice strokes per generation: on average, over the last five hundred million years, there was one survivor in a thousand at each generation, of all species. In other words, only one individual (plants, fungi, animals, etc.) out of a thousand to two thousand congeners reached the age of reproduction. The others are failed tests.

Laurent Alexandre
(The death of death)

#37929
A tsunami, the Japanese term, is a large and unusual wave that sweeps across a shoreline and takes everything in its path, due to an earthquake, an underwater volcanic eruption or a landslide. After a strange lowering of the sea level, it causes a wall of water that rises in seconds and destroys everything in its path.

Laurent Alexandre
(The death of death)

#37930
There is no inevitability in terms of the future, but profound logics that can be reversed, under certain conditions. While it is not certain that an awareness of neurorevolution is sufficient to guide its course, there is no doubt that remaining in ignorance and denial is the best way to achieve the worst-case scenario. That of a world where Man would suffer his future. That of an unequal world where only the best would emerge victorious, leaving the multitude at the mercy of a neurodictature.

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#37931
Intelligence is the means by which humanity has been provided by Darwinian evolution to survive in a wild environment. Thanks to it, we now dominate the world and matter. This ancestral heritage, the fruit of millions of years of evolution and s e l e c tion, is our most valuable asset. The attention and energy that each generation devotes to its transmission is immense. In some social classes, it is even a permanent obsession that determines all life choices: place of residence, dating, marriage alliances, leisure. Education is the cornerstone of this work of transmission. While it consists largely of the acquisition of education, that is, knowledge useful to life in society, it has meaning only complemented by the ability to mobilize knowledge and associate it. This is called intelligence.

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#37932
The first man to live a thousand years may already have been born.

Laurent Alexandre
(The death of death)

#37933
Every athlete knows that a sprint and a marathon correspond to two completely different energy managements: the sprinter gives all the energy available in ten seconds to win the race, but maintaining such a speed over a long distance is very difficult. Nature has chosen the technique of sprinting because it is vital for the species that individuals arrive as quickly and as quickly as possible until puberty. Until the age of reproduction, our body undergoes significant biological stresses that wear out our cells.

Laurent Alexandre
(The death of death)

#37934
And on this map of the world of data, Europe does not exist, or very little. I don't think the backlog will go away. And I think parents for whom this will be possible will have to ask themselves the question of sending their children to study on the shores of the Pacific. In this world, forward flight is the rule. And not running is taking the risk of being eaten by others. To become a digital and cultural colony.

Laurent Alexandre
(Source inconnue)

#37935
Trades with high cognitive content, with no manual component, will also be severely affected by 2030: the radiologist or the computer developer, for example. These symbol manipulation trades will experience competition from artificial intelligence due to the rapid advances in deep learning. The death of the radiologist profession is a matter of years: the machine will soon do their job much better than them!

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#37936
But Google has big advantages in this race for education 2.0: you don't lie to Google when you lie massively on Facebook. E Google has the world's largest database on the human psyche: our 4 trillion annual queries deliver everything we can about our cognitive functioning and will be an extraordinary material for industrializing learning.

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#37937
It is reassuring to note that there is no correlation between unemployment and robotics. The two most robotic countries in the world are Japan and Germany, where full employment reigns. But the most pessimistic point out that these countries are facing a terrible demographic shock. Due to the persistence of a low birth rate, the Japanese population is declining and Germany will soon experience the same fate, despite immigration. In other words, robots in these countries do not replace workers but compensate for the labour shortage. Every year 800,000 young French people enter the job market. Will they compete with low AI doped robots?

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#37938
Intelligence is the inequality that society corrects the least today. At a time when "glass ceilings" are being fought with determination - gender, ethnic and social origins - it is the last frontier of equality. A border that will be abolished in the coming decades.

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#37939
Like the brave farrier who was laminated by the rise of the explosion engine, Julius Turing was a 19th century man. An obsolete character, nevertheless able to accept the meaning of history and the inescapable nature of its evolution. I was the car and he was the horse. The future belonged to me.

Laurent Alexandre
(The Man Who Knew Too Much)

#37940
The body is not a mechanical machine, in the sense that its cells constantly renew themselves, to the exclusion of most neurons. In reality, two phenomena are entangled. The aging of the body hinders the renewal of cells and, at the same time, the deterioration of cells and their lesser ability to divide causes the aging of the body.

Laurent Alexandre
(The death of death)

#37941
The definition of death has changed a lot. It can be brutal or occur as the culmination of the aging process. Today, it is found when the brain is permanently harmed. The old definition, the cessation of heart function, did not survive cardiac resuscitation: one can be resuscitated and thus live after a cardiac arrest.

Laurent Alexandre
(The death of death)

#37942
Well-aging is a beautiful struggle that should not be experienced as a hopeless failure. Wisdom cultivated very early in our lives must thus allow us to live our end in a joyful way. We owe this lucid and positive vision of old age and death to better care for the dying over the past fifteen years. ..

Laurent Alexandre
(The death of death)

#37943
Death has been socialized and exorcised through religious discourses that give it a central place, albeit with varying meaning. For Catholics, the dead are called to God; for Muslims, death fulfills fate; for Hindus and Buddhists, Man is reincarnated and his passage on earth as a human being is perhaps not his first life.

Laurent Alexandre
(The death of death)

#37944
It is easy to impress, even more frightening, when we discuss the subject of the future of humanity. But my goal is not to play the prophet of doom.

Laurent Alexandre
(The death of death)

#37945
But today, AI still looks like an autistic with a severe form of Asperger's who can learn the phone book by heart or make prodigious head calculations but is unable to prepare a coffee....

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#37946
Of course, we are not going to use the immense amount of intelligence at our disposal to simply make sneakers and wheelbarrows: demiurgical power, demiurgical objectives. Transhumanist fantasies are much more fundamental: killing death, understanding our origins, conquering the cosmos, increasing our abilities. And they're going to mobilize billions of our descendants for a very long time. Humanity will discover countless new goals. The simple exploration and colonization of a single small galaxy - the Milky Way - over 500 billion is expected to take at least 50 million years. Whatever the degree of automation of our future societies, there will remain a huge need for ultra-skilled, ultra-multidisciplinary and ultra-innovative work. An infinite number of experiences and missions are to be invented. We have work to do until the end of time. And if one is transhumanist, we can add that we will have even more work at that time to prevent the universe from dying.

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#37947
Do you know the paradox of the liar? "I don't think so. If I write on a piece of paper the following statement: "All the statements on this page are false" , what conclusions do you draw from them? "I conclude that these assertions are true," I said. "Good! But if they are true, it is because all these claims are actually false ...

Laurent Alexandre
(The Man Who Knew Too Much)

#37953
The ai bases had been laid as early as 1940, by Alan Turing, who in 1942-43 broke the codes of Enigma, the machine for encrypting secret messages from the Germans, and thus allowed the Allies to know the strategic information of the enemies.

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#37954
Lieutenant O'Ryan lit a new cigarette to kill time. He had been waiting for an hour outside the door of a British secret service colonel. His training was complete. He had undergone three weeks of physical training with hundreds of other hand-picked men. He had been measured, evaluated psychologically, tested from every angle in a remote military camp deep in Yorkshire. He had been deemed fit to join MI6, the branch of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) responsible for spying activities outside the country. No more monitoring of coconuts outside the Liverpool and Manchester factories, no more interception of mail, trespassing on private homes and interrogations of underlings. In a few days, he would be appointed captain, assigned to MI6. John O'Ryan was going to see the country in Her Majesty's service.

Laurent Alexandre
(The Man Who Knew Too Much)

#37955
He stood in front of the videoconference screen without listening to the briefing of his Asia advisors. The Chinese president, a gay luron in the private sector - he did not ise on synthetic drugs and fine parts - was, as usual, dressed as a undertaker as part of his official duties. Her black-haired black hair, perfectly smooth, appeared to be covered with automotive metallic paint.

Laurent Alexandre
(The Man Who Knew Too Much)

#37956
Each day began with a cold shower, including in the middle of winter, in a large tiled room open to all winds. I had to concentrate with all my might to ignore the naked body of some of my comrades. The freezing cold was a precious ally, avoiding the social death that an unfortunate erection would have caused. I didn't need that to be the head of Sherborne Turk. I passed the morning test of the shower and the changing rooms, reflecting on mathematical problems, the last vexations suffered in class or on the sports fields, chasing from my mind the body of Apollo of Peter Sloane, undisputed king of athletics events, or the massive and circumcised penis of Alan Weinberg, a son of an inexhaustible London tailor in salacious jokes.

Laurent Alexandre
(The Man Who Knew Too Much)

#37957
The secret services were created to fight from the inside against the spread of evil. All shots were allowed. For Lieutenant O'Ryan and his colleagues, this invisible confrontation was a war that didn't say his name. The Reds were criminals willing to betray their homeland to import the dictatorship of the proletariat. Despite numerous attempts, the United States and England had failed to bring down the communist regime in Moscow. The Russian right had been pulverized by Stalin, who held absolute power. Now the fight against the leftist pandemic was taking place on the streets of London, New York or Paris. Fear and paranoia were gaining ground on a daily basis. For every red opinion leader who was the victim of an "unfortunate accident" or sent to prison, ten others appeared on the stands outside the factories, calling on the crowds to join the fight. MI5 was hiring in turn to stem the rise of the red peril.

Laurent Alexandre
(The Man Who Knew Too Much)

#37958
My new solitary passion further accentuated my status as a social pariah, causing my mother and brother to worry. My father was content with a detached astonishment, no doubt concerned about the financial difficulties that had afflicted him since his return home. The golden age of colonization was coming to an end. The science was starting. His world was collapsing in favour of industrialization, the automobile, electricity, telephone, the discovery of radioactivity and X-rays. Revolutions followed. In France, a woman had even won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. My father was a pragmatist, only one thing mattered to him: perhaps his son could get a solid and properly paid job if he continued on this path. Like the brave farrier, who was laminated by the boom of the explosion engine, Julius Turing was a 19th-century man. An obsolete character, nevertheless able to accept the meaning of history and the inescapable nature of its evolution. I was the car and he was the horse. The future belonged to me.

Laurent Alexandre
(The Man Who Knew Too Much)

#37959
Edwin Brewster had the answer to everything, and questioned with authority the nonsense I heard on Sundays at the church, where my mother dragged me. Thus, life was not the work of God, but of the division of cells. The brain was an intelligent machine that was built brick by brick as a child, studying at school. Living beings were machines that, by the greatest of mysteries, reached their final form according to an invisible plane. A first peony cell divided, over and over, millions of times, and became a mature flower. An Ethel Stoney egg fertilized in India by Julius Mathison Turing became Alan Turing. The bricks of life piled up, combined, collaborated in a perfect mechanism to form a man, the most complex and disruptive of the machines at work on the surface of the globe.

Laurent Alexandre
(The Man Who Knew Too Much)

#37960
It is a book that changed the course of my miserable existence, the year of my ten years. An American book called Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know. Its author, Edwin Tenney Brewster, opened my eyes to an unknown, mysterious and exciting world: science. The doors of perception ajar and I snuck between the flaps to never get out again. Science was the ideal refuge, a shelter watertight to the mediocrity of the world in which my mind could wander.

Laurent Alexandre
(The Man Who Knew Too Much)

#37961
From an early age, those who crossed my path thought I was crazy. I was an ugly duckling, unable to assimilate the most mundane social conventions. Every middle-class Englishman had to look like a gentleman. For my great misfortune, I had the manners of a farm boy. I was accused of being in the moon, badly dressed, covered with ink stains. My hair was still in battle and my nails were too long. I was not in the mould, and my chronic inability to get along with children my age did not help my reputation as an asylum seeker. I learned to read alone to break my loneliness. By the age of five, I was already bored with other people's conversations and interests. I was killing time by playing chess against myself and reading any book that fell into my hands.

Laurent Alexandre
(The Man Who Knew Too Much)

#37965
The electric helicopter lands smoothly on the roof of the Googleplex. Sergey Brin leaps out of the camera. As every morning, his personal assistant and three bodyguards were waiting for him. A light rain was falling on Palo Alto. Sergey ignored the shelter of an umbrella offered to him by one of the guards and walked briskly towards the entrance. "Good morning, Mr. President," said his assistant, speeding up the step by his side. Did your trip to Europe go well? "I didn't sleep well. These damn turbulences... They entered the new wing of the Googleplex, the best-kept building in the United States, built on a former U.S. Air Force airfield. The huge reinforced concrete building had the size of five football fields and had six levels, three of which were in the basement. All the digital information in the world passed through the three million servers that were whirring in its bowels. The digital heart of humanity beat in this cathedral of fiber optics from every city, every street, from the genome of every connected individual.

Laurent Alexandre
(The Man Who Knew Too Much)

#37972
AI will compete with many human activities. The obsolescence of the current brain becomes more than a fear: an obvious one.

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#37973
... We are in a race to save democracy, hacked by technology.

Laurent Alexandre
(Will AI also kill democracy?)

#37974
Already, many bioconservative intellectuals are concerned, perhaps rightly so. Francis Fukuyama, the brilliant American philosopher and former advisor to President George W. Bush, calls outright for an immediate ban on biotechnology... before it's too late! (condemn man and his values to disappear.)

Laurent Alexandre
(The death of death)

#37975
We are on the verge of an upheaval that will make all the medical advances of the 20th century look like micro-events. ... The digital divide, however, will remain an epiphenomenon, compared to the great "genetic divide" that is looming for the 2030s.

Laurent Alexandre
(The death of death)

#37976
The question is no longer whether the battle against death will be victorious or not, but what will be the collateral damage of this victory on the definition of our Humanity.

Laurent Alexandre
(The death of death)

#37977
Moral lines move fast, very fast. What seems absurd and disturbing can become obvious and normal in a few years. And vice versa.

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#37978
The bourgeoisie imposed vaccination and

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#37979
The transhumanist religion could impose its law in a few decades, its apostles are already, in fact, the new masters of the world. They have in their hands the two powers: that of money, thanks to their huge reserves of cash, and that of data, which has always founded political power, knowledge is to control. Traditional institutions are outdated.

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#37980
At the end of the 19th century, the threats to coachmen, stagecoach drivers, farriers, the twenty-nine thousand Parisian water carriers, lamplighters, lavenders, taillandiers and blacksmiths were fairly well perceived. On the other hand, no one imagined that in the future there would be microprocessor designers, geneticists, nuclear physicists and astrophysicists, technicians in Tesla factories, cardiac surgeons, airplane pilots, webmasters and smartphone manufacturers. The deeper the technological revolution, the more difficult it is to anticipate the countless new trades. There is no shortage of revolutionary ideas: baby designer, neuro-hacker, Mars terra-trainer, neuro-educator, artificial intelligence psychologist.

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#37981
Nevertheless, the hypothesis of the political victory of a techno-conservative party cannot be ruled out. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 in the United States illustrated the strength of an electorate disoriented in the face of the new world that is emerging. The deeper the economic changes and the more disarray in the labour market, the more simplistic parties proposeing simplistic solutions to make everything happen again as before will prosper.

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#37982
The risk of GAFA instituting a neurological dictatorship by manipulating our brains seems minimal because digital giants like Google are imbued with democratic culture. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that this will be the case for all of whom will control artificial intelligence and neuro-technologies. Moreover, the BATX are totally controlled by the Chinese government, which unlike the GAFA is imbued with authoritarian culture.

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#37983
What will this superior artificial intelligence actually look like? Hard to conceive ... with our own intelligence. By definition, it will be able to reprogram itself, i.e. determine its own goals and think for itself. It will also be able to provide for itself its livelihood and its energy supply.

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#37984
In the 1950s, Isaac Asimov proposed the three basic laws that serve as the basis for a future Robot Charter: "The first law states that a robot has no right to harm a human, and cannot remain passive in front of a human in danger. The second law specifies that a robot must obey the orders of humans, unless these orders are in contradiction with the first law. The third law stipulates that a robot must protect its own existence, as long as that protection is not in contradiction with the first two laws. »

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#37999
Faced with the surge of Silicon Valley, the state is stunned and tramples at the speed of a senator. Recent political debates are pathetic in relation to the issues we are talking about. There is an urgent need to renovate democratic leadership, which has become a prisoner of the tyranny of the short term, which proves incapable of thinking about the NBIC revolution. [Laurent Alexandre]

Laurent Alexandre
(Do robots make love?)

#38000
All democracies are at risk of slipping, either in anarchy or in tyranny. It's a grim prognosis, which goes back to Plato. In the 19th century, Tocqueville was no more encouraging, formulating a prophecy that our time seems to realize: democracy will produce individuals who will increasingly be afraid of their freedom and the instability of the world it sustains, they will feel increasingly fragile and insecure. Results they will demand ever more state intervention (the welfare state is insensitively a guardian state) and let install a soft despotism that it will rid them of the worry of being free. [Jean-Michel Besnier]

Laurent Alexandre
(Do robots make love?)

#38001
Unfortunately, the totalitarianisms of the 20th century exploited the slippery slope on which democracies abandon themselves when they fail to guard against the political resignation of their members. They went very far, pretending to create, from scratch, a new man who would be rid of history, since it will have been put in his head that he has reached perfection...- [Jean-Michel Besnier]

Laurent Alexandre
(Do robots make love?)

#38002
Aldous Huxley with his Best of Worlds and George Orwell with his 1984 had vaccinated us, it was thought, against the mirages of unbearable happiness. No, we would no longer allow a world to develop that would manipulate humans and make it docile, through propaganda and directed amnesia... But it was not anticipated that, if the revolutionary political horizon (brown, black or red) was fortunately no longer attractive to anyone, science and technology could take over and announce happiness for tomorrow, or even the succession by any posthuman. [Jean-Michel Besnier]

Laurent Alexandre
(Do robots make love?)

#38003
Far from having learned the lessons of totalitarianism, we are witnessing a growing sensitivity to the announcements in favor of a manufacture of the human, a manipulation of his genome and his moods, a suppression of his existential anxieties and the chance that sharpens them, reasons to believe his conceivable immortality ... Deciphered in the light of the criticism of totalitarianisms carried out by Raymond Aron, Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis, Marcel Gauchet or Hannah Arendt, the promises of renewal proclaimed by the transhumanists have something to find the most gullible! [Jean-Michel Besnier]

Laurent Alexandre
(Do robots make love?)

#38004
Many intellectuals, like Jacques Attali, want a world government, I think that is. [...] A single decision centre could lead to a totalitarian system, since no one could escape it. It is vital to maintain several geopolitical poles in order to guarantee ideological competition. The need for counter-powers and pluralism is necessary for biopolitics as well as for traditional politics today. You have to be able to run somewhere! [...] A world where the regulation of science and the brain would be decided on a global scale would leave no way out. In the event of a totalitarian slippage in neuroscience, where could one go into exile? There would no longer be any space not subject to the central neurobiotechnological power. This is indeed a nightmare for our freedoms. [Laurent Alexandre]

Laurent Alexandre
(Do robots make love?)

#38005
After the death of death, science would devote itself to fighting the death of the Universe. Artificial cosmogenesis would mobilize all the energy of humanity in the next billion years. After the regeneration of our aging organisms by stem cells, cosmological regeneration would aim to make the Universe immortal or substitutable. [Laurent Alexandre]

Laurent Alexandre
(Do robots make love?)

#38006
Transhumanism is the final stage in the evolution of religious thought, which has gone through three stages. First, the polytheisms, a logical continuation of shamanism, which culminated under the Romans and Greeks. Then the monotheism of the religions of the Book. Today emerges a third age: the god-man. For transhumanists, Serge Gainsbourg's quip - "Men created God, the opposite remains to be proven" - is a no-brainer. God does not yet exist: he will be the man of tomorrow, endowed with almost infinite powers thanks to the NBICs. Man will realize what only the gods were supposed to be able to do: create life, modify our genome, reprogram our brains and euthanize death. [Laurent Alexandre]

Laurent Alexandre
(Do robots make love?)

#38007
In fact, early bridges appear between transhumanism and religion: the Dalai Lama is passionate about neurotheology and the cerebral control of religious feelings. Is Buddhism the intermediate religion before the transhuman era? [Laurent Alexandre]

Laurent Alexandre
(Do robots make love?)

#38008
Three experiments, the last of which was published in Current Biology on February 19, 2015, have increased the intellectual abilities of mice by modifying their DNA with segments of human chromosomes or injecting human brain cells. The consequences will be dizzying. How will Brigitte Bardot's followers be prevented from commanding a smarter, more empathetic, more humane dog? There will always be benevolent territories for requests for cognitive improvement of animals. [Laurent Alexandre]

Laurent Alexandre
(Do robots make love?)

#38009
We have almost eradicated Down syndrome in thirty years, although Down syndrome is mild, has a normal life experience and does not suffer. Why would we do it tomorrow differently with other pathologies? [Laurent Alexandre]

Laurent Alexandre
(Do robots make love?)

#38010
Parents will soon be offered the dream of a made-à-carte child. [Laurent Alexandre]

Laurent Alexandre
(Do robots make love?)

#38011
The technology will allow homosexuals to have biological children carrying genes from both parents, such as heterosexual couples. The IPS stem cell technique makes it possible to make sperm and eggs from fibroblasts, cells found under the skin. It is already possible to make a mouse from two fathers. The transition from these techniques to the human species is just a matter of time, and homosexual associations will advocate for this short period of time. [Laurent Alexandre]

Laurent Alexandre
(Do robots make love?)

#38012
When anything is possible, the human being goes crazy. Psychoanalysis has taught us how the absence of constraints is a source of disarray. Transhumanist ideology, which magnifies our fantasies of omnipotence, carries many psychiatric pathologies. The transhuman will live in the illusion of his omnipotence, which is deadly for our psyche. One thing is for sure, psychiatrist is a profession of the future! [Laurent Alexandre]

Laurent Alexandre
(Do robots make love?)

#38013
For Kevin Kelly, this variety of intelligences is comparable to a symphony in which hundreds of instruments each bring a particular sound, none of which can be reduced to another. "We have several types of intelligences: deductive reasoning, emotional intelligence, spatial intelligence, there are perhaps a hundred different types, all of which are grouped together and whose strength varies according to individuals. And of course, with regard to animals, they all have another panel, another symphony of different intelligences, and sometimes they have the same instruments as ours. They may think the same way, but organize themselves differently and are sometimes more efficient than humans, as the squirrel's long-term memory is phenomenal because it can remember where it buried its nuts. And in other cases, they are less so. »

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#38015
Intelligence is one of those terms that everyone uses without being able to define it precisely. The word is derived from the Latin "intelligere" meaning "know." The Latin word itself is a compound of the prefix between ("between") and light ("choose, pick"): etymologically, intelligence is therefore the ability to sort the available elements - to pick those that are relevant - and to bind them together. It is "all mental functions for conceptual and rational knowledge" (Larousse Dictionary). It is what makes you know the world. Intelligence uses the information provided by the senses to work, but is also able to take a step back from it, to detect its deceptiveness in order to interpret it correctly.

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#38016
Ethical standards will therefore have to be instilled in AI: the more autonomous the automatons, the more moral dilemmas they will have to solve. This is all the more urgent as we are more dependent on AI every day. It is already the one that chooses the information we consume: Twitter, Facebook and Google are driven by AI. The philosopher Roger-Pol Droit proposes to explain the nuances of human functioning to robots to avoid disasters. Interesting proposal, but who among us is able to perfectly explain the ethical underpins of its decisions? Not to mention that ethical standards, it is all their complexity, are often in conflict with each other. Morality is an inaccurate science, full of contradictions and near-down. Quite the opposite of a computer calculation and an equation.

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#38017
One of the most significant advances in deep learning took place in 2012, when Google Brain was able to "discover" the concept of chat by itself. This time, learning was not supervised. In practice, the machine analyzed, over three days, ten million screenshots from YouTube, randomly s e l e c ted and, above all, unlabelled. At the end of this training, the program had learned itself to detect cat heads and human bodies. "No one ever told him it was a cat. It was a turning point in machine learning," Andrew Ng, founder of the Google Brain project, told Forbes magazine.

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#38018
Our society is facing three crises. A social crisis as soon as the spread of a weak ultra-competitive AI in front of us. An ethical crisis, when neuroaugmentation becomes necessary. An existential crisis at last, when AI challenges us in who we are as individuals and human beings. The school - or rather the institution that will succeed it - will have the task of responding to these three challenges.

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#38019
The school, in its current form, is going to die. What remains to be determined, however, is the more or less painful way in which it will disappear. If it is too resistant, it risks preventing children, especially those from smaller backgrounds, from quickly enjoying the benefits of unprecedented access to intelligence. Above all, we must understand that the reinvention of the school will be the condition of a much more fundamental rescue: that of all humanity. For the new school we are going to invent will allow us to meet the immense challenge of our usefulness in a world soon saturated with Artificial Intelligence.

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#38020
From HAL 9000, in 2001, the Space Odyssey, to R2D2 or Z-6PO in Star Wars, the image of the fearsome enemy robot or faithful companion has long been a must for anticipatory movies. But no one imagined that Artificial Intelligence could become a contemporary object, crossing the screen to land in our real life. And yet, ai has emerged in a few years as the main vector of the upheavals taking place in the world today. In twenty years, we have been propelled from Bi-bop to smartphone, from minitel to 5G, from tamagotchi to AlphaGo. The Internet or social networks actually appear to be almost anecdotal stages of technological change on which AI relies. It is everywhere and its progress is meteoric. Our society, already, could not do without it; it becomes even more dependent on it at every moment.

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#38021
The world has undergone three major technological and economic revolutions in two centuries. The first stretched from 1770 to 1850, with the first factories, then the steam engine and railway network. The second from 1870 to 1910, with the birth of aviation, automobiles, electricity and telephony. These inventions changed the world around the electrical and transport networks. The third revolution began around 2000, with the arrival of NBIC technologies (Nanotechnologies, Biotechnologies, Computer Science and Cognitive Sciences) that will change humanity. The revolutionary dimension of nanotechnology lies in the fact that life itself operates at the scale of the nanometer - the billionth of a metre. A ladder hithert out of reach for us. The fusion of biology and nanotechnology will transform man into an engineer of life and give him a fantastic power over our humanity.

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#38022
The philosophers of the enlightenment of the 18th century described a bright future, free from the weight of religion, full of promise. Tomorrow would be more beautiful: freer, more modern, more ethical. Conversely, computer scientists who appeared from 1950 have always had a reputation for being polarized geeks - sometimes wrongly - of being Asperger's-type autistic. From the 1980s on, the roles were reversed. Computer scientists have become carriers of an enchanting discourse, magnifying the future powers of Man. We will become immortal, we will colonize the Cosmos, we will decipher our brains.

Laurent Alexandre
(The War of Intelligences)

#38023
Communism was an ideological cancer, an invisible and devious virus, infinitely more dangerous, that was eating away at society from within. I blamed this hostility on the youth and naivety of this country, which reacted with the clumsy impulsiveness of a teenager overflowing with testosterone.

Laurent Alexandre
(The Man Who Knew Too Much)

#38024
The Jewish question haunts Hitler! The sources I have confirm that. This psychopath thinks that they are the cause of all evils and that they should be eradicated to the last. He's on a mission. No diplomatic threat will stop him. He exterminated the Jews until the total destruction of his armies and the fall of his regime... Will there be one more to save if we wait to march on Berlin?

Laurent Alexandre
(The Man Who Knew Too Much)

#38025
My trousers, holed at the knee, held thanks to a string tied around the waist. Missing a button on my crumpled shirt, I had spikes in my hair and a three-day beard. I never understood how people found the time to engage in such futile activities as going to the hairdresser or waxing their shoes.

Laurent Alexandre
(The Man Who Knew Too Much)

#38026
Switzerland was neutral and maintained diplomatic relations with all countries, including Germany, as if nothing had happened. The tiny country had become a nest of spies, the peaceful HQ of the intelligence services in the heart of a Europe of fire and blood. There was no better place in the world to start rumors. The echo of the mountains amplified the signal to Berlin and Moscow within a minute.

Laurent Alexandre
(The Man Who Knew Too Much)

#38027
When spoken to, Church did not always respond immediately. The words seemed to slowly move towards his brain, before being painstakingly analyzed by his neurons. The answer sometimes came several minutes later, when it was no longer expected. He spoke without haste, carefully articulating each word, as if he were reading the pages of a book to a hearing-impaired child.

Laurent Alexandre
(The Man Who Knew Too Much)

#38028
Dying in the prime of life due to bacteria was not acceptable. Cruel nature. She does not treat the poet better than the scorpion, as Christian de Duve said. Techno-medicine had finally had its skin: we no longer died of diseases, we reprogrammed DNA on catalogue, and the hybridization of man and machine progressed at any berzingue.

Laurent Alexandre
(The Man Who Knew Too Much)

#38029
"What difference do you make between communists, socialists, Bolsheviks, Trotskyists, anarchists?" "These are metastases of the same cancer settled in Moscow, My Colonel.

Laurent Alexandre
(The Man Who Knew Too Much)

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