At a pace that accelerates beyond the human, the digital simulacra seems to be taking over the embodied world. The artificial attenuates the actual. Students farm out their essays and brains to large language models. Hospitals pose a future filled with robotic physicians who (like their cousins, the AI cars) will cause fewer accidents than their human forebears. Silicon Valley offers AI lovers for the lonely. Even the underpaid phone company representative has been replaced by an even more efficient, cost-effective terror: the omnipresent, cheery chatbot who does not know how to truly chat. Techno-optimists and techno-pessimists play out their predictable scripts, but who gets any closer to the truth?
Into these controversies and confusions, Fabrice Hadjadj arrives speaking in the language of prophets and poets.
Even as "everything is about to end," so too artificial intelligence "is also an unprecedented opportunity-at the last and by way of contrast-to discover the essence of human intelligence." As humans we are made for contemplation, not calculation; our orientation is "less about information than incarnation." At least it should be. And if some technologies do violence to our nature, others extend it in mysterious ways. Hadjadj reminds us that "the first and still always astonishing artificial intelligence" is writing. He goes on to challenge all of us, both the techno-optimists and the pessimists, to ask ourselves: How, and to what purpose, do we use both simple and sophisticated technologies? What about reading? What is reading? And are we reading or being read?
______________________ With the lucidity of a philosopher, the strength of a theologian, and the sharpness of a poet, Fabrice Hadjadj assures and reassures us: AI does not replace intelligence, but rather restores what, in our very own and human intelligence, is not artificial-to think is to contemplate, to contemplate is to meditate, and to see is to glimpse, reading between the lines of the world, what is being given. Liberating.
-Jean-Luc Marion