Organized by the Languages, Literatures, Societies, Transborder and International Studies (LLSETI) at USMB and the Association of Philosophy Teachers in Public Education, the series of philosophical lectures titled “What Work in a Finite World?” continues this Wednesday, April 10, at 5:00 p.m. with the theme “Artificial Intelligence, Human Intelligence, and Animal Intelligence.” This lecture will take place in Room 3 at the University of Savoie Mont Blanc (USMB) administration building in Chambéry. It is open to everyone and no registration is required.
The term “artificial intelligence” has two distinct meanings. The first refers to machines mimicking activities typically reserved for human intelligence: writing text in accordance with linguistic rules, playing chess, calculating the Galois group of a polynomial, or drafting legislation tailored to a human situation. Artificial intelligence in this sense is very much a reality today: electronic chess players, algorithms for calculating Galois groups, and above all conversational AI systems such as ChatGPT, which have reignited the debate.
But any progress in these fields leads us to conclude that true intelligence lies beyond these partial successes. The second interpretation refers to the project proposed by Turing in his 1950 paper: the design of intelligent machines that match or even surpass human intelligence. To this end, he devised a protocol for testing the authenticity of such intelligence. Clearly, we are still a long way from achieving this. Human intelligence—and even animal intelligence—remains an enigma to scientists, and artificial intelligence in Turing’s sense is another.
We will provide an overview of the progress made in this field since Turing: Turing’s universal machine, the perceptron, multilayer artificial neural networks with backpropagation, deep learning… The discussion will then turn to the challenges posed by artificial intelligence.
This lecture will be led by Richard Ganaye, honorary professor of mathematics in the advanced mathematics program at Lycée Berthollet in Annecy.
About the series "What work in a finite world?"
We only took note of the devastation caused by our unrestrained transformation of nature and the world when that world threatened to become uninhabitable. But is it the transformation of the world in general that is at fault, or is it an economic model that subjects everything to commodification while perpetuating the logic of domination? In short: are humans not expelling themselves from the world by failing to question these models? We have begun to feel afraid, and with good reason. Understanding why and how we got to this point is, in any case, necessary if we want to take action to change the course of events, which is not inevitable. Discussing this question would reveal its political dimension as well as the social issues at stake.
LEARN MORE
- 2023-2024 Philosophy Lecture Series Program
- LLSETI laboratory website
- Contact: Pascal Bouvier, member of the LLSETI laboratory and organizer of this conference series