Philosophical conference: Artificial intelligence, human and animal intelligence

Organized by the Langages, Littératures, Sociétés Etudes Transfrontalières et Internationales (LLSETI) and the Association des professeurs de philosophie de l'enseignement public, the philosophical lecture series "What work in a finite world?" continues on Wednesday April 10 at 5pm with the theme " Artificial intelligence, human and animal intelligence ". This lecture will take place in room 3, at theuniversité Savoie Mont Blanc (USMB), in Chambéry. It is open to all, no registration required.

The term "artificial intelligence" has two distinct interpretations. The first refers to the imitation by machines of activities usually reserved for human intelligence: writing a text in compliance with linguistic rules, playing chess, calculating the Galois group of a polynomial, finding a legal text adapted to a human situation. Artificial intelligences in this sense have a tangible reality today: electronic chess players, algorithms for calculating a Galois group, and above all conversational intelligences such as chatGPT, which have revived́ the debate.

But any progress in these areas 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 article, of designing intelligent machines that would equal or even surpass human intelligence. To this end, he devised a protocol for testing the reality of such intelligence. Clearly, we're a long way from that. Human, and even animal, intelligence remains an enigma for scientists, and artificial intelligence in Turing's sense is another.

We will give an overview of the progress made since Turing in this field: the universal Turing machine, the perceptron, multi-layer artificial neural networks with gradient backpropagation, deep learning...The discussion will open up on the issues involved in artificial intelligence.

This conference will be hosted by Richard Ganaye, Honorary Professor of Mathematics at the Lycée Berthollet in Annecy.

About the cycle "What work in a finite world?

We only became aware of the ravages of unlimited human transformation of nature and the world when this world threatened to become uninhabitable. But is it the transformation of the world in general that is in question, or is it an economic model that subjects everything to commodification, while allowing the logic of domination to persist? To put it plainly: aren't people expelling themselves from the world by failing to challenge these models? We've started to get scared, and for good reason. However, understanding why and how we've come to this point is essential if we are to influence a course of events that is not inevitable. Discussing this issue would reveal its political dimension as well as its social stakes.

LEARN MORE

• Program for the 2023-2024 philosophy lecture series
• LLSETI laboratory website
• Contact: Pascal Bouvier, member of the LLSETI laboratory and organizer of this conference series