The advent of new technologies and artificial intelligence, with their profound philosophical, psychological, ethical, political, economic, and social implications, prompts us to reflect on human nature and technology, and to define the horizons towards which we are headed. We are honoured to print an interview with Jean Arnaud, a pioneer of the digital renaissance in the fields of art, philosophy, technology, and education. Jean Arnaud is an educator and entrepreneur at the helm of Nova, a company that develops artificial intelligence to accelerate research and combat disinformation. He is also a published author and artist.

New technologies, especially artificial intelligence, are poised to decisively transform the world we know, much like the steam engine that gave rise to the industrial revolution. The impact of AI can be felt across a multitude of domains.

In the realm of research, for example, AI, like the one we are developing with Nova, ensures researchers access to quality scientific literature and, more importantly, tools capable of accelerating academic research. On a larger scale, the impact of AI involves the development of search engine models based on verified information. In education, the use of intelligent mentors — namely, AIs associated with avatars in VR, AR, holographic versions, or robots capable of assisting students in their learning — has caused a fundamental paradigm shift in personalized learning, allowing students to escape from mass education that has been catastrophic for our democracies. Every citizen must be trained to think, analyze, and create, and must have reached their full potential to participate in the larger community. To put it more philosophically, one must be “rich” in self to be able to give.

In its function of providing assistance and giving advice, AI obviously enables greater performance (which is something society expects from workers, but this is still a philosophy, and as such, a set of values that can always be contested) and will revolutionize the field of work with the creation of new professions — for example, prompt engineers — and with the disappearance of others, resulting in significant decreases in employment, like those recently announced by tech giants, in the name of productivity.

Because AI excels at probing the vast data we collect, which we are unable to use unassisted in order to best address specific problems, AI may be effectively employed in the transportation sector to improve route planning, reduce waiting times, and minimize congestion, for example, as well as in medicine to identify diseases and conditions more quickly and accurately.

Of course, the benefits of artificial …

Originally appeared on Daily Philosophy Read More