Pascal Bornet, A Techno-Biased Prophetic Mountebank

PASCAL BORNET, IRREPLACEABLE, WILEY, HOBOKEN, NEW JERSEY, USA, 2024

It is difficult to conclude on this super hot subject of GenAI and its impact on the symboleracy, literacy, numeracy, and techneracy of Homo Sapiens as a species, a historical species which went and is still going through a phylogeny that brings them all the time to higher points and higher powers. Unluckily it has harmed the planet, and it has at least accelerated its cyclical evolution. Every invention, discovery, or development has expanded human capabilities by extending one physical or mental human capability and thus replacing that human capability with a machine or a mechanical procedure.

Will GenAI replace our human thinking? That question is legitimate, and the answer is “Yes if we do not cultivate the capabilities that the machine cannot reproduce, mimic, or vampirize.” That machine can do what it wants — if it wants anything that is based on the program in its Central Processing Unit — but it will not experience love in any comparable way as a human does. [Steven Spielberg, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, 2001] Love, of course, and hatred as well. It may mimic racism and convey racist ideas it has gathered in the clouds of our digital age, but it will not be able to experience the human feelings a racist person experiences, and their victims suffer through, including the ultimate knowledge that death might or even will be the (ex-)termination of their lives. A machine can commit genocide, and yet it is not genocidal because it does not know what it is doing. It only obeys what its CPU tells it to do.

However, and mind you Pascal Bornet is clear about it, we humans can excel beyond this GenAI. I am afraid an elite will be able to survive GenAI, but what dimension of the human mind will GenAI bring to mutation and phylogenic development? How will we develop a new potential expansion of our physical and mental being, and become something new, better, more developed? We go back to Buddhism and its “anicca” principle that everything constantly changes from one moment to the next. Many people, including Buddhists, think that this constant change is the disappearance of what exists now, and they do not see it is also the emergence of something better, more powerful, and…