Despite a call in spring 2023 by the main leaders of the big digital corporations (including Elon Musk) for a pause in artificial intelligence research, AI has made rapid progress and spread to all areas of human life (work, news and information, health, arts, culture, defence, legal systems). Like all the great scientific advances that preceded it, AI is both fascinating and troubling. It offers hope for revolutionary change that could improve our lives, but also generates forms of manipulation and other risks that are a source of concern, hence prompting calls for its control. Here again, as with any scientific innovation, what it will become is what society agrees to let it be. Yet what scope for action do individuals and regulators possess (including institutional regulators, such as states and international organizations) when they are up against the hyper-powerful multinationals developing the technology? What is driving these promoters of AI and what are the plans of these ‘big tech’ companies whose power grows a little more each day?
In this article, Grégory Aimar shows how the Big Tech companies are formulating their plans against a drumbeat of messianic ideology, turning state-of-the-art technologies into a veritable religion, a new creed for mankind in a direct line of descent from transhumanism. He shows how the language of most of the leaders of Big Tech is shot through with an evangelical spirit and faith in the omnipotence of their inventions, the two strands mutually reinforcing each other. And, even more worryingly, he points to the way the regulatory ethical bodies in that industry are losing influence, if not indeed being progressively eliminated, raising fears of that necessary guardrails may disappear — with unforeseen consequences for so-called modern societies.
The article is downloadable only in French. It is not available in English.
