Global Big Data Conference

In 1949, at the dawn of the computer age, the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel warned of the danger of naively applying technology to solve life's problems. Life, Marcel wrote in Being and Having, cannot be fixed the way you fix a flat tire. Any fix, any technique, is itself a product of that same problematic world, and is therefore problematic, and compromised. Marcel's admonition is often summarized in a single memorable phrase: "Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived." Despite that warning, seventy years later, artificial intelligence is the most powerful expression yet of humans' urge to solve or improve upon human life with computers.