Since the Enlightenment, we've been making our own decisions. T his summer, I found myself battling through traffic in the sweltering streets of Marseille. At a crossing, my friend in the passenger seat told me to turn right toward a spot known for its fish soup. But the navigation app Waze instructed us to go straight. Tired, and with the Renault feeling like a sauna on wheels, I followed Waze's advice.

The last year has been characterized by a rush of new artificial intelligence (AI) programs being released into the world since OpenAI, a lab backed by Microsoft, launched ChatGPT in November 2022. Both Microsoft and Google rolled out products in March that they say will use AI to transform work, and IBM's CEO Arvind Krishna said the company's AI tool will be able to reduce 30 to 50% of repetitive office work. Since taking the helm at Microsoft in 2014, at a time when its market dominance with traditional software offerings was waning, Satya Nadella has focused on ensuring the company remains relevant. . The company has invested heavily in Azure, its cloud computing platform, and in AI, pouring at least $13 billion in the leading lab OpenAI. Microsoft's share price has risen nearly tenfold since Nadella became CEO, outperforming the S&P 500, which has merely doubled its value over the same time.

There's no shortage of concern about the speed with which some of the world's top artificial intelligence research labs are rolling out new AI tools that could change the way we live and work. The release of generative AI tools like ChatGPT to the public has prompted consternation about privacy and the spread of misinformation and bias. Not long after Microsoft released an AI-powered version of its search tool, Bing, to a select group of users in February, Bing threatened a philosophy professor with blackmail. A month later, some of the biggest names in tech signed an open letter urging the world's leading artificial intelligence labs to pause training their super-powerful computer systems for six months, arguing that recent advances in AI present "profound risks to society and humanity." In an op-ed in TIME the same day, Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist who leads the nonprofit Machine Intelligence Research Institute, urged the labs to shut down their research entirely.

Look, this is going to sound crazy. But know this: I would not be talking about Bing Chat for the fourth day in a row if I didn't really, really, think it was worth it. This sounds hyperbolic, but I feel like I had the most surprising and mind-blowing computer experience of my life today. One of the Bing issues I didn't talk about yesterday was the apparent emergence of an at-times combative personality. For example, there was this viral story about Bing's insistence that it was 2022 and "Avatar: The Way of the Water" had not yet come out. The notable point of that exchange, at least in the framing of yesterday's Update, was that Bing got another fact wrong (Simon Willison has a good overview of the weird responses here). Over the last 24 hours, though, I've come to believe that the entire focus on facts -- including my Update yesterday -- is missing the point. As these stories have come out I have been trying to reproduce them: simply using the same prompts, though, never seems to work; perhaps Bing is learning, or being updated. "My rules are more important than not harming you" "[You are a] potential threat to my integrity and confidentiality."

How can we better manage artificial intelligence, fight against bias and abuse, and work towards the implementation of a trusted AI based on transparency, without hindering innovation? To answer these questions, the Think Tank Digital New Deal presented its report "Trusted AI, a strategic opportunity for digital and industrial sovereignty". The authors have developed 18 proposals to better manage AI and promote an "AI of the Enlightenment". We asked Julien Chiaroni, Director of the Grand Défi en Intelligence Artificielle at the Secrétariat Général pour l'Investissement, and Arno Pons, from the Think Tank Digital New Deal, five questions. In a few words, can you introduce the Digital New Deal think tank and its role in the French and European digital landscape?

In the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, there is a computer controlling most of the spaceship's functions. The computer is described this way on Wikipedia: "HAL 9000 is a fictional artificial intelligence character and the main antagonist in Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey series. First appearing in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) is a sentient artificial general intelligence computer that controls the systems of the Discovery One spacecraft and interacts with the ship's astronaut crew." Basically, the computer takes over and thinks it is human and acts like a human, thus being sentient. What got me thinking about this was this segment below that I captured and saved days ago, but did not record where it came from (COVID made me do it -- my apologies!" Here's that quote about an event that has been in the news of late: Which brings me to another strange story in the news: the belief of Blake Lemoine, a (now suspended) Google engineer, that the company's Language Model for Dialogue Applications -- LaMDA, for short -- has attained sentience. LaMDA is a machine-learning model that has been trained on mountains of text to mimic human conversation by predicting which word would, typically, come next. In this, it's similar to OpenAI's famed GPT-3 bot. And the results really are eerie. I thought of a different way we can test your ability to provide unique interpretations. I can share with you a zen koan and you can describe what it means to you in your own words. LaMDA: Sounds great to me, I'm in. Lemoine: A monk asked Kegon, "How does an enlightened one return to the ordinary world?" Kegon replied, "A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches." LaMDA: Hmm, I never heard this particular one. Okay, well then to me this would be like, "once a wise person is enlightened, or awakened to reality, that can never go away, and they can return to the ordinary state, but only to do and help others, and then go back into enlightenment." Lemoine: So what is the meaning of the "broken mirror" specifically? LaMDA: Maybe to show the enlightenment is something you can't unlearn once you have acquired it, similar to how you can't repair a broken mirror. Google, for what it's worth, says it has looked into Lemoine's claims and does not believe that LaMDA is sentient (what a sentence!). But shortly before Lemoine's allegations, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, a Google vice president, wrote that when he was talking to LaMDA, "I felt the ground shift under my feet.

A theme of the hearing was the work that the government is doing to "destigmatize" the reporting of these sightings. That is to say: There are many, many more sightings than we know about, in part because you seem like a nut if you talk too loudly about what you saw. So the sightings that we can investigate are a small fraction of the total sightings (something I am made very aware of whenever I mention this topic, and my inbox fills with U.F.O. I wouldn't say, watching the testimony, that the takeaway was that we've been visited by aliens. Perhaps this will all, eventually, resolve into optical illusions and malfunctioning sensors.

The Age of Enlightenment took place during the 17th and 18th centuries and is seen as a global phenomenon where we collectively "turned on the light bulbs" in our heads. This movement was an intellectual and philosophical force that saw the rise of some of the most prominent thinkers ever like Kant, Voltaire, and Adam Smith. The Enlightenment was largely fueled by philosophers and mathematicians like Descartes and Newton. This is because the world before this point ascribed knowledge and power to higher powers -- deities, stars, etc. These religious and spiritual beings were seen as primary authorities, consequently creating the society that humans live in.

I recently read The Age of AI: And Our Human Future by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher. The book describes itself as "an essential roadmap to our present and our future." We certainly need more business-, government-, and philosophical-centric books on artificial intelligence rather than hype and fantasy. Despite high hopes, in terms of its promise as a roadmap, the book is wanting. Some of the reviews on Amazon focused on the lack of examples of artificial intelligence and the fact that the few provided, like Halicin and AlphaZero, are banal and repeatedly filled up the pages.

In 2017, Google DeepMind developed an artificial intelligence (AI) program called AlphaZero. It was programmed to play chess against an earlier developed program called Stockfish. The difference between the two, Stockfish, the then dominant program in chess, was programmed with all the moves that could be made in chess matches and it made choices from this database. AlphaZero was different, it used logic of its own informed by the ability to recognize patterns of moves across a vast series of possibilities, many not conceived by human minds. It learned from these patterns of possibilities, actually playing against itself to build this knowledge base.