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 mettrie


281 years in the making: GPT-3 and de la Mettrie

#artificialintelligence

Today two books came ended up on my desk, one published last year (experimentation guide with a git-hub example library for GPT-3) and one published in 1741 (Man a Machine, By Julien Offray de la Mettrie). So I did what anyone having these two books in front them would do; I let GPT-3 write a sample of how it would have completed de la Mettrie's work. Although de la Mettrie never spoke specifically about technology; being an engineer and a physician, standing in the middle of the rise of the industrial age must have prompted him to write this brilliant (although sometimes very fragmented) essay. It was a piece of work which deviated from litterary work of its time. It had a bold approach in describing the body as a singular system (instead of a mare box used by divine powers) and the mind as a computing machine of which consciousness arose (and not a parallel entity belonging to a spiritual world). It is written from a naturalist perspective, a strong statement against dualism and spiritualism.