Counter-essay based on Dario Amodei’s Machines of Loving Grace and The Adolescence of Technology. General Introduction.  — In October 2024, Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of the company Anthropic, published a short essay with the enigmatic title Machines of Loving Grace . The footnote to which this title refers, however, provides the reader with a series of important indications through which it is difficult not to read the text. The title of Amodei’s essay indeed refers di

The text that follows constitutes the first installment of three articles which, in reality, form a single whole. The aim is to introduce, as didactically as possible, a number of fundamental problems in AI ethics, while also offering an overarching view. My point of departure is a text by the contemporary philosopher Thierry Ménissier, What Ethics for AI? (2019), drawn from a lecture delivered at the conference entitled “Birth and Developments of Artificial Intelligence in G

What kind of ethics does AI require? Given the radical, structural, and systemic reconfiguration—and indeed metamorphosis—that artificial intelligence brings about across the whole range of individual, social, and institutional activities, it is no longer a matter merely of calling upon the philosophical tradition to respond to the new ethical stakes raised by these transformations. Rather, we must in a sense compel philosophy to work upon itself, and to subject its historic

The Limits of Computational Ethics . - This leads us finally to examine another field of ethics, situated at the crossroads of philosophy, computer science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science, and which has tended, since the early 2000s, to become a research field in its own right: machine ethics. What Ménissier calls no longer an “ethics applied to AI,” but an “ethics integrated into AI,” in order to indicate that the goal is less to question externally the ethic

As a preliminary note . – I presented, in another article on this blog, the six characteristics of the technical world as masterfully theorized in one of the most important works in the philosophy of technology of the twentieth century: The Technological Society  ( La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle , Economica, 2008). The reading of Jacques Ellul (1912-1994), an author today largely underestimated, seems to me indispensable for anyone who wishes to understand — to borrow an e

Since our spontaneous relationship to artificial intelligence is, from the outset, technical in nature, any analysis of its ethical and societal implications should first proceed through a global characterization of the technical phenomenon itself. The etymology of the term already informs us about the phenomenon. The word “technique” derives from the noun technè, meaning “skill” or “know-how,” which gave rise in Latin to ars, the origin of the French word “art.” The meaning

Drawing on the experience acquired over the past few years, and in light of an ever-growing body of studies on the effects of digital tools on human cognitive capacities, some observers are now warning about the risks of a progressive loss of autonomy that we might undergo as a result of the generalized use of artificial intelligence tools—especially generative AI. In other words, by increasingly delegating to artificial systems tasks that were previously carried out by human

In an open letter published on July 27, 2015, more than a thousand AI and robotics researchers, as well as industry figures, called for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons. Among the notable signatories were the head of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk; the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking; Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak; the founder of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis; and the linguist Noam Chomsky. The authors propose a minimal definition of lethal autonomous weapons, distinguishing them fr