Arnaud Bertrand shows that Chinese thought, which does not place intelligence at the heart of what it means to be human, takes a different approach to AI: the danger lies not so much in machines that resemble us as in humans becoming machines.
In a long essay, Arnaud Bertrand criticizes the Western debate on AI for looking at the world "from the bottom of its well". According to him, a large part of the current anxiety stems from a hypothesis that is rarely questioned: intelligence is what defines humans, to the point that our species has named itself Homo sapiens. If this is the case, artificial intelligence, a fortiori superhuman, threatens our very identity. The Chinese tradition, he reminds us, has never placed intelligence at the center of humanity, and therefore approaches the thinking machine from a completely different angle.
From Zhuangzi to today's philosophers
The author presents several figures who are little known in the West. Zhao Tingyang, from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, believes that aligning AI with human values could be a "suicidal" mistake. Liu Yongmou, a philosopher of technology at Renmin University, reverses the Western fear: the real problem is the machinization of humans rather than the humanization of machines. This concern can already be found in the Zhuangzi, where an old gardener refuses a watering instrument for fear of acquiring a "heart-machine", whereas Aristotle wondered above all what automation would do to the social order.
The common thread is the notion of xīn, both heart and mind, the seat of moral judgment and Confucian benevolence (rén). It feeds both the fear of a "heart-machine" and the ambition of Zhu Songchun, head of the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, to "give machines a heart". The full article is reserved for paying subscribers; only its introduction is open access.
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