4 essays

Essays

Short pieces that open a question rather than close it. Each one starts from one of the four questions, and often ends up in another.

  • Trusting without understanding

    The problem with a superintelligence is not that it would be smarter than us. It is that its reasons might be true, and still out of our reach.

  • Cleverness is not wisdom

    Aristotle already told apart the ability to reach a goal from the ability to know which goal is worth it. Our machines excel at the first. The second is still our job.

  • The inverted mirror

    We ask machines to prove that they are conscious. Let us turn the question around: could we prove that we are?

  • What cannot be delegated

    If machines outdo us at almost everything that produces a result, what remains is whatever is valuable in the doing itself. Perhaps that is where meaning always was.