Artificial intelligence is trendy, it is invested with every virtues and vices/dangers. According to some people, there it is, happiness is tomorrow with immortality in support of it, and a sort of graft between human being and machine/robot living in the Garden of Eden. The reading of these “theses” and defenders illustrates perfectly how science fiction becomes science without the need for experimentation and scientific rigour, any nonsense is enough. Let’s pass on the promises of immortality that have neither tail or head and not a quarter of an early demonstration, and that a recent epidemiological analysis jeopardizes by showing that the continued growth of life expectancy seems to slow down. The book by J-G Ganascia is a happy event showing that everyone is not dazzled by media wanderings, and administering a cold shower to these pseudo-scientists.
Indeed, one of the popes of this new science -R Kurzweil- considers himself an expert in evolution. He proposes nothing more than evolution being a linear and continuous process without interruption obeying a law that must exponentially end up with this immortal man/machine. We have as in a (bad) text of Prévert, successively : life, eukaryotes, multicellular organisms, Cambrian explosion, mammals, primates, hominids, agriculture, city, states, inventions, industrial revolution, computers, personal computers, Garden of Eden populated by these men machines. Our brave adventurer ignores the classical data of palaeontologists, who have made an inventory of 5 or 6 mass extinctions that do not fit in an exponential function : the 6 mass extinctions correspond to 445 × 106, 370 × 106, 250 × 106, 200 × 106, 66 × 106, 13 × 103 years ago, even a 6th grade student will notice that it does not fit with an exponential function! Ignoring the extrinsic factors that are the origin of these massive phenomena as well as those that punctuate our life expectancy with wars, famines, global warming, that are likely to change the life prospects on our good old earth is disconcerting . The parallelism with the monotheistic religions and their credo in a better world underlined by Ganascia is striking. The 21st century will be religious or will not be at all, said Malraux. Artificial Intelligence and its pseudo-scientists who serve as apostles is a modern version of the monotheistic religions but with a scientific and modern sheen that poses a serious problem to scientists, those who still believe in data, universality of science and progress.
