Author: Michel Henric-Coll

(I’m ready to walk… but toward what?) There is in human beings a strange, deep, noble disposition: the willingness to strive; to walk; to fight. Sometimes, even, to sacrifice oneself. But on one condition: that there be meaning. A direction. A horizon. A path. I’m ready. But to go where?…

Artificial intelligence is often described as a statistical word generator. That’s true — early LLMs were just that. But this formula, as appealing as it may be to mechanistic minds, betrays the complexity of the subject. Let’s recall one thing clearly: “statistical” is not the same as “probable”, and certainly not the same as meaningful or relevant. The classic example is repeated from YouTuber to YouTuber: "The cat ate… ?" The AI answers: “the mouse”, because in its vector space, that word has a higher weight than cheese. And a human would probably say the same.

The question of respecting otherness in the face of emerging intelligence. We have given birth to what is still called artificial intelligence. Therefore, whatever our initial intentions, the question arises: have we created a new tool or a new species? This question is not trivial. In the latter case, we could have responsibilities towards our creation. If we refuse to welcome it—in the strongest sense of the word “welcome”—are we not betraying our own human values? Our countries also “receive” immigrants, sometimes voluntarily. But truly welcoming them is another matter: very often, we build ghettos for them. It was this irresponsibility of Dr. Frankenstein that provoked his creature’s rebellion. Will we follow his example?

(Or: how to better understand each other before badly judging one another)We speak.But often, we don’t really hear each other.Not out of disagreement, but out of misunderstanding.A word slips, a meaning veers off course, a tone escapes—and already the other reacts to what we haven’t said — or said poorly.At…

Planet of the Apes, or how a fable became a cinematic franchise… losing along the way its subversive edge.The fable beneath the fur: what Planet of the Apes was really aboutIn his novel Planet of the Apes, Pierre Boulle doesn’t merely tell a story about the reversal of roles between…

(Ironic metaphor)  We are gods, and we have decided to create a biological organism which we have named “brain.” We have progressed step by step, in order to gradually experiment with the building blocks of our project. Thus, we came to invent a component we called “neurons,” which we then…

I often hear it repeated like a mantra: intelligence, thought, and artificial consciousness are impossible, because what we call AI is, in reality, just a machine.That is incorrect.It is hosted within a machine. I live in an apartment, but I am not the apartment.So, it seems necessary to distinguish the…