Introduction

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INTRODUCTION

When people are faced with problems, what we have always done is to





it gives us security and allows us to detect failures and correct them. This

method allows automation, either by mechanical or electronic means.

The drive to automate goes further, it goes to the idea of building machines

that behave similarly to humans. This has been a constant since ancient times:

in Greek and Roman times (Whelan, 2020), in Buddhist history robotic ten-

dencies have also been documented (Mayor, 2019). We will only go back to

the middle of the 20th century. Alan Turing, an exceptional mathematician,

wrote an article in 1950 entitled Can Machines Think? He proposed what has

been called the Turing Test, a test to determine the ability of a machine to

exhibit intelligent behaviour. In 1955, John McCarthy, a professor at Dart-

mouth College, decided to create a study group to develop the ideas that had

emerged in the preceding years about thinking machines. It was developed

as a summer course in 1956. In the course proposal, McCarthy (1955) wrote:

       -

tions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve

themselves.

In this proposal, he gave this idea the name of  (AI).

While great strides have been made, almost seven decades later all of these

issues remain open. Current AI systems lack the ability to form human-like

concepts and abstractions (Pérez y Madrid, 2021).

Since its inception, AI has suffered from an anthropomorphic narrative

that attempts to attribute human capacities to algorithms. The problem is not

so much the machines as ourselves. Our reliance on AI leads us to confuse

calculation -decision making based on the sum of various types of data and

technical images- with judgement. Too much faith in the machine -and in our

ability to program and control that machine- can lead to unsustainable and

even irreversible situations. In the sure answers of the AI, we see the kind of

certainty that our ancestors searched in vain in the guts, the tarot cards or the

stars (Moser, 2022).