Do not panic, an autonomous artificial intelligence is not about to take control of societies. Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part I, released in theaters on Wednesday July 12, brings in a new kind of villain: a sentient AI named “The Entity”. It is a virus that enters the most secure computer systems, in particular those of the intelligence services, and which could endanger the already precarious geopolitical balances by manipulating information.
Result: hundreds of American intelligence employees transcribe the most sensitive documents using a typewriter to leave no trace online. A real race against time begins to take control of this virtual enemy – thanks to two interlocking keys – and prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.
“AIs have less common sense than rats”
The last opus of Impossible mission surfs on the futuristic imagination carried by certain technoprophets of Silicon Valley. If the breakthrough of generative AIs at the end of 2022 with ChatGPT, Midjourney or ElevenLabs brought the hypothesis of a technological singularity back to the fore, the “sentient” machine – which has the capacity to perceive its environment subjectively – n is not topical. Moreover, the very term of artificial intelligence is hackneyed.
“We have to stop thinking that these machines are magically super intelligent. These are projections on the machine. We manage to deify what we do not understand, that is why the school must play its role, annoyed Laurence Devillers, researcher at the CNRS, professor of AI at the Sorbonne and member of the CNPEN (Comité National Digital Ethics Pilot) last April about OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It is mechanical, statistical speech, without any consciousness or intention”. And it is not Yann LeCun, pope of artificial intelligence, winner of the Turing Prize and vice-president in charge of AI at Meta (Facebook) who would contradict her on this point. Explaining that there is no intelligence in AI has been his hobbyhorse for years.
“The most successful artificial intelligences have less common sense than rats”, he pointed out to Station F in 2018. Yes, AI has made a leap in the past five years, but not to the point of taking its autonomy and becoming turn against humans as depicted in the blockbuster worn by Tom Cruise. Gifted with a conscience and guided by its instinct for survival, The Entity foils all of Ethan Hunt’s attempts to destroy it. Omniscient, she is even able to anticipate her actions.
“There are people everywhere”
In reality, “we haven’t really defined what the consciousness of machines could be… We should do it, underlined Antoine Bordes, director of Artificial Intelligence at Meta, on the occasion of the first World artificial intelligence Cannes festival in April 2022. In the meantime, we are creating regulatory frameworks to define their use, the data on which they are based and the applications with which we have the right to use them. And an AI that would be so intelligent that it would be able to go beyond its limits in a subtle way and manage to unplug us in order to be able to stay connected… this is a theory that is precisely science fiction”. And to conclude: “Compared to this animal intelligence we are talking about, some people think that an AI may want to defend itself from being disconnected in the name of a survival instinct… This seems very fanciful to me. »
Conclusion, three-quarters of the plot of Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning fall flat. But behind its grandiloquent scenario, the opus illustrates in a relevant way the idea that, behind a malicious machine, hides above all a malicious human. ” Who is responsible ? Certainly not the machine. The machine is nothing. It has been trained on data by humans, it has been annotated, evaluated, made available to others. There are humans everywhere”, insisted Laurence Devillers about generative AI. Ethan Hunt is well aware of this. He makes it his mission to prevent anyone from taking control of the Entity, convinced that there is no man or woman capable of assuming such power. Finally, the main enemy of humanity is none other than humans themselves.