In March 4, 1967, in the course of a news item in the scientific section, placed between an article on the new television sets, now in color, and the daily grid of crossword puzzles, the first definition of which was “Sad realities that stand in the way of many dreams” (in nine letters, answer: insomnia)The world made a short and prescient foray into the 21ste century, announcing “an information day devoted to ‘medicine and artificial intelligence’”. “The reflections that the growing place taken by computers in medical life can inspire, the comparisons between human thought and artificial intelligence, will be studied in particular during this symposium”, was it written.
Artificial intelligence, abbreviated today as AI. The concept had been coined in the mid-1950s, following the reflections of mathematician Alan Turing, who wondered if a computer would ever know “think”, or if he was only capable of one “imitation game” (imitation game). » It landed surreptitiously in the columns of the newspaper on March 4, 1967. It was only going to develop and spread, following the exponential progress of computer memories and the multiplication of potential uses. Until the editorial surge caused by ChatGPT (for Generative Pre-trained Transformer : “pre-trained generative transformer”), a software created by the OpenAI company, in collaboration with Microsoft. The tool, sorry, the “conversational agent”, can write texts in response to a request and, according to the ambient fantasies, do Victor Hugo without Victor Hugo.
Microprocessors surpass the human brain
Back in 1967. We were a year before the release of 2001, a space odyssey, from Stanley Kubrick, with this replica of the HAL 9000 computer: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that” (“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that”). Two feelings inspired in a robot, regret and fear, together with an act of disobedience. The question of the film is also the one that torments – until proven otherwise – the very human journalists of the World and which could be summed up as follows: “Computers, do you have a soul? »
The editors of the evening daily also confront this dizzying enigma: will computers one day take power over human beings? The scientific columnist Nicolas Vicheney wrote on November 23, 1968: “For the moment the most powerful computers remain immensely stupid – they still only know how to say yes and no, but several billion times per second… Will we succeed, the day when we understand its mechanism, in copying the human brain to create an artificial intelligence? »
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