Artificial Intelligence and Our Secret Mind: Human Mediation in Grey Zones

Abstract

CIRET has set up an AI research group to highlight the need for human ethical mediation in the age of digital technology and binary logic. Francisco Varela has observed that cognition can take place in the computer field without appealing to consciousness. Yet human decision-making cannot be the result of cognition alone and requires the interaction between cognition and consciousness. In fact, rationalist and reductionist models borrowed from the hard sciences have only shown a mechanistic vision of AI or a biological-environmental vision, which cannot be applied to complex human phenomena occurring in a grey zone. In this grey or fuzzy zone of mediation, conciliation, and repair, we need the dialectical process or dialogue between consciousness and cognition. In this context, the proposal of mediating leaders and managers appears as a possible ethical alternative to demonstrate that consciousness is beyond the logic of the computer. Humans must remain responsible for all the effective decisions that will help us solve problems theoretically and concretely. We therefore need an emerging global wisdom that flows from our conversations about AI and appeals to human consciousness at al l its levels of reality. This group produced a Symposium on November 21 and 22, 2023, in which we imagine that AI may be at the service of human evolution and resiliency in “learning to be societies” instead of contributing to block our evolutions: if AI remains a work tool… Certainly it will because the creation sparkles still a mystery for men themselves.