If people invent or create "smart" machines, they do it because they secretly become disillusioned with their minds or are exhausted under the weight of a monstrous and helpless intellect; then they drive him into cars in order to be able to play with him (or on him) and taunt him.
Entrusting our intelligence to a machine is to free ourselves from any claim to knowledge, just as delegating power to politicians allows us to laugh at any claim to power.
If people dream of original and "ingenious" cars, it is because they are disappointed in their identity or prefer to give it up and use the machines that come between them. For what machines offer is a manifestation of thought, and people, driving them, surrender to this manifestation more than to thought itself.
Machines are called virtual for a reason: they keep thought in a state of endless tense expectation associated with short-term comprehensive knowledge.
The action of thought has no definite period. It is not even possible to pose the question of thought as such, in the same way as the question of freedom for future generations; these questions pass through life, as if through airspace, while maintaining a connection with their center, just like Artificial Intelligence People pass through their mental space, tied to a computer.
The Virtual Man, sitting motionless in front of a computer, makes love through the screen and learns to listen to lectures on TV. He begins to suffer from defects in the motor system, undoubtedly associated with brain activity. It is at this price that it acquires operational qualities.
Just as we may assume that glasses or contact lenses will one day become an integrated prosthesis that will consume the gaze, we may also fear that artificial intelligence and its technical props will become a prosthesis that leaves no room for thought.
Artificial intelligence is devoid of the ability to think, because it is artless. Genuine art is the art of the body seized by passion, the art of a sign in seduction, duality in gestures, ellipsis in language, masks on the face, the art of a phrase that distorts meaning and is therefore called sharpness.
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These intelligent machines are artificial only in the most primitive sense of the word, in the sense of decomposition, as if by shelves, of operations related to thought, sex, knowledge into the simplest elements, in order to then re-synthesize them in accordance with a model that reproduces all the possibilities program or potential object.
Art, on the other hand, has nothing to do with the reproduction of reality, it is akin to what changes reality. Art is the power of illusion. And these machines have only the naivete of counting; the only games they have to offer are mix and match.
In this sense, they can be called not only virtual, but also virtuous: they do not even lend themselves to their own object, they are not deceived even by their own knowledge. Their virtues are clarity, functionality, dispassion and artlessness. Artificial Intelligence is a lonely machine doomed to celibacy.
What will always distinguish human activity from the work of even the most intelligent machine is the rapture and pleasure obtained in the process of this activity. The invention of machines capable of experiencing pleasure is fortunately beyond the reach of humans. He invents all sorts of devices to facilitate his amusements, but he is not able to invent such machines that would be able to taste pleasure.
Despite the fact that he creates machines that are able to work, think, move in space better than he himself, it is not in his power to find an information and technical substitute for the pleasure of man, the pleasure of being a man.
To do this, machines need to have a thinking inherent in man, so that they themselves can invent man, but this chance for them has already been missed, because man himself invented them. That is why man is capable of surpassing himself as he is, and this will never be given to machines.
Even the "smartest" machines are nothing more than what they really are, except, perhaps, in cases of accident or breakdown, the vague desire of which can always be blamed on them.
Machines do not possess those ridiculous excesses, that excess of life, which for people is a source of pleasure or suffering, thanks to which people are able to get out of the outlined framework and come closer to the goal. The machine, unfortunately, will never surpass its own operation, and it is possible that this may explain the deep sadness of computers. All machines are doomed to an idle, lonely existence.
Before, we lived in an imaginary world of a mirror, a bifurcation, a theatrical stage, in a world that is not characteristic of us and is alien to us. Today we live in an imaginary world of the screen, interface, doubling, contiguity, network.
All our cars are screens, the inner activity of people has become the interactivity of screens. Nothing written on the screens is intended for deep study, but only for immediate perception, accompanied by an immediate limitation of meaning and a short circuit of the image poles.
Reading from the screen is not done with the eyes. This is groping with your fingers, during which the eye moves along an endless broken line. The same order and connection with the interlocutor in the process of communication, and the connection with knowledge in the process of informing: the connection is tactile and search.
The voice that conveys information about the news, or the one that we hear on the phone, is a tangible, functional, fake voice. It is no longer a voice in the proper sense of the word, just as that by means of which we read from the screen cannot be called a look.
The whole paradigm of sensitivity has changed. Tachability is no longer inherent in touch. It simply means the epidermal closeness of the eye and the image, the end of the aesthetic gaze distance.
We endlessly approach the surface of the screen, our eyes seem to dissolve into the image. There is no longer the distance that separates the viewer from the stage, there is no stage convention. And the fact that we so easily fall into this imaginary coma of the screen is because it draws in front of us an eternal emptiness that we strive to fill.
The proximity of the images, the crowding of images, the tangible pornography of the images … But in reality they are many light years away. These are always just TV images. The special distance to which they are removed can be defined as irresistible for the human body.
The linguistic distance separating from the stage or mirror is surmountable and therefore human. The screen is virtual and irresistible. Therefore, it is suitable only for a completely abstract form of communication, which is communication.
© Jean Baudrillard, "The Transparency of Evil"