"We are in too much of a hurry to entrust AI with the management of the world instead of measuring its limits."

Whatever changes it brings about, artificial intelligence (AI) is part of a long human history. And understanding its historical aspect can help us better critique it, to make better (or less) use of it. Because AI extends the history of communication machines since the telegraph, and, much older, that of animism, this tendency to endow non-human entities that are somewhat similar to us with a human mind.

The proliferating debates on AI bear the trace of this history, even when they cry out about novelty, marvel at it or are frightened by it, for example when they thunder that it will never be able to replace the scientist , the artist, the philosopher, etc. or, on the contrary, that it will dethrone the human. The fear is fueled by small matters, like this work by a "Hong Kong philosopher" generated by AI , but this says more about the weakness of a certain philosophy and a certain readership than about the strengths of AI.

Let's take a step back. Technological modernity has long given rise to ghosts in language-producing machines, regardless of the origin of that language. The two centuries preceding us have seen a proliferation of "spiritual" technologies. Barely born, Samuel Morse's (1791-1872) telegraph gave rise to beliefs in the possibility of communicating with the dead, and even, without the slightest machine, with distant, barely human people. Books and journals have analyzed this "spiritual telegraph," which was imagined to innervate humanity, having become a machine for thinking together.

Radio, before becoming a machine for the mass dissemination of a well-formatted program, began as wireless telegraphy, and mysterious voices of distant, dead, and vanished humans floated there in the ocean of ether, that fluid in which we had long believed. The benevolent electricity fairy irradiated its machines, while its promoters already knew how to hide the costs of coal-fired power plants far from the pretty lights.

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