The Hermeneutic Turn of AI: Are Machines Capable of Interpreting?

This article aims to demonstrate how the approach to computing is being disrupted by deep learning (artificial neural networks), not only in terms of techniques but also in our interactions with machines. It also addresses the philosophical tradition of hermeneutics (Don Ihde, Wilhelm Dilthey) to highlight a parallel with this movement and to demystify the idea of human-like AI.

The Hermeneutic Turn of AI: Is the Machine Capable of Interpreting?

This article aims to demonstrate how the approach to computing is being disrupted by deep learning (artificial neural networks), not only in terms of techniques but also in our interactions with machines. It also addresses the philosophical tradition of hermeneutics (Don Ihde, Wilhelm Dilthey) to highlight a parallel with this movement and to demystify the idea of human-like AI.

Science Facing Interoperability as a Necessary Condition of Success and Evil

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as machine learning algorithms, have allowed scientists, marketers and governments to shed light on correlations that remained invisible until now. Beforehand, the dots that we had to connect in order to imagine a new knowledge were either too numerous, too sparse or not even detected. Sometimes, the information was not stored in the same data lake or format and was not able to communicate. But in creating new bridges with AI, many problems appeared such as bias reproduction, unfair inferences or mass surveillance. Our aim is to show that, on one hand, the AI's deep ethical problem lays essentially in these new connections made possible by systems interoperability. In connecting the spheres of our life, these systems undermine the notion of justice particular to each of them, because the new interactions create dominances of social goods from a sphere to another. These systems make therefore spheres permeable to one another and, in doing so, they open to progress as well as to tyranny. On another hand, however, we would like to emphasize that the act to connect what used to seem a priori disjoint is a necessary move of knowledge and scientific progress.