Turing’s Vision

Chat-GPT, humanoid robotics, and self-driving cars are just a few of the things that are changing our everyday lives. The rapid advancement of AI is eroding one by one all the cornerstones considered unique of human nature: language, consciousness, creativity, and moral responsibility. The book argues that the revolution we are facing is driven by Alan Turing’s “vision”. This vision rests on the idea that intelligence is not an intrinsic property of human beings, but is a way in which matter is functionally organized and an attribute we are naturally inclined to ascribe to certain entities. For decades we have pretended that this idea does not have the corrosive power that it actually does, perhaps more so than the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions. But now, given the achievements of new forms of computing based on deep learning and predictive coding, the most common intuitions can no longer avoid the dangerous Turing idea.