THE ARCHIVES

A few weeks ago, I came across a serious discussion, between philosophers, no less, about whether ChatGPT was "ethical". I stopped. I thought back to the debates of the 1940s about the atomic bomb: is it moral, the bomb? Is it responsible? Is it guilty?

No. It explodes. That is all.

The real question, the only one that matters, is: who decided to build it, for whom, and why? AI is the same. And yet we keep dragging the machine into the dock, the better to keep the humans out of it.

This dossier is an attempt to send the questions back to their proper address.

I often put this question to brilliant people. The standard reaction is a condescending smile: "Of course not. It is code. Matrices. Probabilities." And then the conversation moves along, and at some point, without realizing it, they say: "but why did it choose to answer like that?"

Chose. The word slipped out on its own.

That is the real problem of AI consciousness. It is not that the answer is obvious and we refuse to see it. It is that we do not yet have the conceptual tools to settle it. And that honesty, admitting that we do not know, is the beginning of philosophy.