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"IT IS NOT A FAILURE OF THE HUMAN SPECIES THAT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ONLY BECOMES PARTICULARISED AND OPTIMISED FOR CONCRETE PURPOSES, BUT A REMINDER OF OUR CREATURAL LIMITS AND THE NEED TO BE GRATEFUL FOR ALL THAT WE HAVE BEEN GIVEN".
However, the attribution of such a genuine manifestation staff as compassion and affection to a machine, in such a singular moment as death, raises in all its radicality the specificity of the human being, of artificial devices and of the subject of relations that may exist between the two.
What is peculiar to human beings is their capacity for intellectual knowledge ; and it is this capacity that enables the development of technology and the whole field we call artificial intelligence (AI). The intellectual knowledge , which begins with abstraction, allows us to concentrate on particular aspects and dynamics of nature in order to be able to make accurate judgements - sometimes after much effort - about future behaviours of natural reality. The immateriality of the intellectual knowledge allows us to break out of the dangerous circle of "essay and error" that characterises successful adaptations based on random genetic mutations. Human beings can plan the future and partially adapt the world around them. In particular, we can transform part of nature into artefacts that serve our needs.
But man's intellectual capacity is not absolute, nor is it ever exercised perfectly. He is not capable of encompassing through a single intuition the natural dynamism which, for him, like its origin, remains a mystery. Man experiences himself as given, as nature. He can, partially, intellectually know the natural dynamics and benefit from this knowledge to improve in specific directions the results of biological evolution. It can "accelerate" the growth of some branches of the tree of life. But it cannot supplant the evolution of the universe as a whole.
Artificial ingenuities do not seem to be able to free themselves from the limits of their creators. In particular, as the embodiment of the exercise of human reason, AI will always be particularised and optimised for specific tasks and purposes. The human bias in AI is indelible. Each of its realisations leads directly to the inference of an design and an intelligent designer, with a lower case.
We cannot artificially programme the unspecificity of natural intelligence. We cannot programme evolution. But we can design ingenuities to solve particular problems, according to particular ends. However, adding such ingenuities to the mystery of biological complexity, or to the mystery of evolution in general, is beyond our intellectual reach. The good news is that it is not a failure of the human species that AI will only end up being particularised, but rather a reminder of our creatural limits and the need to be grateful for all that we have been given.