Parlons Futur

Meilleurs extraits de l'article de The Economist Conserve elephants. They hold a scientific mirror up to humans     Elephants, about as unrelated to human beings as any mammal can be, seem nevertheless to have evolved intelligence, and possibly even consciousness. Though they may not be alone in this (similar claims are made for certain whales, social carnivores and a few birds), they are certainly part of a small and select group. Losing even one example of how intelligence comes about and makes its living in the wild would not only be a shame in its own right, it would also diminish the ability of biologists of the future to understand the process, and thus how it happened to human beings.   Dr Wittemyer argues that, human beings aside, no species on Earth has a more complex society than that of elephants. And elephant society does indeed have parallels with the way humans lived before the invention of agriculture.   The nuclei of their social arrangements are groups of four or five females and their young that are led by a matriarch who is mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, sister or aunt to most of them. Though males depart their natal group when maturity beckons at the age of 12, females usually remain in it throughout their lives.   Families are part of wider “kinship” groups that come together and separate as the fancy takes them. Families commune with each other in this way about 10% of the time. On top of this, each kinship group is part of what Dr Douglas-Hamilton, a Scot, calls a clan. Clans tend to gather in the dry season, when the amount of habitat capable of supporting elephants is restricted. Within a clan, relations are generally friendly. All clan members are known to one another and, since a clan will usually have at least 100 adult members, and may have twice that, this means an adult (an adult female, at least) can recognise and have meaningful social relations with that many other individuals.   A figure of between 100 and 200 acquaintances is similar to the number of people with whom a human being can maintain a meaningful social relationship—a value known as Dunbar’s number, after Robin Dunbar, the psychologist who proposed it. Dunbar’s number for people is about 150. It is probably no coincidence that this reflects the maximum size of the human clans of those who make their living by hunting and gathering, and who spend most of their lives in smaller groups of relatives, separated from other clan members, scouring the landscape for food.   Dealing with so many peers, and remembering details of such large ranges, means elephants require enormous memories. Details of how their brains work are, beyond matters of basic anatomy, rather sketchy. But one thing which is known is that they have big hippocampuses. These structures, one in each cerebral hemisphere, are involved in the formation of long-term memories. Compared with the size of its brain, an elephant’s hippocampuses are about 40% larger than those of a human being, suggesting that the old proverb about an elephant never forgetting may have a grain of truth in it.   In the field, the value of the memories thus stored increases with age. Matriarchs, usually the oldest elephant in a family group, know a lot. The studies in Amboseli and Samburu have shown that, in times of trouble such as a local drought, this knowledge permits them to lead their groups to other, richer pastures visited in the past. Though not actively taught (at least, as far as is known) such geographical information is passed down the generations by experience. Indeed, elephant biologists believe the ability of the young to benefit by and learn from the wisdom of the old is one of the most important reasons for the existence of groups—another thing elephants share with people.   Nor is it only in their social arrangements that elephants show signs of parallel evolution with humans. They also seem to have a capacity for solving problems by thinking about them in abstract terms. This is hard to demonstrate in the wild, for any evidence is necessarily anecdotal. But experiments conducted on domesticated Asian elephants (easier to deal with than African ones) show that they can use novel objects as tools to obtain out-of-reach food without trial and error beforehand. This is a trick some other species, such as great apes, can manage, but which most animals find impossible.   Wild elephants engage in one type of behaviour in particular that leaves many observers unable to resist drawing human parallels. This is their reaction to their dead. Elephant corpses are centres of attraction for living elephants. They will visit them repeatedly, sniffing them with their trunks and rumbling as they do so (see picture overleaf). This is a species-specific response; elephants show no interest in the dead of any other type of animal. And they also react to elephant bones, as well as bodies, as Dr Wittemyer has demonstrated. Prompted by the anecdotes of others, and his own observations that an elephant faced with such bones will often respond by scattering them, he laid out fields of bones in the bush. Wild elephants, he found, can distinguish their conspecifics’ skeletal remains from those of other species. And they do, indeed, pick them up and fling them into the bush.  

Dans ce podcast je pase en revue et commente les articles suivants : 00min00s : Inside China's Vast New Experiment in Social Ranking (14 déc 2017, Wired, article de 6000 mots) 12min47s : The Business of Artificial Intelligence (2017, Harvard Business Review, article de 5000 mots) 39min00s : These People Never Existed. They Were Made by an AI. (30 oct 2017, futurism.com) 41min16s : Nvidia’s new AI creates disturbingly convincing fake videos (5 déc 2017, thenextweb.com) 42min35s : These Creepy Mini-Brains May Finally Crack Deadly Brain Cancer (12 déc 2017, singularityhub.com) 47min43s : Une recherche suggère que ce n'est pas la conscience qui dirige l'esprit humain (27 nov 2017, trustmyscience.com) 53min23s : AI Can Now Produce Better Art Than Humans. Here’s How. (8 juil 2017, futurism.com) 1h01min13s : New robots can see into their future (4 déc 2017, news.berkeley.edu) 1h05min26s : Google’s New AI Is Better at Creating AI Than the Company’s Engineers (19 mai 2017, futurism.com) 2autres articles que je n'ai pas eu le temps de présenter mais que j'ai par ailleurs raccourcis sur la page dédiée à ce podcast : Computers are starting to reason like humans (14 juin 2017, www.sciencemag.org) AI's Implications for Productivity, Wages, and Employment (20 nov 2017, pcmag.com) Je liste aussi ici les derniers articles que j'ai pu écrire dans la presse: 5 approximations de Laurent Alexandre face au Parlement Européen (Journal du Net, déc 2017) Réactions à l'article "The impossibility of intelligence explosion" (nov 2017) Comment nous discuterons demain : télépathie, changement de voix, et autres bizarreries (Journal du Net, nov 2017) Réponse à Jacques Attali qui se demande si l'IA peut rivaliser avec l'intelligence humaine et jouer les artistes (oct 2017), JA qui m'a d'ailleurs répondu sur Twitter : "Tres intéressante réponse, parlons en?" Voici enfin le lien vers la page sur le site www.ParlonsFutur.com où pour chaque article ci-dessus je ne garde que les phrases clefs au format bullet point. Vous trouverez aussi sur cette même page une sélection de mes derniers tweets.  

Dans ce podcast, j'ai souhaité réagir à l'émission C Dans L'Air du 15 décembre 2017 "Trump veut la lune" dans laquelle les experts sont allégrement passés à côté de plusieurs sujets clefs, j'y réponds ici : Quelles sont les 5 raisons avancées pour justifier l'exploration/conquête/colonisation de Mars ? Pourquoi il ne faut en fait pas envoyer l'Homme sur Mars ? Pourquoi il est intéressant de retourner sur la lune ? Pourquoi la lune et ses environs représentent un enjeu militaire stratégique majeur pour les nations ? Dans ce podcast, je reprends certains des éléments détaillés sur mon site Pourquoi Elon Musk ne doit pas envoyer l'Homme sur Mars, et en version courte dans une tribune parue dans l'Express Pourquoi Elon Musk ne doit pas envoyer l'Homme sur Mars, article mis en une du journal et repartagé plus de 900 fois. J'ai aussi écrit un livre du même nom disponible sur Amazon. Pour être prévenu(e) de mes futurs podcast traitant du progrès technologique et de son impact sur l'aventure humaine, touchant à tout de l'IA à la conquête spatiale en passant par les biotechnologies et les robots, vous pouvez vous abonner à la newsletter en laissant votre adresse email sur http://www.parlonsfutur.com/.