Transhumanism and Artificial Intelligence against African axiology

Over the course of its long history, humanity has experienced several technical revolutions that improved its material conditions of existence: art, hunting, agriculture, animal husbandry, industry, the railway, electricity, the telephone, the aeroplane, and today new technologies (NT).

New technologies are now present in every area of our lives. Their existence excites us as much as it worries us. They present themselves to us with a profile identical to that of Janus. On one side they carry new opportunities. On the other, they do not come without major risks. Some applications of NT generate progress in various fields such as health, where they make it possible, for example, to repair the human being preventively through predictive disease diagnostics. This is the case of nanotechnology. But other applications of these NT generate risks of totalitarianism in various areas such as individual freedoms, where they can allow a state to track citizens' every movement in public space. This is the case of facial recognition.

But the worst may be yet to come. NT have given rise to two new disciplines that promise to turn utopia into reality: transhumanism and artificial intelligence. Work on transhumanism conveys the promise of an augmented human being. But no one sees that, alongside this promise of an augmented human, the shadow of the unburdened human also looms. Unburdened, because they will be relieved of all the tasks imposed by their human condition—the very tasks that make them the unique being that the human is. These are the tasks that compel them to adopt a Promethean posture: thinking, foreseeing, anticipating, conceiving, organising, testing, inventing and innovating. A posture that reflects their generic identity. Yet deprived of their Promethean tasks, the unburdened human—even if augmented—would be no more than the erased human.

It is surely towards this unburdened human that one of the major disciplines aiming to create digital applications relying on cognitive abilities similar to those of humans risks leading us: namely, artificial intelligence (AI). The potential this discipline carries introduces the risk of converting the transhumanist project (the ambition to repair and augment the human) into a post-humanist project (which would consist in erasing the human as nature configured them). Erasing the human by transferring their Promethean tasks to digital applications. This is already taking shape with an application like ChatGPT, which in the field of education invites us to relieve the learner of any cognitive effort—in other words, an application that aims to evacuate any reflective approach on the learner's part from educational spaces.

From this comes the need to engage in reflection on how to introduce a logic of sustainability into our uses of these new technologies—these new technologies that Reason and Science place at our disposal. A logic of sustainability to ensure that the risks these NT carry do not outweigh the opportunities these same NT carry.

I. The notion of sustainability as a safeguard

The notion of sustainability is a difficult one to grasp. It presents different nuances depending on whether it is considered from the point of view of businesses, finance, consumers, education, etc. This raises the question of which notion of sustainability we should refer to when examining it from the point of view of NT.

Generally speaking, the notion of sustainability applied to NT echoes a concern for saving time and energy. We cannot adopt this meaning of sustainability within the framework of UNESCO, whose work refers to the notion of sustainability conveyed by the 1987 Brundtland report entitled "Our Common Future"…