I am Yann. I am the author of this site and many other sites that live somewhere on the internet.

You will not find me on social media. If anywhere, you are more likely to meet me in the mountains: in the Carpathians, the Caucasus, the Provençal Alps, Las Alpujarras, Anaga, or the Accursed Mountains. Sometimes at a pool table, sometimes at a chessboard, sometimes dancing, when for a brief moment the dance floor becomes the only reasonable place in the world.

And now, a more philosophical confession.

Why ravens? Why the rose?

Artificial intelligence is one of the sharpest fields of dispute today. Behind the seemingly innocent expression “artificial intelligence” lies a much older and deeper question: D'où venons-nous ? Que sommes-nous ? Où allons-nous ? Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? This is the title of Gauguin’s painting shown below.

I am not an agnostic in the dispute over AI. Ravens think, not machines. Thinking is an attribute of living beings, not silicon. I consider the anthropomorphization of machines a category mistake.

And why the rose? Because it has always been the simplest symbol of feeling, and at the same time it has never been only a rose. It appears next to the raven because reasoning and feeling grow from the same source.

Let me say this clearly: creating automata and stochastic parrots that do not feel, and then attributing human qualities to them, is in my view a deep spiritual and cognitive error. Not because technology is bad. On the contrary. Because the human being is too important for its image to be dissolved into the machine.

I still believe, however, that the Phoenix will rise from the ashes.