A news item informs me that the ping-pong playing machine has been invented. Table tennis players already had a kind of robot that served to train them and that placed the balls with force and precision, but the current device is something else entirely. The machine can play a continuous match; it has a large platform behind the table and a mobile arm with a paddle, and a whole host of cameras that film the game and the opponent and, thanks to AI, can know where the ball will go and respond with maximum forcefulness and malice. Right now, the machine is playing at a high level, and they want to make it compete against the top players in the world to see if it can beat them. The thing is, as is perfectly plausible, this whole mess of arms, cameras (new), tons of AI, and a paddle could manage to defeat champion Wang Chuqin or one of the Lebrun brothers (the only French players to reach the global elite of the game), but once this feat is achieved: what would change? Would we stop playing table tennis? Would there cease to be competitions, Olympics, clubs and fans, schools and masters of this sport? It is very likely not, as common sense tells us. If AI and associated technology can do something that we already know how to do, why do it? I don't doubt that such a tool can be used for training –it doesn't get tired, it can help work on weaknesses–, but, does it help to learn? What can the machine teach us about the game and how to play it that a high-level player cannot teach us? Nothing. Don't we see that the machine moves and decides what to do in the game thanks to a series of processes that have nothing to do with the human mind, perception, and body? It is evident that we do. Why, then, when AI is not playing ping-pong, can it still seem exemplary to us? What does the functioning of AI have to do with the human mind and the way we learn and improve in our lives? Why can we come to consider that an AI can help us improve, for example, in writing better, when what AI does to create text has nothing to do with what writers do when shaping a page? We are giving AI an exemplary power that it can never have, because the way AI solves problems has nothing to do with the way humans think and make decisions. That technology can become extraordinary is undeniable, but the old technology of the human brain has been working, for millions of years, in the same way, and it costs us as much as millennia ago to learn new things, incorporate new skills, or reach some form of intellectual excellence. AI does not make us smart if we do not know how to think for ourselves and evaluate what we really need. Just as we already have a machine that washes our clothes, it seems we would want a machine that spares us from thinking or learning, or from doing things for ourselves, as if we had sold to a conglomerate of companies the possibility of doing something that we knew how to do perfectly, but that they will now do, because we are lazy.
