Every month, the Paris campus publishes its newsletter to highlight campus life, student projects, as well as perspectives from instructors, the teaching team and students. This December, the director of the Paris campus shared his thoughts on AI — and we thought it was worth sharing this editorial with you…
The topic of the year in 2023 — yes, AI really is pretty cool.
It's practical, it's fun, it saves time… Pretty cool, right!
Experts talk about mechanical sympathy — a programmed, engineered warmth designed to make us feel well-disposed towards the AI systems we converse with. The more likeable an AI seems, the more likely we are to trust it and, ultimately, to pay for it to listen to us and do us favours.
But 2023 was also the hottest year ever recorded in human history, the year of an unprecedented escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — a year that showed just how much humanity needs to be truly sympathetic towards one another.
Sympathy, from the Greek sun (with) and the Latin pathos (to suffer with), can be translated as "to feel together" — something that cannot be programmed, and that we can only find if we accept, for a moment, to stop thinking only about ourselves.