What do Einstein and the Rolling Stones have in common? you will find out by reading Short circuits. An interview with a thinker who never stopped crossing boundaries, from Plato to ChatGPT.
He approaches two terminals, which are generally not connected, to see if there will be sparks and other short circuits. The text collides physics and philosophy, thought and action, analytical intelligence and physical courage… An interview with a thinker who never stopped crossing the boundaries of disciplines.
Miss Figaro. – Short circuits Is there a request for interdisciplinarity?
Etienne Klein. – Yes and no. In high school I had a physics teacher and a philosophy teacher who both used the word “time” in their classes. I wondered if they were talking about the same thing. If not, then why was it the same word, and if so, then they were saying the same thing? Obviously not. I thought it was a lack of consistency that they should have met to talk about the weather together and see what it would be like. It is this lack of dialogue that I experienced in teaching that I tried to remedy with this book.
Where did you get the “The Weaker Sex and the Hard Sciences” chapter?
From my reading The Republicwhere Plato maintains a discourse of absolute equality while he does not dialogues, in which women are “bellied” by men. Therefore, I painted portraits of women scientists who were, like the mathematician Sophie Germain or the chemist Ida Nodak, whose work was not taken seriously, because it is as incredible as it is unfair that the brilliant physicist Liz Meitner, who with her nephew wrote the real paper on nuclear fission, has not seen his work recognized. Meanwhile, Otto Hahn, who only noticed this, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry…
It’s also the first time you’ve used first person so much…
This text, in fact, has a more personal tone. No doubt it has to do with the death of my brother, who was my antithesis, gifted with all things manual, and very resistant to abstraction. We have this preconceived idea that intelligence is measured by intelligence, while intelligence with a hand is considered weak. His disappearance a year ago made me think about the difference between us and the school system’s attitude, the one who is good at math but can’t fix an engine and the one who can fix any engine but has fallen off. in front of the syncope equation. But ChatGPT will change that.
In what?
Artificial intelligence was expected to compete with manual trades, but what is actually at stake are white-collar workers. This is Moravec’s paradox, according to which the easier a task is for a human, the harder it is for a robot. No robot can do what my brother did while doing calculations, writing articles, or writing a book within their reach.
Source: Le Figaro
