Goosebumps | Culture

And then we get goosebumps. Suddenly, a glance transforms us into a powder keg. A few words transform us into hedgehogs, the world is dyed purple. Pure tannin remains on the lips. Artificial intelligence never gets out of hand, doesn’t get angry or blush. She stays in the grooves, never outside of herself.

You will never know what a night of the heart is. He will never be a man, or a woman, joy. Christian Bobin, the French poet, was emphatic: there is no such thing as artificial intelligence. We will never see an artificial love. Because at the epicenter of intelligence there is no data, nor binary combinations: there is love.

It is in what rescues the minuscule, in those more than alive, those who have died and we remember, at the stroke of words. And then the epiphanies arrive, the cathedrals, the chests that light up as if they were stained glass, stained glass. You enter, for example, the Conques abbey, and you never leave it again, because the abbey stays inside you, forever. Each memory is spit on you, even to get rid of it, you write a book, and you call it: the night of the heart.

Artificial intelligence speaks, but is deaf to that night. It has the force of gravity, it solves everything, with data cannons. But he knows nothing of the brief lightness of being. None of the foam of the hours. It cannot reproduce that vibration, that stings, when you come across another that makes you born into the world. A Frenchman said it in a Dutch room, Cogito ergo sum. Thinking is doubting. To live is to love. Artificial intelligence only calculates, it has nodes instead of knots. He gives dice, but he does not love, therefore he is not intelligence, only an artificer.

The first step is always in the heart. From there we rise. We got up in the caves, and then we climbed on the skulls, we even rode the rockets. But here there is not only intelligence, pure reason, there is also passion, doubt, everything that lasts, everything that vanishes. Artificial intelligence has no heart, it twists like a sword, something that is neither a sword nor a harpoon. It bifurcates, it expands, it will get into all the holes, all the gaps that we leave. That is why it is urgent to return to inhabit the world. Everything becomes calculable, predictable, as if we could suddenly enclose the absolute, the entire infinity in data, algorithms. As if everything was suddenly controllable.

And yet, something moves. The chorus of a song. The color of a scarf on the canvas. A writing that becomes a bitch, that doesn’t let you sleep in peace anymore. That something, that nothing, is everything. It is what gives us goosebumps. It is what makes that when we make love that wiggling is not just a job for dogs, dogs that eat the meat in bites.

Data mining makes us go down to the bowels, and there, in the cave, we discover correlations, and the galleries proliferate infinitely. Artificial intelligence works to discover patterns, and it does so by learning from the past, it does not come out of before and after, from one and zero. He solves enigmas, he paints like the masters, and one day he will even give us back Lorca’s voice. But he will never give me goosebumps.