Artificial Intelligence that displaces us

The arrival of generative artificial intelligence disrupts our relationship with the world and with ourselves. Far from replacing us, it forces us to explore what makes us irreducibly singular.

The Inner Journey: When Elsewhere Transforms Perspective

Displacement constitutes a movement that simultaneously engages body and mind. It enables what philosophers call a change of perspective, this capacity to see differently that opens onto discoveries capable of transforming an entire existence. My journey to India at age 19 made me understand that there is no single, objective world, but a multiplicity of worlds that coexist. What I held to be truth, objectivity itself, revealed itself to be merely my cultural subjectivity in relation to life, to death, to the individual, to the collective, to politics, even in the way of experiencing joy or sadness.

This experience echoes what anthropology has taught us since Marcel Mauss: our most intimate certainties are cultural constructions. Affects themselves depend not primarily on external conditions, but on deeply anchored worldviews. Each person inhabits their own world, constructed by the symbolic and practical frameworks of their culture.

Generative AI today provokes a displacement of comparable nature, but perhaps of unprecedented magnitude. Since the emergence of ChatGPT in November 2022, we have witnessed upheavals in the very conception of our fundamental categories: What is work? What is art? What is creation? What is thought? What is intelligence? How is the relationship to self and other, the individual and the collective, now defined? These displacements vary for each person, conscious or not, and integrate into our daily lives with a troubling appearance of naturalness.

Cognitive Delegation: Losing to Better Gain

GPS, present in our lives for more than two decades, perfectly illustrates this transformation. It has profoundly modified our autonomy by leading us to trust a “brain” external to ourselves. Yet this delegation potentially liberates our attention for other forms of concentration: less preoccupied with geographic cartography, we can devote ourselves more to relational cartographies. By entrusting a cognitive task to a technical device, we free up mental time and open our minds to other spaces of attention.

Displacements also redistribute social positions. People long stigmatized for their spelling, who saw access to certain jobs closed to them, can now thanks to AI cross these barriers. They thus gain in social skills, but also in personal confidence. This new confidence, which these tools bring them, authorizes effective displacements in social space. As philosopher Jim Gabaret emphasizes in his book L’Art des IA (2025), AI opens doors to those who were excluded from them, democratizing access to practices previously reserved for cultural or educational elites.

Automation has always displaced humans. Mechanization, and the very invention of the tool, as powerfully and poetically shown in the opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) with that bone, the original tool, which extends the hand of a prehistoric man and confers more power upon him, which immediately becomes instrumentalized for violence and domination—this automation, then, transforms power relations and possibilities for action. Today, in the era of artificial intelligence that explicitly invites itself into the daily lives of billions of human beings, the very issue of the relationship between man and machine finds itself displaced.

AI as a Distorting Mirror: A We Beside Ourselves

The machine is no longer normalizing and dehumanizing due to its mechanical and inhuman nature. It is no longer constructed for a precise and delimited productive purpose, as was the case in the past with the plowshare, the loom, or the Fordist assembly line. On the contrary, the contemporary machine models itself on us: on us as singular individuals and on us as a linguistic and cultural community, through its autonomous learning of our languages. We are dealing with a radically singular machine, which cannot simply be identified with the machines that preceded it.

It is us, with that sidestep, that slight displacement. This resemblance no longer holds merely to an anthropomorphic physical appearance, that of the science fiction robot. It is us, philosophically, culturally, and cognitively. It is not a simple imitation of us: it is a displaced us, a us, but nevertheless beside us in ontological terms, hence the great disturbance. It is not merely a servile assistant, but an authentic us that, in displacing us and being itself displaced, being fundamentally only a displacement of ourselves, represents an unprecedented human opportunity in history.

This opportunity consists in having to know ourselves better, to deepen our understanding of what we are as “pure” human beings, as non-machines. We are almost obliged to go dig into who we really are, to identify what profoundly differentiates us from the rest, whereas we naively thought that what differentiated us was our intelligence and our creativity. As Sophie Nordmann writes in La vocation de philosophe (2025), what distinguishes human thought from other forms of intelligence is not a positive “something” but precisely its capacity to “bring forth nothingness into being and into thought,” to “open breaches” rather than to “combine, manipulate, or produce data.”

The Breach of Questioning: The Irreducible Human

The contemporary machine, which is called “artificial intelligence,” this displacement of us, invites us to displace ourselves in turn. It even forces us to this displacement. What it urges us to do is to displace ourselves toward ourselves, to know ourselves better, to discover in ourselves unsuspected capacities that we ignored because we confused them with our cognitive intelligence. These machines therefore have nothing to make us lose. On the contrary, through differentiation, they have everything to make us gain, to grow as a human community, through new openings within ourselves.

The meaning of an organized community resides precisely in its collective journey of consciousness construction, in its capacity for reproduction and transmission which, to remain sustainable and allow the world to enjoy the enrichments we can offer ourselves and others, requires that consciousness grow and venture forth. If consciousness remains immobile, if we always think in the same way, if we never displace ourselves, if we refuse to enrich ourselves from otherness, then we progressively advance toward forms of cultural and philosophical consanguinity, which impoverish in my view the value and grandeur of human experience.

Jim Gabaret, in his interview in Le Monde (October 2025), says that reducing AI to an “automaton without intelligence” would amount to obscuring “the richness and power of fascination of AI on a growing number of users, collectors, and artists.” AI, far from constituting a threat to our creative capacities, can serve the “renewal of imaginaries.” It confronts us with our own limits, with our own thought automatisms, and compels us to explore what escapes all automation.

Toward Empathy and Infinity: Displacement as Vocation

Where, more precisely, do artificial intelligences invite us to displace ourselves? I observe that they invite us to displace ourselves toward our empathy with ourselves and with the other, whether that other is another person or the world as a whole. By deciding to put ourselves in the place of others, we access an enlargement of our consciousness. It is this void, this space that allows displacement, this eternal unanswered question facing infinity, facing the knowledge that we do not know, that promises us the discovery of a new world within which we will have to reinvent ourselves.

Those who claim to know are the obscurantists. Those who affirm they hold reason are the despots. Those who believe them and follow them out of comfort, to remain on the side of the strongest while avoiding asking themselves questions, betray the true purpose of humanity: to displace ourselves together, to go collectively further than what we could reach alone, to cooperate to grow.

The human is necessary, as Jim Gabaret reminds us, upstream of these creative processes, “giving meaning and value to the sequences of words, pixels, or sounds that electrical currents generate in our servers.” We are the only ones who can truly appreciate the work produced by AI, to confer upon it a significance that surpasses pure data manipulation. And if humans were to disappear one day, he concludes with accuracy, “what we call ’art’ would vanish with them.”

Sophie Nordmann concludes her book La vocation de philosophe (2025) with:

“What human thought has of its own is a hole, a gap. When this breach closes, all is lost because what is lost is that nothing that changes everything. There is nothing more fragile than a breach which, if we do not watch over it with care, can close at any moment. Nothing more precious either.”

Artificial intelligence therefore invites us to displace ourselves toward ourselves and toward one another to honor the adventure of what we are and our commitments in our individual and collective transformations. Without these displacements, without this openness to the radical otherness that AI represents, life itself would stop. For to live, for a human being, is precisely to stand in this breach, in this questioning that never closes.