The Need for Intelligence

In September 2025, as new AI supercomputers are announced, I ask myself a question: if machines become our cognitive prostheses, what remains specifically human to cultivate?

The industrialization of intelligence

In this month of September 2025, back-to-school season, announcements multiply concerning the arrival of new intelligent machines. The French army is preparing to open an artificial intelligence supercomputer in the Paris region, in Suresnes at Mont-Valérien. A data center dedicated to AI will soon emerge in Seine-et-Marne. A European supercomputer opens its doors in Germany, near Cologne, equipped with 24,000 NVIDIA H200 chips, capable of training language models comparable to ChatGPT. The National Education itself announces an artificial intelligence for teachers.

These announcements do not concern the hiring of armies of brilliant engineers, but indeed the manufacturing of machinic intelligences, which have become necessary for industrial competition. Human beings today find themselves constrained, to maintain their capacity for exchange and contribution to others—a social function before being an economic one—to rely on these artificial intelligences. If states massively support these investments, at the cost of worrying ecological consequences, it is because the need for intelligence is gradually shifting from human to machine.

This is very strange, and it happened so quickly, but this reality imposes itself on everyone, including the most ardent critics of AI who, paradoxically, also use these tools, sometimes even without realizing it. For these intelligences to exist, they must indeed be built, and this happens on an industrial scale. Alan Turing wrote in 1950 in his foundational article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”: “We can only expect to see machines compete with men in all purely intellectual domains after a considerable time.” That time has come.

The troubling mirror of our tools

I think of the TGV, so practical despite the legitimate ecological opposition it provoked during the construction of its lines. I once met Pierre Rabhi on a TGV, he was not ashamed to be there, he who could have protested against the destruction of ecosystems caused by these routes. We use highways without loving them, because they allow us to reach our destination faster. We navigate the Internet, operated mainly by American multinationals whose values we do not necessarily share.

These tools—roads, trains, the Internet—seemed to be merely instruments. They were not mirrors of ourselves. Artificial intelligence troubles us more because its object is no longer movement or communication, but reasoning itself. Yet the Pascaline, the first calculator built by Blaise Pascal in 1642 after five years of effort, already replaced a part of human intelligence. For it takes intelligence to calculate, even if it is an intelligence we can qualify as technical.

Artificial intelligences remain technically tools, but tools that seem to compete with us in our essence. We compare ourselves to them, we wonder if they are more or less intelligent than us. Gilbert Simondon, in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958), already described this confusion well: “Man has so much played the role of the technical individual that he cannot, without feeling frustrated, leave this place to the machine.” The wrong is there, and the step has been taken: we will no more eliminate AIs than we eliminated TGVs or the Internet.

Intelligence is no longer our monopoly

These machinic intelligences can process more data than us, reason faster, just as a calculator saves us calculation time. Artificial intelligence saves us reasoning time, reference searching time, synthesis time, writing time, etc. It therefore becomes essential for us humans to distinguish our intelligence from that of machines, in order to continue being human. And indeed, these are not the same forms of intelligence, and we must cultivate human specificity, which is no longer pure intelligence.

We may have believed that intelligence characterized us. I think it is time to recognize that what characterizes us is sensitivity, empathy, fantasy, serenity, forgetfulness, imprecision, an off-beat vision of things, etc. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty said so well in Phenomenology of Perception (1945): “The body is our general means of having a world.” Our relationship to the world passes through our sensitive corporeality, not through pure “computation.”

So, we no longer have a monopoly on intelligence. We have long known about animal intelligence, Frans de Waal documented it so well in Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (2016). We have more recently discovered plant intelligence, and now there is machine intelligence. We must seek what we have that is specific as humans. Creativity itself, which seems to characterize us, is already beginning to be challenged and will no doubt be increasingly so in the future. But it doesn’t matter: let us focus on today and what we can bring to the world, which is not pure computational intelligence. Let us no longer cultivate our intelligence, let us seek to cultivate something else, which is truly properly human, our singular thought.

Intelligence without humanity: a historical warning

I know that I can be criticized, that people will cry scandal by accusing me of inviting people to stop thinking, to let themselves be dominated by machines. But thinking and reasoning are not the same thing. Intelligence is reasoning. Reasoning applied to insensitive choices can produce the worst horrors.

All the intelligence deployed to build the Nazi machine, its implacable logistics, its methodical organization, can we call that humanity? Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), precisely analyzed this bureaucratic intelligence devoid of humanity, what she had named the “banality of evil.” There is nothing more inhuman than this project, and yet it mobilized much intelligence.

We then understand that what makes our humanity is not our intelligence. We possess intelligence, naturally, but it is not what we must primarily develop. What we must cultivate is our anchoring in humanity, our respect for others, our sensitivity, our ethics, things that machines do not have, because they are not alive. They have reasoning capacities, but they are not living beings in the same way as us. This may perhaps change in the future, but today, this is still the case.

Cultivating our singular humanity

Let us therefore develop our sensitivity, our ethics, our humanity, our humanism, our unconditional respect for the other who faces us. Emmanuel Levinas, in Totality and Infinity (1961), rightly placed ethics as first philosophy: “The face of the other is what forbids me to kill.” It is this fundamental ethical responsibility that constitutes us as humans, not our capacity for reasoning and calculation.

Thanks to these new intelligences, we may paradoxically grow in humanity. Intelligence can serve the worst, so it does not definitively characterize humanity. Let us not cultivate intelligence for itself, let us cultivate sensitivity, ethics, empathy, permanent questioning, and especially unconditional respect for others. We will thus contribute to laying the foundations of a more virtuous world, an aspiration I hope is shared by many.

To do this, we will need intelligence, and since machine intelligence surpasses ours in certain domains, let us use it. Hans Jonas, in The Imperative of Responsibility (1979), warned: “Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of an authentically human life on earth.” Let us therefore mobilize so that this use is not an ecological disaster. Let us support research on energy and the design of less energy-consuming computers, for example.

The challenge is not to renounce intelligence, but to put it in its rightful place: a tool in service of our deep humanity, not an end in itself. By accepting that machines take charge of part of the computational burden, we may free ourselves to finally explore what makes us truly human beings: our capacity to feel, to empathize, to create meaning, to create thought.