Thales and Artificial Intelligence: towards harmony between humans and machines
Leading up to his address at the Women's Forum Global Meeting in Paris on Friday 6 October, Patrice Caine, the Thales Group Chairman & CEO, published an opinion piece on Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the LinkedIn social network.
The article followed an open letter sent by numerous prominent researchers and entrepreneurs this summer, in which they warned the international community against the dangers presented by Artificial Intelligence, including the threats posed by possible autonomous weapons and "killer robots".
The Group's Chairman & CEO notably used the occasion to express the company’s position on a number of points related to the use of AI.
Patrice Caine encourages ongoing international political debate on the uses of AI in the defence sector, while calling for moderation regarding the current level of maturity of AI technology.
He further underlines that humans must remain crucial to all critical decision-making: “AI is a tremendous opportunity with the potential to bring huge progress in many areas”, he writes, on the condition that progress serves “the best interests of the human race, without undermining or replacing people, who need to be able to take conscious actions at every decisive moment, in situations of ever greater complexity”. In these conditions, our main challenge is to seek a “perfect understanding of the mechanisms behind AI developments, while at the same time analysing human behaviours as people interact with these new systems”.