Questão 46 do ITA 2026

Elon Musk and Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak have recently signed a letter calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of AI systems. The goal is to give society time to adapt to what the signatories describe as an “AI summer”, which they believe will ultimately benefit humanity, as long as the right guardrails are put in place. These guardrails include rigorously audited safety protocols.

It is a laudable goal, but there is an even better way to spend these six months: retiring the hackneyed label of “artificial intelligence” from public debate.

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However, many critics have pointed out that intelligence is not just about pattern-matching. Equally important is the ability to draw generalisations. Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 work of art Fountain is a prime example of this. Before Duchamp’s piece, a urinal was just a urinal. But, with a change of perspective, Duchamp turned it into a work of art. At that moment, he was generalising about art.

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Human intelligence is not one-dimensional. It rests on what the 20th-century Chilean psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte Blanco called bi-logic: a fusion of the static and timeless logic of formal reasoning and the contextual and highly dynamic logic of emotion. The former searches for differences; the latter is quick to erase them. Marcel Duchamp’s mind knew that the urinal belonged in a bathroom; his heart didn’t. Bi-logic explains how we regroup mundane things in novel and insightful ways. We all do this – not just Duchamp.

AI will never get there because machines cannot have a sense (rather than mere knowledge) of the past, the present and the future; of history, injury or nostalgia. Without that, there’s no emotion, depriving bi-logic of one of its components. Thus, machines remain trapped in the singular formal logic.

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But the reason why tools like ChatGPT can do anything even remotely creative is because their training sets were produced by actually existing humans, with their complex emotions, anxieties and all. If we want such creativity to persist, we should also be funding the production of art, fiction and history – not just data centres and machine learning.

That’s not at all where things point now. The ultimate risk of not retiring terms such as “artificial intelligence” is that they will render the creative work of intelligence invisible, while making the world more predictable and dumb.

So, instead of spending six months auditing the algorithms while we wait for the “AI summer,” we might as well go and reread Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That will do so much more to increase the intelligence in our world.