Deep learning as machine metis

Abstract This article situates current deep learning (DL) artificial intelligence (AI) within Leroi-Gourhan’s deep history of the human species’ relation to technology. According to Leroi-Gourhan, technology is both a key element of anthropogenesis and a source of later tensions (or disentanglement) between the human species and its external and increasingly autonomous technics. Human organic (life-oriented) intelligence at first extends itself through technical (machine-oriented) intelligence, only to be later left behind by it. We propose a concept of machine intelligence that goes beyond technical intelligence, the latter a (still) hybrid human–machine intelligence. This new, emerging machine intelligence is DL AI. DL AI developed out of the failure of symbolic AI to instantiate a key generic component of intelligence: creativity. While symbolic AI was rigid and pre-programmed, DL is flexible and unpredictable, presenting an embryonic form of actual machine intelligence. Its creativity can be likened to the ancient Greek concept of metis, a cunning and polymorphous form of intelligence. Although often biased and problematic, DL exhibits a machine creativity that goes beyond the anthropocentric imaginings of AI as a (mechanistic) imitation of the human norm.