Jean-Gabriel Ganascia

Jean-Gabriel Ganascia (born 5 April 1955) is a French computer scientist and philosopher. He is an emeritus professor of computer science at Sorbonne University and a researcher at the Laboratoire d'informatique de Paris 6.

His early work was in symbolic machine learning, including a rule-learning system and an interestingness measure he introduced in 1991. Later, he worked on computational ethics, and then on the digital humanities. In Voir et pouvoir (2009) he proposed the Catopticon, which is a model of surveillance being exercised from below rather than by those in power.

He chaired COMETS, the ethics committee of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, from 2016 to 2021. He is a fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence and was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 2019.

Ganascia has also written essays on artificial intelligence for a general readership. His book Le Mythe de la Singularité (2017) is an attack on the idea of a coming technological singularity, and Servitudes virtuelles (2022) argues that the major technology companies impose a form of virtual subjection and compete with states for the attributes of sovereignty. He has also published fiction under the pen name Gabriel Naëj.

Early life and education Ganascia was born in Limoges, Haute-Vienne on 5 April 1955.

In 1983, he defended a doctoral thesis on knowledge-based systems and then in 1987, a thèse d'État on symbolic machine learning, both at Paris-Sud University in Orsay under the supervision of Yves Kodratoff.

Career Ganascia became a professor of computer science in 1988 at Pierre and Marie Curie University,

During the 1990s he coordinated national research in cognitive science. First, he worked for the Ministry of Research and, from 1995, was director of a joint programme grouping the ministry, the CNRS and other national research bodies.

From 2011 to 2020 he was deputy director of OBVIL, a project that brought his team at LIP6 together with literary scholars at Paris-Sorbonne University to apply computing to the study of literature.

Ganascia chaired COMETS, the ethics committee of the CNRS, from 2016 to 2021. He has been chair of the ethics committee of France Travail, the French public employment service, since 2021, It is used for scoring partial classification rules by weighing supporting records against counter-examples, and is also known as descriptive confirmed-confidence.

In the same 1991 paper, Ganascia described CHARADE, which is a system for learning sets of classification rules. He developed it as part of his work on symbolic machine learning. Johannes Fürnkranz and Tomáš Kliegr wrote that the system simplifies its output in two stages. First, it removes conditions from individual rules that are logically implied by the remaining conditions, and then removes whole rules that are implied by other rules in the learned set. It detects insertions, deletions, replacements and displacements at the level of individual characters, using an approach related to sequence alignment in bioinformatics.

Ganascia's work in computational ethics takes a top-down, logic-based approach. He has translated ethical principles into formal representations a machine can reason with. In 2007 he formalised Aristotelian consequentialism, Kantian ethics, and Benjamin Constant's theory of principles, using non-monotonic logic implemented in answer set programming.

Writing Ganascia's first book, L'Âme machine, was published by Éditions du Seuil in 1990. Its title answered La Mettrie's L'Homme-machine (1748). The book surveyed the questions raised by the field of artificial intelligence and argued that narratives about the end of the world, and about machines acquiring consciousness, have no scientific foundation.

Voir et pouvoir Ganascia's book Voir et pouvoir: qui nous surveille? was published by Éditions du Pommier in 2009. In the book, he presented the idea that a new model of surveillance was emerging. He drew on Luciano Floridi's notion of the infosphere. In place of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, which Michel Foucault had used to describe centralised systems, Ganascia proposed the Catopticon. Panopticon is a concept in which power belongs to those able to see without being seen. Opposed to this, Catopticon is a decentralised form of surveillance exercised from below.

Le Mythe de la Singularité In 2017 Ganascia published Le Mythe de la Singularité: faut-il craindre l'intelligence artificielle?. It is an essay against the technological singularity. In the book, he challenges three propositions on which the idea rests: Moore's law, Ray Kurzweil's law of universal evolution, and the prediction that machines will become autonomous. He writes that it is incorrect to assumed that the exponential growth in machine performance will continue indefinitely and that computing power does not amount to intelligence. He also writes that, in a philosophical sense, reinforced learning does not give machines autonomy. In the concluding chapter he attributes the promotion of the idea by major technology companies to corporate communication strategy, and argues that it diverts attention from their ambition to assume functions historically held by states.

Later books In 2019 Ganascia published Ce matin, maman a été téléchargée under the pen name Gabriel Naëj. It is a novel set in 2047 and follows the story of Michèle Vidal who wants her consciousness transferred into a manufactured body after her death.

Servitudes virtuelles was published in 2022. In the book, Ganascia argues that intelligent machines have entered everyday life and that public anxiety fixes on minor dangers but ignores graver risks. It takes in projections of superintelligence and the difficulty of withdrawing from cyberspace, and argues that the technology companies impose a form of subjection. The moral principles currently present to regulate artificial intelligence offer very less protection against this subjection. 2017 - Prix Roberval, grand public category, mention "coup de coeur des médias", Université de Technologie de Compiègne 2019 - Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur 2022 - Prix du Livre FIC, university research category, Forum International de la Cybersécurité Fellow, European Association for Artificial Intelligence

Selected publications