LITERARY ARCHETYPES OF THE NEW COGNITIVE REVOLUTION – FROM ANCIENT MYTH TO DIGITAL UTOPIA

Abstract

Geoffrey Hinton, the current winner of the Nobel Prize for discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks, admitted in his lecture to Oxford students last year that artificial intelligence has surpassed its initial trajectory and has moved in a direction that poses great challenges. We are facing a new, radical evolutionary leap that is completely redefining the realms of human existence. The world is faced with a great algorithmic puzzle that opens many unknown questions. It is because of these characteristics that artificial intelligence grows into a new myth, with a concept and characteristics that have completely defined the myth throughout history. At the same time, it opens vast horizons for the research of contemporary social, cultural and philosophical issues that create the modern man’s attitude towards life and largely determine his place in it. Artificial intelligence, through its digital codes and sequences, reflects the entire human capital, diligently stored over thousands of years of existence. It grows into the most authentic metaphor of the myths that perpetuated man’s eternal search for the truth of his existence and of the collective anti-drama. New technological trends are a metaphor for the Promethean fire stolen from the gods, in which man is both god and Prometheus at the same time.