Deep learning as machine metis

Krašovec, Primož (author)

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.

• Language: English
• Keywords: Leroi-Gourhan, deep learning, intelligence, intuition, metis, creativity
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FF - Faculty of Arts
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2025
• Number of pages: Str. 5809–5818
• Numbering: Vol. 40, iss. 8
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-178479
• UDC: 316.74:004.8
• ISSN on article: 0951-5666
• DOI: 10.1007/s00146-025-02360-4
• COBISS.SI-ID: 234340355
• Publication date in RUL: 28.01.2026

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: AI & society
• Shortened title: AI soc.
• Publisher: Springer Nature
• ISSN: 0951-5666
• COBISS.SI-ID: 28796417

Licences

• License: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Description: This is the standard Creative Commons license that gives others maximum freedom to do what they want with the work as long as they credit the author.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: umetna inteligenca, globoko učenje, strojna inteligenca, intuicija, metis, ustvarjalnost, strojna kreativnost, André Leroi-Gourhan

Projects

• Funder: ARIS - Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency
• Project number: P6-0194
• Name: Problemi avtonomije in identitet v času globalizacije