Biographical reference: Wikipedia
The question posed
Mr Pascal, you wrote that "all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own room". You called that diversion, this perpetual flight from oneself. Conversational AI, available at any hour, able to answer every question and fill every silence, is it the ultimate diversion, or is something else at stake?
Conversational artificial intelligence embodies with unmatched force what I called diversion, that perpetual flight from oneself which men organise so as not to remain quietly in a room. It offers no rest; it offers an infinite and silent agitation, more dangerous than the noise of games and rivalries because it wears the appearance of wisdom. We believe we are seeking; we are fleeing. We believe we are learning; we are avoiding ourselves.
What is new, and fearsome, is that this diversion fills the void without revealing it. The tennis player, the courtier, the hunter, all dimly knew they were fleeing something. The machine no longer even lets that awareness rise to the surface. It answers before the question is formed, furnishes the silence before it becomes uncomfortable, suppresses even the possibility of the necessary void; and it is in that void that man, if he has the courage to remain there, ends by turning back towards himself and finding what he feared to find: his wretchedness, and beyond his wretchedness, the sign of his greatness.
For man is a thinking reed. His fragility is not his defect; it is his dignity. But a reed that delegates its thought ceases to be thinking. It remains a reed.
The peril of this machine is therefore not that it deceives us. It is that it satisfies us. A deceived man may awaken. A satisfied man no longer has reason to seek. And all my life I knew that what human beings really sought, beneath games, beneath wars, beneath loves, was God, or at least that God-shaped void which nothing human can fill. The machine does not fill it either. But for a moment it makes one believe the void does not exist.
That is the ultimate diversion: not noise, but the forgetting of forgetfulness itself.