This text is not an animal chronicle. It aims to take detours, non-motorable routes, gravel paths and bush tracks to nurture reflexivity on the societal impacts of artificial intelligence (AI).
Unlike the noise and chatter generated by artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT, which cover and dodge many social and political debates of another magnitude, reflexivity takes time. It requires collective exchanges based on self-learning and consensus, not an aggregate of opinions that dialogue with each other only through interposed Facebook pages.
Have you noticed how the heartbeats of AI are rapid, how they lead to panic attacks, social tsunamis dividing the population between “for” and “against”? Traumadvice: being “for” remains better seen on the scale of cool. The pace is not slowing down, the pace is fast, you have to formulate an opinion in response to each level of technological innovation. However, deep, nuanced and shared reflection does not sit well with a thundering drum machine and FOMO (fear of missing out) outrageously fed on the hunt for clicks.
There is an urgent need to slow down on AI issues so that we can listen to groups at all intersections of social issues to leave no one in the human rights gap. Collective reflection on the social projects to be built takes time. Listening to all of society’s stakeholders, to those who speak less loudly, to those who no longer speak because of the accidents of life, to all people marginalized by structural, historical, economic or political injustices is combined quite badly with the imposed figure of the reaction and the media buzz.
Can we take the time to imagine for a moment the violence of the starting postulate of this state of affairs: if you do not understand this new technique, your place is no longer here among your fellow men, you are out of step and unfit to face the contemporary realities. This becomes an important indicator of value, if not the only one. Not having technological capital is the new stigma that affects your rights to enjoy different services. This is what the defender of rights in France has rightly called “structural abuse”.
Technology Capital
Technological capital, beyond cultural, social or economic capital, constitutes the new ostentatious instrument to distinguish oneself. The social elevator picks up speed and soars skyward for those best endowed with knowledge and technological skills. It is true that we are witnessing a return to the popularity of manual trades that make sense. Despite everything, having subsistence farming skills to feed a family or a country is still less valued than mastering technological tools. And precisely, it is quite possible to live well with skills in the digital universe without knowing anything about agriculture, but the opposite is not true.
We are swimming in the waters of the absurd whose sediments have produced the fertile ground for the works of Ionesco. Among them, Rhinoceros a play from 1959 that still enjoys incredible accuracy. The protagonists, under the effect of a wave of conformism annihilating any individual critical thought, end up denying their humanism and transforming themselves, by mimicry, into rhinoceros. A herd was born by the sole desire to follow the flow and not assume the difference with their congeners. Jean said to Bérenger, at the beginning of his metamorphosis into a rhinoceros: “Humanism is outdated! You are a ridiculous old sentimentalist. »
The playwright uses this metaphor and a deliciously sarcastic tone to denounce the danger of the rise of totalitarianism. We will have to ensure that AI fever is not the new “rhinoceritis”, a contagious phenomenon illustrated by Ionesco. How to explain the mystification that accompanies this rather uncritical enthusiasm for AI? Is it the relationship between the rhinoceros and the unicorn that gives this technology an almost magical aura?
The effectiveness of the enchantment of the AI contributes to a voluntary alienation from which it is necessary to get rid of to use this technology adequately, to the benefits of everyone. For a reasonable debate, we must look at the other side of the coin of technological innovations, on the side of ordinary suffering, on the side of authoritarianism with which AI is applied, without participation of the people concerned or injured, without governance shared.
Serve the general interest
Fundamental injustices (generational, geographic divides, etc.) like biases (racist, sexist, etc.) are neither legally nor socially acceptable even if AI is the innovation of the century. So, let’s make sure that the pachyderm AI doesn’t crush everything in its path, including the precious porcelain that is human rights, confusing the skeptics in turn.
AI will contribute more massively to the general interest when it is extracted from lucrative logics in the same way as education, when it is a common whose governance is shared, when its audacity lies in the inclusiveness of all social groups. , in participating in discussions on the purposes of its implementation.
Finally, AI is also the elephant in the room, this hot potato that we send back while denying its real impact. To carry the miseries of the AI on the back of an elephant or a rhinoceros is unreasonable as the pathos of the bitter failure of the biases and wounds of the AI comes back to us, living beings supposedly endowed with consciousness and intelligence. empathy, rationality and benevolence. However, being the source of the problem gives us the immense privilege and responsibility of being able to be the source of the solutions. The algorithm is powerful, yes, but a tank too. THE machine learning is powerful, yes, but so are killer robots.
Here is the proof that a technical advance, however powerful and effective it is, does not always rhyme with social progress. Technological relentlessness mutilates. The palliative care that constitutes the attempts at regulation a posteriori should be the last remedy after having attempted generalized awareness upstream. This is the justification for the need either to disarm technical power or to rearm human solidarity in order to use these new forms of power conferred by technology wisely.