To say in the tone of your uncle born in 1950 who boasted of having attended the Woodstock festival: I was there at the birth of the internet, me, sir!
Finally, I did not attend the birth of the internet (1983), but at its emergence (in the 1990s). Little by little, the internet has become embedded in our lives.
I remember the sound of the telephone modem that connected us to the World Wide Web. I remember the magazines we sold in grocery stores to direct us to the best sites. Netscape, AOL, La Toile du Québec. I remember AltaVista, a powerful “search engine”. From [email protected], my first email address.
I remember our collective naivety, too. The future would be communal thanks to the inevitable democratization that this decentralized network would bring where the corporatist will could not take root, it was contradictory.
The future would be smart, too, I would even say it was seen as inevitably smarter than our end of XXe century: bullshit could not survive all this knowledge that was accumulating there, at the end of our Dell computer keyboards.
Around 1997, we really wondered how stupidity could survive so many humans capable of taking courses at Harvard or the Sorbonne, of remotely consulting the works of the Library of Congress and of verifying information in real time in the best media in the world…
Those who dared to predict that the XXIe digital century would not necessarily be an ideal of knowledge were rebuffed: Technology is neutral!
Of course, technology is neutral. Of course, it is the use that we make of the technology that determines whether it is harmful or beneficial.
But still, the times were resolutely optimistic: the internet would liberate mankind in a thousand ways. In fact, by historical osmosis, we had the same optimism about the Internet as about the fall of the Soviet Empire…
Yes, the Internet was a tremendous advance: one of the great inventions of humanity. But the Internet is also a gigantic incubator of stupidity which disseminates it, stupidity, at very, very high speed.
My favorite anecdote about the dumbing down power of the internet concerns the Flat Earth Society: subscribers to its newsletter (sent by post) were few (3500) in 1997, when a fire destroyed the list of subscribers of this Flat Earth Society…
We thought that was the end of this misconception of a flat Earth.
We were wrong: the internet brought it back to life1 in a flamboyant way, making it possible to spread it to the greatest number, recruiting more followers than ever.
Another manifestation of the harmful side of the Internet: we are emerging from a pandemic where parallel realities made up of falsehoods erected into truth have radicalized millions of people who believe that everything, all the time, everywhere, is only a lie institutionalized by media and the Deep State…
And that the “truth” will come out in a Nuremberg 2.0 trial where people like me will be tried and hanged.
That, this digital propagation of alternative facts, I swear to you, in the late 1990s, was not dominant on the radar of the internet thinkers of “tomorrow”.
There, we are in the day after tomorrow of the digital year 2000 and, oh boythe great fight for the imagination is that of true and false…
How to distinguish one from the other?
It is less and less a matter of technology and more and more a matter of faith. Access to all the knowledge in the world has not stopped the progression of stupidity, it is even the opposite.
Here we are in 2023 at the dawn of another era, that of artificial intelligence. It’s vast, the AI, of course. But I feel we are hardly more vigilant of the dark sides of AI than we were of the dark sides of the nascent web in 1993.
Everyone laughs with ChatGPT, this algorithm that can write a song like the Rolling Stones, write a dissertation on the mystery of the pyramids or write a column like Denise Bombardier.
We laugh at the failures of ChatGPT, but I read what the robot lays and, it’s funny, I hear the noise of my first modem… Everything is being refined.
Artificial intelligence can now create “deep fake” videos, deep fakes that make someone say things they’ve never said, that make someone do things they don’t. ever made… A porn movie, for example.
Take the most popular podcast host on the planet, Joe Rogan. He would have received Justin Trudeau at The Joe Rogan Experience2… This interview exists, but it never took place. It was created from scratch. The result of the deepfakes is imperfect, but for the untrained eye, it’s stunning. Same for the ear.
The result, for sure, will be perfect in 5, 10 or 15 years.
Imagine a pandemic with a video of Horacio Arruda or Anthony Fauci saying things they didn’t say about the virus. Imagine what you want, the AI will make real with fake.
In 5, 10 or 15 years, I don’t know if the real will be dissociable from the fake, especially when you know that millions of people prefer reassuring fake to hair-raising real.
From artificial intelligence to artificial reality, inevitably, there is only one step.