Could self-driving cars save lives? That’s what was titled The duty in 2017. The article added at the time to the multiple promises of technological revolution and economic benefits conveyed by the promoters of artificial intelligence (AI).
Such promises are never merely descriptive statements. The promise generates action, movement; it makes you dream and convinces. To use the words of sociologist Pierre-Benoît Joly, the promise generates a “horizon of expectation”, a space within which the actors and actors of innovation legitimize their project, mobilize resources and mitigate the many uncertainties specific to innovation. techno-scientific activity. The promise is therefore a powerful rhetorical object that makes it possible to stabilize a possible technological future rather than others.
ideas in review
In the name of technological progress, optimistic speeches follow one another to reactivate the machine for manufacturing technological solutions presented as the panacea to our social problems. Twenty years ago, nanotechnology promised to change the world, one atom at a time. Today, it is AI that builds this expectation. Tomorrow it will be quantum computing. These promises must be approached for what they are: discourses that seek to shape the present through representations of a technical future. This is what the research community calls “the economy of promise”.
The manufacture of promises
The influence of the promise economy on society is major. The enthusiasm generated by the promises facilitates the acquisition of the material resources necessary for techno-scientific activity, shapes the priorities of research in the country, leads to new public policies, stimulates industrial activity and, thus, channels public funds. to private companies. Everything is motivated by the expectation of a future benefit for society.
The case of the “AI ecosystem” is a notorious and documented example. Since 2012, promises about the possible economic benefits of AI have multiplied. These promises have generated such enthusiasm that the political community has endorsed a national strategy aimed at advancing the field. The investment of public funds in academic and private research has increased massively, often to the benefit of the people and organizations that are making these promises of the long-awaited AI revolution. This economy of AI promise has structural effects on the Canadian political economy, tying up the state’s limited public resources on the basis of an announced revolution, still more or less well understood by all parties. stakeholders.
This governance of technoscientific advancement, blinded by the speculative nature of the promise, runs the risk of disappointing. Technoscientific activity is littered with pitfalls; it consists of a series of activities at the end of which the possibility of failure is very real. This possibility should be celebrated. Without it, research is doomed to be presented, in the public space, as a functionalist and simplistic project.
On the other hand, approaching the promise as a desire to create from one horizon of expectation among others makes it possible to avoid this trap while refocusing attention on the social dimensions of techno-scientific activity. This also makes it possible to go beyond the ethical considerations which too often monopolize the debates on the question. When science or technology generates controversy, there are public platforms built to foster “citizen participation” and generate “social acceptability”, such as commissions and declarations that aim to build consensus on the basis of nature. “responsible” for a technology. Sometimes described as “ ethics-washing », these tactics maintain the illusion that the activities of promotion of the promise can self-regulate, by inviting the citizens to pronounce themselves in sanitized debates.
Instead of considering society as a group of passive beneficiaries whose acceptability is targeted, the governance of science and technology would benefit from valuing critical thinking towards the effect of the economy of promise on techno-scientific activity. . The sustained inclusion of the social science research community would make it possible to initiate a dialogue with the stakeholders in order to better balance the expectations generated by the next announcement of a techno-scientific “revolution”.
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