Daniel Cohen is an economist, university professor and specialist in sovereign debt. Its productivity in the field of economy is recognized and praised. His strength ? Its clarity and its pedagogy. He is also a founding member and president of the Paris School of Economics. Today he publishes Homo numericus: The coming civilization published by Albin Michel.
franceinfo: The human species continues to evolve and the first question that comes to us is, and we find it elsewhere in this book: “Faced with the formidable power of computers and artificial intelligence, what is the advantage that men will assert?”
Daniel Cohen: On the horizon, two advantages. In reality, man is creative and the machine is not. That is to say that the human is able, when he sees a falling apple, to deduce the movement of gravitation. He is able to pass from one situation to another by an effort of the imagination which raises him to generalities. The machine can’t do that. So we have this ability to produce concepts, to produce stories. And the other is that we have a direct sensibility. We have a body in which we think and it’s this body that when I look at you, I know that I’m facing a human. We have thoughts that we can share.
Between these two extreme ends, the ideas and the body, there is the machine which can do practically everything.
Daniel Cohenat franceinfo
Some things scare us. There was indeed this article in Le Monde which was interested in the evolution of what has been called the augmented soldier. And besides all the armies of the whole world are interested in this prowess of mixing human flesh and silicon. Should these moments in history where science fiction meet the military imagination be taken seriously?
Sure. Very seriously. On the battlefields, we often invent the technologies of tomorrow, so the idea that armies are thinking about an augmented soldier in which we would have terminator, it is one of the threats which advances. That is to say, to be more efficient, we are plugged into something. We will no longer have the cell phone in our pocket, which is already a new umbilical link, but we will perhaps have it in our brain and we will be able in thought to turn all the pages of Wikipedia without even having to move with the thumb. This is obviously very worrying. What is also worrying today is the fact that we are in this addictive relationship with social networks and we see that it is an extraordinary form of stupidity. In the early days of the Internet, we thought we would have a new Gutenberg, we would have a collective intelligence modeled on Wikipedia and then 20 years have passed and we realize that we are deeply stupid. Why are we dumbed down? It’s because in fact, we don’t look for information on the Net, we don’t try to dialogue with others. We are inhabited by what economists call “confirmation bias“. We have an idea. We think that the war in Ukraine is actually used to increase the profits of the oil companies. You click that on the Net and you will find a million people who think like you. In fact, it does not is not a new intelligence of the conversational type, but it is digital ghettos in which thought is actually fossilized. terminatorit is this reality that, in reality, made me want to write this book because it worries me deeply.
Where does this desire to gather, to tell and to be a teacher come from? Aren’t you finally a bit of what is called a storyteller?
It must. This is essential. You have to when you write a book, but you have to when you talk to your students, when you talk in media circles. You have to anchor the story in the world because otherwise you are in the argument of authority. The argument from authority, first, no one listens to it and second, it can simply be wrong. We only discover ten years later that in reality we had not properly taken into account the consequences on inequalities of such and such a factor.
If I have something to bring to my students, it is this experience that allows me to see the strength and the limit of the ex cathedra reasoning held by economists.
Daniel Cohenat franceinfo
As a child, what did you dream of?
I am a child of May 68. When my high school was busy and the teachers sat down in place of the students, I was 14 years old, I could climb on a table and talk, harangue when I knew nothing about nothing. And basically, my whole intellectual history is trying to understand this founding moment.
You say through this work that the Internet is ultimately also part of the 68 Movement. There is an “anti-system” side…
But of course! The Internet inherits this libertarian aspiration from the counter-culture of the sixties. So, in effect, the movements #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, the Arab revolutions inherit this possibility which was given to communicate outside the walls of institutions when they close. There is something precious in this antisystem tone, in this ability to communicate. But it has turned into pathology, so we have to come back to the point of bifurcation and return to this furrow of an aspiration for a happy, joyful society where everyone can say what they think while respecting the thoughts of others.