2023-10-19 20:38:01
Last spring, personalities as diverse as Elon Musk, Yuval Noah Harari and Steve Wozniak joined more than 1,000 “experts” to warn of the “major risks for society and humanity” represented by artificial intelligence and request a six month break in drive models more powerful than GPT-4. Of Monde au FigaroPassing by FranceInfo or Releasethe media willingly relayed the terms of this letter which calls for a pause to better affirm the inevitability and omnipotence of future AI systems.
What is striking in the immediate media reception of this letter is the myopia in the face of a process that has been theorized since now. almost 30 years old : “the digital unthought” (or computer science, before him). This concept of “unthought” designates the discursive strategies by which technology is presented as obvious, often under the influence of actors whose economic or political interests it serves.
Read more: AI benefits from biased media coverage
The institute’s open letter Future of Life is a textbook case: according to her, artificial intelligence is a powerful tool, it is already there, and it is expected to be even more present and more powerful in the future for the greater good of humanity .
How to spot the digital unthought?
Seven discursive markers should alert you. To illustrate this “toolbox”, the open letter from Elon Musk and others, who nevertheless claim to call for a break, advantageously presents all the discursive markers of the unthought, although we can alsoapply to the very serious Villani report who advocated in 2018 for a national and European AI strategy:
In this type of discourse, the technical object presents itself as neutral: it is up to humanity to use it wisely, its mere existence serves as justification.
However, if we are told that AI represents “major risks for humanity”, is this not proof that we are faced with a technique that is not precisely neutral?
This is undoubtedly the most devious mechanism of the unthought: demonizing the technical object contributes both to affirming its power and its potential when used wisely, and to fueling the pseudo-debate without which media interest would decline. . IT, digital technology, AI are already therethere is no need to produce serious historical work on them, the storytelling of entrepreneurial successes is enough.
The unthought forms a vicious circle with the slippage of political prerogative…
The unthought is inseparable from two other processes with which it forms a veritable vicious circle: the shift in political prerogative and the managerialization.
Thanks to the digital unthinking, tools held by private actors without electoral or sovereign legitimacy even determine public access to information. An example of this is the X platform (formerly Twitter), which is scrutinized by journalists because it is fueled by public and political figures, as well as public institutions. When a private platform carries a political message, we are in what is called “political prerogative shift”.
Indeed, when private actors deploy technologies systematically, from infrastructure (cables, server farms, etc.) to software and applications, this amounts to delegating decision-making of a political nature to them. Thus, faced with a search engine which dominates our access to information and occupies a place which would be a real public service, we are in the middle of a shift in political prerogative.
We observe the same phenomenon when the French government prefers to use consulting firms rather than university expertise. Firms, whose recommendations readily favor the systematic use of digital technologies and pave the way for management.
The unthought favors the shift of political prerogative into the hands of digital players whose tools impose themselves on citizens (excerpt from the science fiction comic MediaEntity by Simon & Émilie). MediaEntity, Simon & Emilie
…and with managerialization
Today, digital tools not only allow us to manage various activities (banking, medical appointments, etc.), they have also and above all become essential for carrying out these tasks. We have no choice but to fit into the categories that these tools impose on us. It is not always easy to make an appointment with a medical secretary, for example, or to file your tax return on paper. This is what we call “managerization”.
This managerialization also reflects a shift. For example, the Parcoursup access to higher education tool is now essential for high school students and their families. However, this tool carries a political dimension with questionable consequences, such as the exclusion of certain categories of baccalaureate holders or the accentuation of competition between training courses. In management, the tool is secondary to the activity; with management, the tool becomes first: Parcoursup has taken precedence over the need it is supposed to respond to.
In our daily lives, to visit a new region, choose the menu for our dinner or to meet a soul mate, everyone obediently grasps the information expected by the digital consumption platforms. When carrying out a sporting activity in equipping with a bracelet which processes, memorizes and circulates a set of biometric data, these become the model that we follow, rather than the feeling of our body, in a sort of “self-management”.
Duly identified and profiled by our tools, we contribute without reservation to the economic profits of firm most of whose income escapes tax… And therefore democratic power already shaken by the shift in political prerogative.
Digital productivity and digital management (Sociopolitical issues of digitalDominique Boullier).
Criticize…and act
Digital technology is not this sometimes infernal and sometimes radiant future that its unthinkers promise us: it is only a category to designate a set of technical objects and socio-technical devices which must be questioned and debated with regard to their political and societal action.
While the unthought focuses our attention on AI, perhaps we need more new tools (in which there may be AI) in order to better organize the (digital) expression of our intelligence in the face of issues that require unprecedented collective decisions. Climate, democracy, environment, health, education, living together: there is no shortage of challenges.
With this in mind, we invite you to discover the new version of the contributory web navigation service Needle. Fed through the concept of the unthought, this radically different proposition of access and sharing of digital content relies on collective intelligence. Needle is a networking platform that materializes the hope of a digital environment rich in mesh and of curious exploration of everyone, instead of the network of straight lines through which artificial intelligence should tell us which documents to consult.
This technology is now driven by a start-upproof that it is possible to design concrete proposals which take into account the necessary criticism of the place given to technology in our societies.
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