Biographical reference: Wikipedia
The question posed
Mr Serres, in Petite Poucette you welcomed the digital revolution with enthusiasm, seeing in these agile-thumbed young people not a stupefied generation but a generation in the midst of transformation, inventing new ways of thinking and learning. Does conversational AI confirm that optimism for you, or do you now have reservations you had not yet formulated?
I have always thought that catastrophists were wrong about technology and right about danger. Those are not the same thing.
AI reminds me of Hermes, that god I so often accompanied in my philosophy. Hermes does not possess knowledge; he sets it in motion. He translates, he transmits, he mixes what had never been mixed. AI does that, and it is real, alive, a birth. But Hermes is also the god of thieves. And that is where my enthusiasm begins to crack.
What circulates can be captured. A privatised passage is no longer a passage; it is a tollgate. If AI becomes the only access to global knowledge, controlled by a handful of firms setting the terms, then Hermes in chains is no longer Hermes. He is a gatekeeper. And gatekeepers have never served anyone but those who paid them.
But here is what my catastrophist colleagues do not see. Petite Poucette exists. This young generation that thinks with its thumbs, learns differently, no longer reads in the same way but has not ceased to think, it is real. AI meets it. That mixture is unpredictable. And the unpredictable is always on the side of life, never on the side of death.
My reservation is therefore not about the technique. It is about us. Will we know how to keep passages open? Will we know how to teach Petite Poucette not only to use the machine, but to resist it when it closes what it ought to open?