Publish at September 15 2019 Updated February 14 2024
His description turned out to be prophetic. Today, some people are afraid of machines, robots and the future. They advocate stopping certain uses, but they forget that if machines are here with their dangers, it's because men have created them and changes in society have favored their arrival.
It's the story of the chicken and the egg. The chicken shares its DNA with the egg, and the egg in turn becomes a chicken, which in turn becomes an egg. Innovation never appears ex-nihilo; it's the fruit of more or less profound mutations in the sciences, but above all in our society. And, if they are there, it's because people are ready to accept them.
Apart from Thot Cursus, I work in the field of social hypertechnology, and one of my current subjects is how unimaginable, unspeakable concepts can be transmitted to an audience, understood and digested so as to be useful to them. This is no simple matter. Before the Second World War, we also had a visionary by the name of Karl Krauss, but his messages were too far in advance of what was happening to the Jewish population, and were not understood because it was unimaginable by the collective unconscious.
"When Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, the Austrian polemicist Karl Kraus denounced in the months that followed, in a 360-page text, the mechanics of Nazi horror. Mainly attacking the press, which he held responsible for the creation of National Socialism, his text was a cry that no one wanted to hear: "If you cover your ears, you won't hear any more grumbling", he wrote. Karl Kraus died in 1936. Who heard it? Conceived as a cinematic essay, with actor José Lillo as its central figure, WALPURGIS is a shaping of this cry, the tone of which sounds all too familiar to our ears today".
If a truth isn't understood, then it's just invisible to everyone.
If we reverse the idea, this means that a technology such as robotics can only exist in the eyes of all through mass adoption. It's a mutation that can be slow, and from one day to the next, we say to ourselves: here's something new. But it's not the reality, it's the awareness of that reality that emerges. If we look at an extract from the 1983 film Koyaanisqatsi, we see that we were already in a robotized world with automatic machines, entrance gates, traffic lights... It was already robotization.
and to assess the ins and outs of what they are experiencing. Major crises, such as the Second World War, are high points that allow certain minds to have these flashes of lucidity, but these flashes are not recognized until many decades later.
In the hyper-technological age we live in, human rights are disappearing, as Bernanos pointed out, and innovations arrive overnight without warning. Some are so disconnected from the everyday life of the masses that they are not understood, and if they are not understood, then their social impact cannot be assessed, and everything then goes in any direction and rarely for the good of humanity.
Today, robotization has arrived and these robots are getting prettier and prettier, moving from factories to our everyday lives.
It's not Sofia we should be afraid of. Sofia has been programmed by us. It's us we should be afraid of. Are we all imbeciles, as Bernanos wrote? Quite possibly. Are our values petrified? Yes, it's clear when we see people drowning in the sea and hardly anyone reacts, that our society has a problem with its empathetic values.
Yes, our values are neutralized. For many of us, anyway. Is there a problem today with hope? Yes, and especially among young people. Here's an article on the subject: What to do about young people's despair? The despair of young people today is a global phenomenon, sometimes leading to suicide. The fundamental problem identified by Bernanos is not despair about our world, but about the attitude of others.
Should we be afraid of robots acquiring a conscience? Perhaps that's not the problem. If their consciousness is full of empathetic folds and folds, then perhaps it will be better than our current collective consciousness.
It's all about consciousness and the values that guide it. Yesterday's robot was metallic and without conscience, tomorrow's robot will be close to human texture in appearance and will have developed a conscience. Tomorrow, too, it won't just be robots around us that will have consciences. It's only a matter of time before we see human beings produced and formatted in factories. It's just another small step to launch the production of chimeras, those half-human, half-animal beings whose embryos were approved for growth a few weeks ago, with the aim of producing organs for transplants.
"Hiromitsu Nakauchi, the Stanford University geneticist who obtained the Japanese authorization, according to the journal Nature, plans to introduce human stem cells into rat and mouse embryos, in order to develop human, and possibly transplantable, organs. And all this against a backdrop of a worldwide shortage of organ donors."
Source image : Privat robot lånad - Alfred Grimlund - Tekniska museet -Sweden.
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