Governance

In short Pushing AI to its limits is not a sign of audacity: it is often a lack of judgment disguised as courage. True audacity lies in deliberate frugality—choosing where AI creates value, and where it does not. Pragmatism is not lukewarmness: it is the most demanding form of technological discernment. ⎙ Imprimer / Télécharger en PDF There’s a reflex I see resurface in almost every engagement I work on, in different guises but with the same root: the conviction that AI is needed, everywhere, right now, or you’ll fall behind. This reflex has a name, and I won’t shy away from it: it’s maximalism. And like every form of maximalism, it dresses itself up as strategic necessity to dodge the only question that matters: do we actually need this? ...

Yes, VivaTech was ten days ago. No, I didn’t write in the heat of the moment. Everyone else did. The LinkedIn posts went up on Thursday evening — rocket emojis, selfies with robots, “game changer,” “mind blown,” and the traditional blurry photo of a screen displaying something impressive. I chose not to do that. Not out of snobbery. Out of intellectual honesty. Because a show like VivaTech is designed to dazzle you. That’s its function. It’s even its virtue — it makes visible what is still invisible in most organizations. But between what you see and what it means, there is work to be done. Work of distillation, of putting things in tension, of connecting what you observe with what you see elsewhere, in the organizations you support. ...

In short AI doomerism has the structure of a religious movement — but what matters isn’t the discourse, it’s the capture it performs. The very actors brandishing existential risk are building the AI and concentrating decision-making power in a few private hands. The real fault line isn’t fear versus optimism, but power versus democratic governance. ⎙ Imprimer / Télécharger en PDF In response to Nirit Weiss-Blatt’s article, “First They Built a Secular Apocalypse Belief System. Now They Want Religious Authority.” ...

In short On one side, the promise of a “humanist superintelligence”; on the other, delusions fed by chatbots — the same technical object seen from two opposite floors. Between declared intent and lived reality lies execution debt — and here it’s paid in mental health. The real question isn’t “will AI be humanist?” but “who holds the gap between intent and its real effects?”. ⎙ Imprimer / Télécharger en PDF There are two discourses about AI that, right now, aren’t speaking to each other. ...