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Understanding and experiencing the digital revolution: societal
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Thierry Deschamps de Paillette
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In Social life 2019/4 (n° 28), pages 51 to 64 Éditions
Érès

ISSN 0042-5605
ISBN 9782749266299
DOI10.3917/vsoc.194.0051

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Understanding and
experiencing the digital
revolution: societal challenges

Thierry Deschamps de Paillette

Digital
ourtechnologies are now an
daily. We constantly integral
interact withpart of
screens or various
interfaces intended to interpret our wishes, pay our bills and guide 51
some of our behaviors. This fourth industrial revolution has imposed
itself on our economy and our lifestyles, to the point that Western
societies consider Internet subscription as vital as access to
electricity or drinking water. The underlying systems and mechanisms
that drive it operate using computer algorithms executed in computing
and data storage centers, called “ data centers ”, interconnected to
the Internet network.

By nature immaterial, these computer treatments escape our

senses but adapt to our needs by now taking into account our habits.
These systems carry out increasingly complex tasks, some of which
not only accompany man, but are beginning, with the arrival of the so-
called “artificial intelligence” displayed under the acronym ia, to
compete with his natural capacities. The word "intelligence" used in
ia
is in fact an unwelcome and awkward translation from English of the
false friend " intelligence " which relates to the notion of intelligence.

Thierry Deschamps de Paillette is an author and research and development

consultant in artificial intelligence for sensor networks and professor of higher
chair in engineering sciences.

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The digital industry, imperiously dominated by the large

American firms grouped under the acronym gafami, already in
competition with their Chinese equivalents, offers services that
value and monetize our personal data by interfering, sometimes
without our knowledge, in our private lives. These technologies
provide our societal and economic model with new opportunities
that need to be decoded in order, failing to hope to control them,
at least to position ourselves individually and collectively in order
to perpetuate our values, social choices and fundamental
freedoms. Our societies of the post-industrial era, heirs to
Taylorism, organized themselves by distributing their services
around ever more specialised, standardized and hierarchical
skills. The AI, whose operation is ideally suited to this structural
configuration, naturally takes a place that could threaten,
according to the recent report of the OECD1 , 16.2% of
French jobs and radically transform 38% of them over the next
twenty years. In a context where youth unemployment2 exceeds
20% in France, these same studies3 show that the training
system must be adapted to these new professions and requires
significant investment to limit the social divide.

Our places of life and work, as well as our collective

52 infrastructures, are evolving towards integration and
interoperability of these digital services with which the citizen must cooperate.
The variety of human-machine interfaces imposes the acquisition
of new skills necessary for interaction with these systems.
The pricing and mode of access to the services they offer
introduce the problems of equal access and consequently the
risks of exclusion. To understand the social challenges of this
digital revolution, we must first use new tools to understand its
development potential inherent in the remarkable technological
performance that characterizes it.

ÿÿÿ Understand the evolutions and potential of

digital technologies

The dazzling developments in transport and information

processing technologies, which are complementary, are at the
origin of the current digital revolution. Telecommunications
networks and infrastructures make it possible to transit and converge in time

1. OECD, OECD Employment Outlook 2019, 2019.

2. oecd, “Youth unemployment rate”: https://data.oecd.org/chart/5yYG
3. oecd, “transformative technologies and jobs of the future”: https://www.oecd.
org/en/innovation/inno/transformative-technologies-and-jobs-of-the-future.pdf

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real colossal flows of information of heterogeneous natures

at any point of the globe. Since its creation, almost fifty years
ago and with more than 50,000 gigabytes of data exchanged
per second in the world, the Internet now supports the bulk
of information transfers. The data it carries, initially produced
and put online by humans, has gradually given way, now not
insignificant, to information generated by machines and
sensors. This new stage, which began fifteen years ago with
the massive arrival of connected objects (IoT), not only made
it possible to access new telemetry information, but also to
interact remotely with industrial and commercial infrastructure.
The number of these devices will reach, according to the
American consulting firm Gartner and the European think
tank Idate, 80 billion by 2020.
Industrial automation and robotics have evolved considerably
to become remotely controllable through dashboards and
other Web interfaces, to significantly and lastingly modify
jobs as well as consumption habits.

At the same time, advances in cybernetics in the 1960s

led to the development of the first supervised learning
algorithms for automatic classification systems, then called
perceptrons, which were to evolve into modern architectures
of artificial neural networks. This software, essential drivers 53
of AI, is installed in data centers or more recently integrated
into new generations of so-called “neuromorphic” chips.
These neural networks need a prior training phase in the
form of learning to automate the processing tasks that are
then assigned to them. Thus, on the basis of a corpus of so-
called labeled samples, various learning techniques allow
these systems to refine their inference rules in order to
recognize, classify or associate new samples hitherto
unknown. .

The Internet giants, historically ideally positioned to collect

billions of pieces of information, use them to train these AIs
intended to identify and interpret some of our social or
consumer behavior. The indirect marketing of the results of
these analyzes for advertising purposes already constitutes
the bulk of their steadily growing revenues – which in 2018
reached some 700 billion dollars. The gafami 's investment
in new technologies exceeds 100 billion dollars each year,
when the budgets of the cea and the cnrs combined painfully
reach 8 billion euros. For example, Jeff Bezos' firm Amazon
alone invested more than $22 billion in research and
development in 2017, closely followed by Alphabet, Google's
parent company, with more than $17 billion.

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dollars. These investments, which are continuing and becoming

widespread, are pushing France and Europe to develop these
technologies to integrate them into their markets, but cannot
ignore American solutions.

The results of this research considerably increase the

processing capacity of the resulting products. Apple's chip, the
A12 Bionic, which equips its new smartphones reaches 5 trillion
operations per second (1012), ten times more than its previous
version released only a year earlier. For comparison, an
estimate of the computational capacity of the human brain
would be around 1015 operations per second.
Applications such as facial recognition, real-time speech and
text translation and interpretation allow the extraction of
information from a very high semantic level.
However, even if they can impress, the performances of these
AIs are very far from being comparable to those of the human
brain because they are confined or mobilized for repetitive
tasks and relative to a particular corpus of learning samples.
The word “intelligence” is therefore particularly unsuitable for
qualifying the processing capacity of machines. Indeed,
although attempts at learning by transfer, which consists of
transposing knowledge into a related field of application, have
54 been made, it turns out that AI has no spontaneous ability to
associate knowledge . ideas or concepts. She thus proves
incapable of adapting to new environments or carrying out
survival actions, which remains the ultimate test of intelligence.
At the same time, the performance of these mindless algorithms
is inherently limited by their inability to innovate, criticize, or
think, which are skills notoriously different from those needed
for computation.

Moreover, in this illusory race towards infinite processing

power, certain limits are emerging, starting with the availability
of energy and material resources. Indeed, according to the
cnrs4 , we attribute to digital technologies a
consumption already reaching 10% of the world's electrical
energy with a growth of 7% per year, thus constituting one of
the non-negligible causes of pollution on a planetary scale and
of global warming . The metals and rare earths used, even in
minute quantities5 , for the production of digital devices

4. Laure Cailloce, “Digital: the great energy waste”, cnrs Le Journal, May 16,
2018 (https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/articles/numerique-le-grand-gachis-energetique).
5. ademe and France nature environnement, Smartphone impacts, June 2019
edition (https://www.ademe.fr/sites/default/files/assets/documents/guide-pra
tique-impacts-smartphone.pdf).

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come from more than fifty countries around the world, almost half
of which are in a situation of political instability.

The machine therefore excels in the execution of repetitive

tasks on large quantities of data and having a strong correlation
with prior learning. Thus, professions requiring little innovation
and adaptation could be automated. In our technocratic societies
having applied the productivist and normative rules resulting from
Taylorization, the risk of automation is therefore particularly high.
These technologies are integrated into all components of society
and disrupt our interactions with its services as well as with our
contemporaries.
The performance of the treatments carried out by AI achieves in
record time and in several fields, such as the search for diagnosis
of certain pathologies in medical imaging, results similar to those
obtained by the best specialists.

AI not only makes it possible to analyze data, but also, on

the basis of the corpus of learning samples organized
chronologically, to produce probabilistic predictions and therefore
decisions. These so-called predictive applications are already
applied in all sectors, starting with banking activities linked to
hyper-frequency trading, where the automation of asset purchase-
resale operations on the financial markets is carried out on a time
55
scale whose legal limit is the nanosecond, inaccessible to
humans. Faced with this apparent weakness, some old cultural
and intellectual movements initiated from the Age of Enlightenment,
and today rehabilitated by the wealthy beneficiaries of this digital
tsunami, such as transhumanists, are diverting these currents of
thought and calling for an increase interactions with digital
systems – going so far as advocating their fusion with the human
body to arrive at the idea of an augmented human.

In addition, recent advances in robotics allow AI to perform

direct physical interactions with the real world. In 2017, the
number of industrial robots sold worldwide 6
increased by 29% compared to the previous year, a
record. This trend, relayed by firms such as Boston Dynamics
which wishes to have its “intelligent” dog robot, nicknamed Spot,
adopted by the general public7 , is increasing considerably with
the fall in prices in this sector. The autonomous car, like driverless
public transport, is at the heart

6. International Federation of Robotics, World Robotics Report 2018.

7. Numerama, July 2018 (https://www.numerama.com/tech/396305-1-000-spotmini-
for-2019-boston-dynamics-wants-that-you-adopt-his-chien-robot.html)

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of all intentions with nearly 6,000 patents filed in the last ten
years8 . These robotic technologies should offer services mainly
in the industrial, transport and health sectors for personal
assistance. These autonomous robots pose enormous legal
problems. Indeed, who would be responsible for an error, a
choice or an action that puts a person's life in the balance? The
owner, manufacturer or state that authorized the marketing of
this machine? In this area, the legal void is still gaping!

ÿÿÿinSystemic approach to digital integration

our societies

Our companies, organized into silos of skills, have specialized

the trades and standardized the exchanges between the services
to which is attached a hierarchical structure going from the
executor to the decision-maker. Numerous studies show that all
levels of responsibility and trades can potentially be impacted by
automation. Thus, throughout the world and in addition to public
interest organizations such as the OECD, certain banks and
economic institutes seek to assess the resilience of sectors of
activity in order to estimate investment and placement risks.
56
Among them, the pwc institute across the Channel
predicted, in its UK Economic Outlook report of July 20189 ,
that on average 30% of professions were threatened by AI over
the next twenty years, with a minimum of 10% in the education
sector and 60% risk in the transport and storage of goods.
Intermediate professions in service sectors such as banking,
insurance or other administrative jobs would also be highly
threatened. To understand the social consequences of this
digital revolution in a model of society with multiple and
interdependent components, it is necessary to use appropriate
analysis tools.

Systemic analysis, introduced at the beginning of the 20th

century by the biologist Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy, was then
transposed into the field of engineering and cybernetics by the
mathematician Robert Wiener to finally be applied in sociology
and then in economics. This methodology has proven to be a
powerful tool for understanding the relationships and propagations
of causes and effects in complex systems and in particular for
estimating the societal impacts of digital technologies. This approach consists of

8. https://www.invest.ch/2018/10/qui-mene-la-course-a-la-voiture-autonome/
9. pwc, uk Economic Outlook, July 2018 (https://www.pwc.co.uk/economic-services/
ukeo/ukeo-july18-full-report.pdf).

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study the relationships between the resources and information

used by each player in a system, here the services accessible to
the citizen, vis-à-vis the added value they deliver in order to
estimate their local or global effectiveness with regard to certain
criteria. Thus, a useful avenue for understanding the societal
impacts of the digital revolution would lead to conducting a systemic analysis.
Prospecting organizations use this type of model to build their
reports.

Concretely, the systems equipped with AI deployed around

the citizen engage him consciously or unconsciously in all his
relations with the services offered by society. The interaction
chains are positioned vis-à-vis the user, on the one hand, visibly
with the service access interfaces, and on the other hand, invisibly
inside each of them. 'them. The construction of the behavioral
model supporting this systemic approach is based on the
identification of the objectives or functions of the main actors,
services and moderators, as well as on the quantification of the
resources and losses necessary or inherent in the execution of
their respective missions. It is then interesting to identify the
common input/output elements of the different components,
because these shared parameters generate distribution or
elimination constraints. For example, financial, energy or legal
resources condition the functioning of almost all the services of 57
our modern societies. In the same way, any service production
consumes energy and transforms physical flows by producing
waste in the form of heat, matter or gas, and therefore more
generally generates entropy.
Moreover, it is important to note that the notion of time, which is
physically linked to the notion of work and therefore of energy, is
also today unanimously associated with financial resources.

The accounting interest of digital technologies is measured by

quantifying its effect on the added value produced by a service
with regard to the quantity of resources it consumes, to which we
add the sum of the waste produced. This operation therefore
amounts to evaluating a yield. For many services, AI and new
technologies would tend to increase this ratio. In particular
because, to a first approximation, machines would reduce
resource consumption in that they limit labor, decrease processing
time and reduce travel.

In a process of financial optimization, it is easy, by considering

each actor in isolation, to understand the appetite of gafami and
financiers to invest in the field of new technologies. Indeed, this
new configuration satisfies

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perfectly the capitalistic economic model which favors the increase

of the profits by the reduction of the costs and the gain of
productivity. The direct consequence is that this reduction in
resource contracting labor simultaneously reduces the quantity of
jobs distributed throughout the model as well as the employability
of a person at a constant skill level.
Consequently, the analysis model clearly reveals an intrinsic failure,
considering that the citizen calling on these automated services
himself occupies a position in one of them. As soon as his own
access to these services, even at reduced cost, mechanically
depends on his ability to pay for them, the individual is exposed to
an increased risk of social exclusion.

The difficulty therefore consists in identifying jobs that are

potentially vacant in the medium or long term. Systems theory not
only makes it possible to identify dysfunctions but also to extract
the indicators and regulation actuators from the model, if it is
regularly updated. If the observation is a priori alarming, certain
feedback parameters appear eminently interesting.
In particular, due to the availability and ease of sharing knowledge
resources made possible by these technologies, education and
training would make it possible to compensate for some of the jobs
lost by promoting the knowledge economy advocated by Idriss
58 Aberkane10. This action should be accompanied by significant
means in terms of both skills and financial resources. However,
the same model shows that the human resources and skills needed
to carry out this training are assigned to departments with higher
levels of remuneration.

The resilience of the system constrained by shared finite

resources and subject to the arrival of the digital revolution is
therefore particularly sensitive to the distribution of wealth and jobs.
The projections, which are realistic even for the most optimistic,
would therefore add at least 10% of inactive people to our social
model over the next twenty years. The question of the financial and
environmental sustainability of such a situation in a perspective of
low growth would generate an unparalleled threat to our model of
society addressed in the work of Jacques Blamont11 and whose
remarks are abundantly corroborated in the productions of other
intellectuals. or economists such as Gaël Giraud. Social exclusion
is therefore a major risk of this digital revolution.
However, a vague "hope" of a rebound effect can be envisaged if
this social exclusion sufficiently reduces the purchasing power of the

10. Idriss Jamil Aberkane, The Age of Knowledge. Treatise on positive ecology, Paris,
Robert Laffont, 2018.
11. Jacques Blamont, Introduction to the Century of Threats, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2004.

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greater number. The turnover of the companies dominating the

digital technologies would in fact also be reduced. The added
value and the objective of these same multinationals, being
respectively technological and financial, they would therefore
be forced to modify the geometry of their offer in order to survive
in the face of a shrinking of their market.

ÿÿÿ The “ smart city ” or optimization at all costs

The word “ smart ”, which translated from English means

“intelli gent”, appears everywhere and is juxtaposed with many
concepts. This “prefix” characterizes the capacity of a structure,
device or service to automatically optimize its behavior according
to criteria or exogenous rules set under constraints.

Thus, our cities, which concentrate part of the daily economic

and social activity, saw, a few years ago, the anglicized word
appear, backing it with this pretentious epithet to qualify the
adaptability of their services to their inhabitants. or visitors. The
“ smart city ” attracts the attention of many politicians,
organizations and businesses, which see in its development for
some an innovative opportunity to improve the quality of life of
citizens and for others a colossal potential market. of 400 billion 59
dollars. Some screenings12
estimate that the urban transition is accelerating, causing our
cities to concentrate 66% of the world's population by 2050.
Such an influx of people requires an in-depth structural review
of the functioning of our cities.

Optimization is historically at the heart of the concern of the

notion of smart city. This would essentially mean making the
city more accessible, safer and more respectful of the
environment while increasing its reception capacity. Digital
technologies would be ideally suited for these missions and
would thereby increase the rationality and efficiency of its
governance. The implementation of such promises is a real
challenge in that it requires the introduction into each department
of a technological arsenal intended to measure, supervise and
automatically control numerous functions spread over their territory.
The convergence of these so-called field data towards
information and control systems would lead to the production of
huge quantities of data of all kinds, difficult to process even

12. un, “More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities”, Department of
Economic and Social Affairs, 10 April 2014 (https://www.un.org/
development/desa/en/news/population/world-urbanization-prospects.html).

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by an army of operators. AI and big data technologies

would then prove to be essential to process this information.
For example, the use of a simple carpooling or vtc application,
soon to be autonomous, induces the movement of a polluting
vehicle subject, on the one hand, to the user's wishes and, on
the other hand , passive and active circulation control organs.
During this move, the complexity linked to the implementation
of a process for optimizing the time and energy used for the
execution of the service mechanically requires the deployment
of significant computing power to find the supplier, the optimal
path and synchronize the traffic management units.

The user would therefore evolve in a world dotted with

communicating devices allowing him to carry out his daily tasks
and to interact with the digital environment of this so-called
“intelligent” city. We can divide these organs of interaction
between man and machine into two categories relating to the
freedom that the citizen would have to use them. The first
group contains the infinity, often imperceptible, of sensors,
access terminals and other cameras strategically positioned in
the agglomeration and intended to measure or guide the
activities of the population independently of their will. These
systems have the essential characteristic of producing useful
60 information for the control or operation of urban services. The
second type of interface requires the city dweller to take a
voluntary step which consists of providing useful information to
the community on his own or activating a particular function.
Smartphone applications for managing subscriptions,
geolocation or information are just a sample. Although they
take the form of software, Web services or are offered on
dedicated media, they systematically modify or generate physical flows.

Consequently, it is a question of making cooperate services

intended to satisfy particular interests with common
infrastructures to envisage any optimization. It is then necessary
that the information systems become interoperable to exchange
useful data for the realization of the raison d'être of the smart
city. But if applications delivered by private companies must
share data with public bodies, the risks of use and exploitation
of the information then exchanged for commercial purposes
are eminently significant as well as worrying. The perspectives
opened up by this paradox lead the legislator to seek solutions
to filter the channels of exchange and protect privacy. Since
regulations relating to data are still limited to a geographical
area limited by borders, it is difficult to impose on gafami to
comply with rules that may be antagonistic to their economic
model.

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Even if justice could regulate these flows, the technical means to be

deployed to carry out this sorting would not only have a prohibitive
cost but would present inevitable flaws.

Faced with the legal and technical complexity combined with

budgetary constraints, our institutions therefore prove to be partly
powerless to carry out the necessary mediation and regulation tasks.
The citizen, placed in spite of himself at the heart of these conflicts
of interest, both actor and victim, must nevertheless position himself.
Since responsibility can only be induced by knowledge, it is therefore
a matter of obtaining information, which brings us back to the plan
for promoting education already introduced previously. The different
users, of different generations, abilities or cultures, are nevertheless
all subject to the same social obligations. The diversification and
personalization of training should be increased to limit social
exclusion through incompetence.

Our relations with the new services induced by the digital

revolution are therefore conditioned by the skills necessary for their
implementation, but also by the knowledge and reflection allowing
us to anticipate the consequences of the actions taken. If AI today
simplifies and tomorrow automates some of our interactions with
public or consumer services, then private information is and will be
the driving force behind their efficiency. Optimization therefore
61
rhymes with interconnection. The systemic approach also shows
major potential flaws in equal access to the services offered by the
smart city, which, as mentioned above for the study of the impact of
digital technology in society, presents notorious risks of
marginalization. .

Unequal access to training therefore potentially implies behavior

that is unsuited to the risks of use and disclosure of sensitive
personal information. The responsibility of the citizen cannot be a
pretext for the State to free itself from any duty of security. Indeed,
the poor partitioning between medical and financial data, for example,
could have dramatic consequences in the life of an individual. If a
pathology of family genetic origin likely to develop were listed in a
medical file communicated to credit or insurance organizations or in
the professional environment, individual freedoms would be
threatened.

The digital revolution also brings the dematerialization and

simplification of payment acts. While historical financial institutions
have introduced contactless payment, gafami
assisted by telecommunications operators brought payment

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by smartphone. A simple fingerprint reading or a selfie is enough

to debit our bank account, whether to pay for parking, validate
the subscription to a sports club or to a cultural service. As long
as the bank account is provisioned, the services are available,
but as presented in the systemic analysis, the growing
precariousness could well make city life inaccessible to modest
incomes. The cost of the intelligent infrastructures put in place
must be borne by the population or privatised. Either the tax or
the price of services must therefore be readjusted to amortize
these investments.

The application of the systemic analysis at the scale of the

city shows that the critical factors which participate in its
optimization according to the aforementioned criteria are
hierarchical13 and highlight the underlying problems of
synchronization of services, transport and infrastructures. as
well as their respective dimensions. The notion of time
management thus seems to be one of the main problems.

Time, our time, a distinguished guest in the optimization

process, unfortunately at the center of the attention economy,
is the focal point of all covetousness. The chronological
adaptation of urban infrastructures to our obligations, leisure
62 and travel is not easy to achieve. Collective coordination being
more restrictive than that of the individual, the personal agenda
therefore becomes an adjustment variable. AI invites itself to do
so and, consulting our state of health analyzed by the precious
smart watch, will automatically make an appointment tomorrow
with the cardiologist at a time when the trip will be at minimum
cost and when the ia managing the doctor's diary will have given
his availability, ideally when our bank account is provisioned:
"Google Assistant at your service" If the cities are not yet
equipped with infrastructures interoperable with these
technologies, their rate integration into everyday life makes investors and other bu
of the whole world. Private equipment completes and accelerates
this change, with the 100 million devices sold14 integrating
“Alexa”, Amazon is redefining the art of “shopping”. These new
intuitive, natural and discreet interfaces capture our slightest
words and gestures to fuel our desires and satisfy the
consumerist appetite for growth indicators such as that of
household consumption.

13. Jean-Pierre Sueur, Cities of the future, future of cities. What future for the cities of
the world ?, information report produced on behalf of the Senate Delegation for
Prospecting, n° 594, June 9, 2011.
14. Digital Century : https://siecledigital.fr/2019/01/05/amazon-100-millions-devices-
alexa/

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Security, a sovereign function of the republic, justifies the use

of these innumerable cameras to probe acts of incivility and
increase the responsiveness of services. The video streams
produced, which are impossible to monitor humanly as there are
so many of them, are processed by AIs which automatically
detect what looks like behavioral anomalies by launching alert
and doubt-clearing procedures. The police, equipped with
portable cameras, realize for themselves the good behavior of
the agents and the veracity of their statements; useful, they
collect images that will be archived or destroyed as needed.
Fewer agents, better deployed and more responsive, here again
rationalization can prove to be virtuous as well as monstrous.

Finally, the environment has deteriorated considerably in

urban areas, pollution there in France would cause 48,000 deaths
per year15. Here again, thousands of sensors measure and
analyze the quality of air, water and infrastructure. The “ smart
grid ”, which consists in adapting in real time the production and
delivery of electrical energy with its consumption, appeared a few years ago.
The Linky “intelligent” meter, which has caused so much ink to
flow, is one of the first components. But decentralized energy
production, load shedding and the interconnection of cogeneration
systems require major investments that sometimes compete with
global plans to switch to production using “renewable” energies. 63
Jean-Marc Jancovici, polytechnician and energy specialist, does
not fail to alert16 economic and political players to the need for
consistency in action plans for energy transition in the medium
and long term. The best energy being that which we do not
consume, the city of the future should be more restrained and
economical. The insulation of homes being an important vector,
the urbanization and renovation plans encouraged by the ademe
should, according to him, be accelerated.

Like Philippe Bihouix17, we can nevertheless wonder about

the environmental balance sheet of the smart city with regard to
the resources necessary for its operation. Indeed, using sensors
integrating precious metals and rare earths from politically and
economically unstable countries, probably assembled in Asia,
producing zettabytes of data stored in data centers consuming
8% of the world's electrical energy , itself produced essentially
with coal, and exploiting American software products seems more
like heresy

15. Le Monde, February 26, 2019.

16. Jean-Marc Jancovici, Sleep easy until 2100, and other misunderstandings about climate
and energy, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2015.
17. Philippe Bihouix, Happiness was for tomorrow. The dreams of a solitary engineer, Paris,
Le Seuil, 2019.

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only wisdom. However, the city must transform and rethink itself
to better and harmoniously accommodate a growing population
subject to the current economic crisis. Simplicity and sobriety are
opposed to the complexity induced by “intelligent” and connected
systems. The totalitarianism chosen by the Chinese smart cities
which hit the headlines by awarding citizenship points to their
inhabitants forces us to question the meaning of innovation that
the physicist and philosopher of science Etienne Klein would like
to see reconfigured in progress.

ÿÿÿ Conclusion

The digital revolution brings to man new tools that are

supposed to improve his way of life but whose obsolescence is
accelerating at the frantic pace of their evolution, thus producing
a mass of waste that is difficult to recycle. Many philosophers,
scientists or ordinary citizens, like Bernard Stiegler, who focuses
his thoughts on the changes caused by digital technologies, are
looking for virtuous modes of development that would bring
embellishment, wisdom and harmony that should animate it.

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