The Present of the Future

Criticizing the mythological discourses of AI giants from a position of superiority is not enough. The challenge is to act in the present to build the future we want.

Technological mythologies: between marketing and world transformation

It is useful to cast a critical eye on the discourses held by technology giants, particularly the actors in artificial intelligence. These companies create mythologies: the metaverse as a “Second World,” artificial general intelligence, technological singularity. These narratives sell well because they situate these new tools within our universe of representation and anchor them deeply in our anthropology.

These discourses are marketing, certainly. But they are also more than that: they tell the story of a changing world and propose an imaginary for this change. We would be wrong to consider them solely as false and belonging to the realm of imagination. The imaginary positions these services within our anthropology, but there is also the reality of a changing world. And in this world, we are actors. We are not on the outside, in a critical and distanced posture. We are its primary actors.

Let me take a concrete example. The people who severely criticize the mythologizing discourses of Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg, not to mention Elon Musk, who consciously plays on controversy, are often the same ones who use ChatGPT without any problem. They can ask it things that are important to their lives, to their thinking. They are transformed by this thinking machine while criticizing the one who created it.

Sam Altman, initiator of ChatGPT, the first generative artificial intelligence conversational robot launched in November 2022, had been holding relatively private discourses for ten years. Had they been analyzed at the time, they would have been judged as belonging to science fiction, transhumanism, a dangerous capitalist imaginary. And then, ultimately, we are the first users of what we would have previously criticized with condescension.

This situation reveals a fundamental contradiction in our relationship to technology. Intellectual critique coexists with practical adoption, without this tension being truly thought through. It is precisely this gap between discourse and usage that deserves to be questioned.

The critique of AGI: an intellectual superiority that misses the essential

Today, discourses on artificial general intelligence (AGI) are the subject of much scholarly criticism. Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, in their book The AI Con (2025), argue that the term “AGI” is “a cover for abandoning the current social contract” and that definitions of AGI “primarily serve the economic arrangements of the individuals and organizations claiming to create it.” The MIT Technology Review went so far as to call AGI “the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time” (October 2025).

Erik Larson, a computer scientist specializing in natural language processing, published The Myth of Artificial Intelligence (Harvard University Press, 2021), in which he exposes “the vast gap between the actual science underlying AI and the dramatic claims made about it.” The AI Now Institute devoted an entire report to what it calls “the mythology of AGI” (June 2025), showing how this promise “tips the scales in many debates about AI’s impact on society.”

A survey by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) reveals that 76% of AI researchers believe it is “unlikely” or “very unlikely” that simply scaling up current approaches will lead to AGI. The philosopher of AI Ragnar Fjelland, in an article in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2020), takes up Hubert Dreyfus’s arguments to show why AGI will not be achieved.

These critiques are legitimate and documented. They dismantle the excessive claims of the industry. But there is in this critical posture a kind of superiority, a certainty of being more intelligent than those being criticized. Yet, while we look at the imaginary aspect and criticize it as if we were more clear-sighted, we forget to look at the reality of what these great industrialists are building. For they are building industries, not just discourses.

This posture of superiority carries a risk: by believing ourselves stronger, more distanced, having more critical spirit, we neglect to prepare ourselves for what is coming. No one can know exactly what tomorrow will bring, but if we are not attentive to preparing ourselves to welcome new technologies and services, while maintaining our critical spirit, we are not playing our role as intellectuals.

The role of intellectuals, that is to say, people who hold a discourse on things, is to illuminate these things with their singular perspective. The confrontation of different perspectives brings to the reader a multiplicity of viewpoints from which each person can construct their own. The objective is that each person can find, in tomorrow’s world, their place, their role, their commitment, their battles, their ethics. For ethics applies to concrete things, in lived situations, and all these new industries modify our lived experience and our representation.

Code is law: technical hegemony and government by money

Political engagement against these industries, while being a user of them, aims, we are told, to prevent a takeover of the world by capitalists. This vision of a world government by money, more powerful than states themselves, has been documented for a long time. States, to function, are dependent on tools, services, and networks owned by private multinational companies.

Lawrence Lessig theorized this situation in his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999) and his article “Code is Law” (Harvard Magazine, 2000). His central thesis is that computer code, written by software engineers, provides the rules of interaction and embodies value judgments that define how society interacts in cyberspace. In the absence of government regulation, the interests of coders, who do not necessarily prioritize shared values like privacy, reign supreme. Code regulates, but it is humans who write the code, and these humans work for private companies.

There is therefore indeed a form of hegemony of technical government. But most of those who harshly criticize these future “masters of the world” were also, in the lived situation of the Covid-19 pandemic, the first to defend a health policy largely influenced by private consulting firms and pharmaceutical laboratories. There was, during this period, a manifest lack of critical spirit, that is to say, a submission through fear.

What this episode reveals is that manipulation through fear causes most people to let themselves be governed by capitalism while believing they are acting for their own good. It is not simplistic and superficial discourses criticizing this or that industrialist that will advance our consciousness. These discourses reassure us but in no way protect us against submission to orders disguised as free choices.

And this is exactly the case for the use of ChatGPT: all the greatest critics of this future are users of it. There is here a supreme irony that should make us question the nature of our critique and its real scope.

The future is built in the present: toward a thought of action

A future for the world that would not be directed by “great villains”: we are responsible for it, each and every one of us. Through a more nuanced intellectual posture, one that makes use of complex rather than simplistic thinking, we can prepare the diversified future institutions that the world needs.

It is essential to be attentive to all initiatives related to free software, in the field of artificial intelligence as in digital technology in general. We must support this, encourage local authorities to regain their sovereignty over their data, to leave Microsoft and Google services as much as possible in order to install decentralized servers on the territory, operated by institutions, structures, local authorities, educational establishments. We must take back power over our digital space.

This is where the future of democracy lies. If we do nothing and only criticize “great villains,” certain ones that we wave around like scarecrows, we ourselves are responsible for having left them with power. Criticism is easy. Responsibility is difficult, risky; it requires learning, inventing, daring, dialoguing.

Artificial intelligence tools that allow us to create computer code much more easily than before, without being a specialist, enable us to create the tools of our emancipation. It is up to us to choose how we politicize these tools. Every tool can be diverted from its initial purpose, which is not necessarily clear anyway. ChatGPT was initially an experiment. And then it changed the world like wildfire.

We have the right to transgress the use of what we pay for. It is even our political responsibility, individual and collective. Let us work in the present. This is how we will design the future. The future is in our present, and we are fully its actors if we become responsible.

Let us act, rather than criticize in a simplistic, useless, and even dangerous way, because it avoids making the effort to get to work right now.