The writing being

Writing, identity and world transformation.

Writing shapes us. Beyond the traditional writer, the “writing being” encompasses anyone who writes—from journalists to social media users—whose words transform reality and construct identity. The “Writer” Before and After the Internet (…)

Presence and suicide

Typology of presence before/after the radical choice of absence.

Suicide paradoxically transforms absence into an overwhelming presence. Grief involves symbolically constructing this absence to rediscover one’s own presence in the world. The Lack of PresenceA primary idea is that the energy driving suicide (…)

What is Philosophy Today?

Crafting concepts from presence and lived life.

Every person carries a philosophy without knowing it, inherited from their culture. I try here to say what it is, for me, to do philosophy today, forging concepts from presence and lived life. No one escapes philosophyEvery person, whether or (…)

Presence of abandoned luggage

On the security fantasy.

When fear of the unpredictable transforms forgetting into threat, an entire society tips into a security fiction. In French public transport, a simple forgotten bag is enough to paralyze the system. Behind this excessive reaction, a (…)

The cage of representations

When the absence of care locks the other in our imaginary constructions.

Human relationships break down less through conflict than through construction: we fabricate characters, we assign them roles, and in this seemingly innocuous gesture lies a violence that can go so far as to symbolically kill the other. The (…)

Retroactive Time

On childhood that changes, on a real we never reach but only thicken, and on the way transforming the present also transforms the past and the future.

A love affair, a course of therapy, a book can alter the childhood we carry within us, and not merely the memory we keep of it. I call retroactive time this dimension of experience in which what happens now transforms what we will have been, at a (…)

Is artificial intelligence going to replace us?

Possible talks on artificial intelligence, creation and critical thinking, for cultural teams, schools and universities, local authorities and companies.

This is the question that always comes, and it hides several others: fear for one’s profession, anger at companies that feed on authors’ work, the feeling of being left behind, and sometimes a curiosity one dares not show in front of colleagues. (…)

Is science immoral ?

A film by Benoît Labourdette (5’11s, 2014).

The myth of scientific progress. According to Albert Bayet.

The Company, place of creation in Marseille : drone workshop

Inventing art forms, filmed with drone.The Company, place of contemporary art in Marseille, led by Paul-Emmanuel Odin, invited me to offer to local youth, in the central and very popular in Marseille where it is an audiovisual creative (…)

Theater and life

Short reflexion on the definition of reality.

We differentiate between “real life” and theater, like reality and fiction. Understanding more finely the entanglement of the two can undoubtedly allow one to better touch one’s own “truth.”Protest against the separate idea we have of (…)

Multiverse

Permanent Photography

The image as a dimension of existence, no longer as a tool of life

Since a camera entered the phone that never leaves us, from 2005 onward, the image has stopped being an object we make at certain moments and has become a milieu we live within. I try to name this shift with a concept, permanent photography, and (…)

Must You Have Something to Say to Facilitate a Discussion?

Between the dream of a facilitator who would fade away and the fear of imposing a point of view, the place of the adult voice in discussions with young people is one of the knots of cultural mediation.

A facilitator who steps back does not neutralize the power relations in a group, they let them play out freely; a facilitator who imposes their vision closes thinking down. I defend here a third position, which consists in speaking in the first (…)

Empty

First love

Un film de Benoît Labourdette (5’09s, 2018).

Un film peut être comme un objet spirituel, philosophique, un texte qui accompagne notre vie et nous apprend de nouvelles choses à chaque fois qu’on le regarde.

Living heart of the machine

Series of 85 photographs of a new life form.

The machine, or machines, are now, and have been for a long time in fact, in mechanical life. They are the lungs of our lives: electricity, drinking water, various energies and automated production of the objects in which our lives are embodied. (…)

The invisible art of material organization

When organizing materials becomes a philosophy of cultural mediation.

In my digital cultural actions, I discovered that material organization transcends simple logistics to become a practical philosophy of mediation. The materiality of the digital: a paradox to be tamedMy work in cultural animation leads me to (…)

The machine that writes to itself

How reasoning came to language models.

Since late 2024, language models have been “reasoning” before they answer. I retrace here the path by which reasoning came to these statistical machines, from the discovery of 2022 to Anthropic’s interpretability research, so that this (…)

Webinar presenting the findings of the AI Monitoring Committee of the Forum des images

Humanize AI rather than robotize humans.

For eleven months, philosophers, artists, educators, institutional leaders, and corporate experts worked together within the Artificial Intelligence Oversight Committee, launched by the Forum des Images and TUMO Paris. I facilitated this (…)

Petite Poucette 2.0

In Praise of Social Networks Against the Moral Panic of the Elite.

What if, far from atrophying our minds, social networks were the new printing press? A revolution of thought that the powers that be are trying to demonize for their own survival. The digital witch trial: a sense of déjà vuI read and hear (…)

Les droguistes : “Labourdette, working time”

Les droguistes, cultural magazine online, offers a “cultural program” every week. In February 2016, links to my last films published, and back on the film Fatigue, in a article with which I feel in agreement. CanvasLabourdette, working time (…)

Six Fears About AI, Six Shifts in Thinking

Responding to defensive rhetoric with a philosophy of transformation.

Surveillance, relational isolation, environmental destruction, robotic warfare, existential threat, billionaire power: the dominant discourse on AI accumulates perils. These concerns deserve examination. But their very formulation prevents us (…)

A fixed point (thought 383)

A film by Benoît Labourdette (2’15s, 2023).

How do we know if we’re right or if the other guy is right?In the staging of this film, the text appears as a single piece. This may seem simplistic. It’s meant to symbolize that a way of thinking about the world must take into account all (…)

Notes for a philosophy at the age of artificial intelligences

A toolbox for thinking about what is happening to us.

The concepts available to philosophy were forged in an era when humans were alone in producing articulated meaning, in reasoning through propositions, in fabricating written works, in dialoguing through language. With generative artificial (…)

Next train

A film by Benoît Labourdette (2’51s, 2024).

Time stands still. And then life returns. Pain is life. Sweetness is life. Replications. Messages. Double helix. Heal. ExtensionsWhen we live through borderline or traumatic experiences, we may find ourselves experiencing time in a way that (…)

On Warrior Absence

Reinvesting in a radical philosophy of pacifism.

War is the abdication of our humanity, pacifism its highest affirmation. Between the absence from self imposed by violence and the presence to the other demanded by peace lies, in my view, the ethical destiny of humanity. War as denial of (…)

Presence and time

Practical hypothesis of power over time.

We each have extremely varied experiences of time, depending on our general modality of presence in time, and our specific intentionalities at certain moments. What is presence? What is time? And how an intimate comprehension of their (…)

Absence at the Blockage Point

Why our frozen identities prevent us from liberating ourselves.

We all carry impossibilities that define us. Every existence is traversed by aspirations that remain perpetually out of reach. And what if the obstacle were not the objective itself, but our absence at a precise point in our history, a point (…)

Between two waters

Time

The three ecologies of co-resilience

Reread with Félix Guattari, Serge Tisseron’s co-resilience answers the accusation made against resilience of manufacturing consent.

The researcher Thierry Ribault sees in resilience a “technology of consent”: training populations to adapt to disasters would exempt us from tackling their causes. This criticism is serious and documented. I argue that it hits individualised (…)

Presence and Isolation

On essential solitude as a condition of authentic thought.

Presence to oneself is born paradoxically from isolation. This fundamental solitude, far from being a withdrawal, constitutes the breeding ground of all authentic thought and the foundation of our humanity. Isolation as birth to oneselfTo be (…)

France culture : program “Matter to Think” by Serge Tisseron

How can technologies help us think ? Focus on video to mobile phone. Discussion between Serge Tisseron and Benoît Labourdette.Serge Tisseron, a psychoanalyst specializing in images and robotics among others, offers since September 2017 a (…)

Critical Thinking Against Archetypes

How the greatest minds can fall into obscurantism, and why understanding this matters for forgiveness.

Rigorous scientists can defend irrational and inhumane positions, devoid of any ethics, on certain subjects. This paradox reveals the deep mechanisms of conformism and collective fear. The Blind Spots of the Scientific MindEven the most (…)

Chaosmos

Un film de Richard Texier et Benoît Labourdette (8’51s, 2014).

Filmer la peinture de Richard Texier avec un drone...

Delegated Thinking

Why intellectuals suspend their critical thinking on certain topics.

An intellectual person close to me asserts to me one day, as an established fact, what she has read on the cover of Le Monde: that the newly elected far-right mayors are already “uninhibited.” She has not read the article itself. I had seen that (…)

Presence and adaptation

For an ethics of transformation.

Between active presence and constrained adaptation, cultivating an “adaptive presence”: an ethics of creative resistance in the face of transformations that overwhelm us. Presence, a state of active consciousnessWhat I call presence is a (…)

Nature begins again (thought 121)

A film by Benoît Labourdette (2’22s, 2021).

Thinking the mystery of life through mathematics.

Displaced Resonance

Extending resonance to the age of artificial intelligence.

Hartmut Rosa describes our living relationship to the world along three axes of resonance: the relationship to others, the relationship to work and things, the relationship to nature and art. In the age of generative artificial intelligence, I (…)

Build antifragility for cultural projects

Methodological proposal.

What methodology should be adopted to build cultural projects that have the capacity to tame uncertainty and thus become more deeply rooted in their objectives? Methodological proposal, based on the thesis of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the (…)

Presence and truth

Investigation of a real critical mind.

In response to Roger-Pol Droit, who laments the loss of a common truth, I argue that truth is necessarily complex, partial, and linked to our experience of the world. A Truth in Crisis?The philosopher Roger-Pol Droit, in his book Alice au pays (…)

The Lies of Experts

When authoritative speech replaces the scientific method.

The media expert does not formulate hypotheses: they assert truths. This methodological inversion reveals a mechanism of symbolic domination that threatens the democratic exercise of critical thinking. The Imposture of Media ExpertiseOn (…)

The work of art in the age of digital mediation

Conceptual update of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935).

During an experiment in artistic mediation integrating digital techniques, it became clear to me that the typologies of status and function of artistic works that Walter Benjamin defined in 1935 are now being modified by digital practices of (…)

Artificial Intelligence and Wearable Objects: A New Convergence

When the virtual becomes our second skin.

The hybridization between wearable technologies and artificial intelligence opens, in my view, a new era where the real and the virtual interweave until they merge. Computing or the history of growing intimacyThe history of computing objects (…)

Power, potency, domination

Can one take power without becoming a dominator?

We often confuse power with domination, as if wanting one meant wanting the other. By distinguishing them, and by adding a third term, the capacity to act, we can conceive of a form of power that does not turn into domination. This is what I (…)

A tear of fatigue at Gare d’Austerlitz

Series of 217 photographs in rotation.

We turn, I turn on myself, and we don’t look at anything, I let myself be told.How much time is missing between each frame? What is its nature? Is it this missing time that gives us the illusion of movement, that impels the energy of the gaze (…)

John Dewey : an inspirer of cultural rights?

Sharing my interest in an inspiring personality.

The notion of “cultural rights” is increasingly present in the debates within the cultural sector. They are seen by many as being at the heart of the issues and processes of change in the field of culture. But they are controversial, their very (…)

The Simulacrum of Presence

Towards an Epistemology of Personal Engagement.

I explain here why expert discourses that claim to objectively describe the world are simulacra, and why they can only lead to immobilism. I argue for an acknowledged recognition of our subjectivities, and I indicate how this is a path toward (…)

Thought 381

Film by Benoît Labourdette (2’47 s, 2016).

Is reality more real than dream, or both are equal ? Based on the “Thoughts” by Blaise Pascal (17th century).

Fragments-images

Contes philosophiques du quotidien (livre téléchargeable gratuitement).

Images écrites du monde qui évoquent et construisent des pensées philosophiques, glanées au fil des rencontres et des chocs dont la vie est tissée. Écriture dans le réel de la confrontation. Confiance. Comme de courts contes philosophiques. (…)

Presence within Entanglement

Presence when a third party holds the trace.

Artificial intelligences write in our place and retain what we no longer retain. The transformation is now ordinary, present even in the everyday uses of the telephone. What it modifies in our manner of being present to the world and to others (…)

The imaginary as survival equipment

We are woven of imaginaries, our daily life is made of them, and our ability to get through crises depends on how we maintain this weave.

The imaginary is commonly seen as a decorative extra set beside serious life. I argue here for the opposite view: our institutions, our interactions and our stories are made of imaginary significations, and this weave can be worked on. Drawing on (…)

Light in a window

A film by Benoît Labourdette (2’06s, 1999-2019).

A contemplative journey through the energy of light, between nature and electronics.

Noam Chomsky’s consent

When an intellectual gives in to the very mechanism he spent his life describing, his work becomes the most accurate instrument for understanding what happened to him.

In October 2021, Noam Chomsky, who had been documenting the manufacture of consent for fifty years, declared that unvaccinated people should have the decency to remove themselves from the community. This reversal does not invalidate his thought. (…)

Philosophy of compromise

How to commit without moralism?

The Philosophy of Compromise explores how we live with the contradictions between our principles and our daily actions. Rather than morally judging this cognitive dissonance, I propose to see it as an essential component of our complex humanity. (…)

The concept of reality in the age of digital media

A proposal to revitalize the practice of independent thinking.

Since 2005, digital media has redefined our relationship to reality. We now confuse our direct perceptions with images from others, creating an unprecedented confusion about what reality is. A guard of honor to manufacture realityThe (…)

Artificial Intelligence and Major Risks

Three Scenarios for Thinking About Our Technological Future

Faced with AI’s promises and perils, Sam Altman has outlined three troubling trajectories. Between military dystopia and insidious dependency, how should we think about our relationship with these technologies? But above all, how can we think (…)

For More Interactions with Machines

Artificial Intelligence as a Space for Emancipation from Social Violence.

Systematic critiques of AI technology denounce a dehumanization through technology. But this vision idealizes human relationships often marked by domination, and ignores the emancipatory potential of machines for those excluded by the system. (…)

What is a scenario?

Introduction to a philosophical vision of a technical and artistic object.

The screenplay, traditionally seen as a technical tool of cinema, is in reality a complex concept that deserves to be questioned in its essence. Both a practical guide and a creative act, it reveals different facets depending on cinematic (…)

Scientific research and scenario

Scientific rigor guarantees script quality.

Rigorous scientific research, whether it concerns the hard sciences or the humanities, anchors the screenplay in reality and generates singular ideas born from the encounter between imagination and reality. Documentation, Experimentation, and (…)

Artificial Intelligence and Creation” course for teachers

Podcast of a participatory conference by Benoît Labourdette.

Co-animation by Benoît Labourdette and Laura Schlenker (La fabrique média) of a one-day course for teachers on the theme of Artificial Intelligence and creation, organized by the Délégation Académique aux Arts et à la Culture of the Grenoble (…)

The object that disposes

What machines change in mediation.

When we choose a tool for mediation, we choose a device of relationships. The technical object carries within it a history, a politics, ways of arranging bodies and gazes. This is true of the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph in 1895 as much as of (…)

Leaving the house in the presence

Reflections on collective presence after lockdowns.

The lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 ultimately revealed our vital need to go out and share collective moments. This experience questions the meaning of presence and cultural action today. Forced domestic withdrawalThe mandatory lockdowns imposed on (…)

Philosophy and pedagogy

For a profound practice of pedagogy.

Philosophy and pedagogy are deeply interconnected, as our worldview influences our educational approach. If we consider that humans are intrinsically eager to learn, pedagogy becomes a way to nurture this natural desire rather than imposing (…)

Spirit Journal : article “Lives in Pictures”

I published the article “Lives in Pictures” in the June 2016 issue of the Spirit Journal on the theme “Power of Images”. Issue edited by Carole Desbarats. Presentation text of the article “Lives in Pictures”Smartphones and digital platforms (…)

Education in the age of artificial intelligence

Rethinking our practices for a changing world.

AI disrupts our relationship to knowledge, thus questioning the foundations of education. This transformation goes beyond the technical to touch upon the philosophical and political: how do we educate emancipated citizens in this new world? (…)

Vertical films

Reflection and starting point for experiments.

Moving images are verticalizing. This is far from being anecdotal and has an impact on our representation of the world. What philosophical changes does this bring about? How can we explore them? How can we share them? Images are becoming more and (…)

Being a subject with technologies, or being their object

From the object held in hand to subject presence.

Psychoanalysis distinguishes between the subject and the object, and this distinction helps me think about creation as much as about our relationship with technical tools. I defend here an idea that my practice led me to find along the way. One (…)

The being and the image

Short proposal for an operativity of the philosophy of the image.

The images we look at, share, imagine and create have an important impact on our being in the world. Why do they do so? And how can we make good use of images to “be better”? Philosophical hypotheses and practical questions.Too much (…)

When the real does not exist, one cannot speak of it

On speech as the manifestation of the real, and silence as the body’s lucidity.

We often reproach certain people for not knowing how to speak about what they live in their relationships. I want to argue that their silence is not always a deficiency of expression, but sometimes the lucidity of someone who recognises that, in (…)

The transformative power of speech

On what living speech brings into being, and the work that makes it possible.

In French culture, the written word prevails over spoken speech, which is held to be fleeting and less solid. From years of facilitating groups, I have come to see that this hierarchy is false. Living speech is a mode of thought in its own right, (…)

The Adventitious Subject

A concept for thinking about how works of art are born.

We picture creation as the treatment of a subject by a form chosen to serve it. Against this picture, I would like to construct a concept, the “adventitious subject”. The subject of a work is not sown in advance by the artist; it comes up in the (…)

Nature of reality in the digital age

Small kaleidoscope of thoughts about digital philosophy.

In my opinion, digital technology is not a subject that should be debated, that deserves to be positioned “for” or “against”. It is in fact an environment of existence, in the same way as nature, air, borders, economy, education... Digital (…)

Presence and Explanation

For a critical mind based on inner grounding rather than on the accumulation of information.

Faced with fears, we seek unique and reassuring explanations. Only “presence” opens us to multiple explanations and grounds critical thinking. The universal need for explanationAll human beings, in their infinite diversity, children, (…)

Holy Shroud

A film by Benoît Labourdette (3’40s, 2021).

Film comes, in the history of mankind, as a much more religious fact than one might have thought at first glance..André Bazin, in his article “Ontology of the photographic image” (1945), evokes in a very clear way the function of the original (…)

Intelligence as a Resource

How the commoditisation of artificial intelligence is shifting our intellectual activity towards what is most distinctively human: the formulation of questions.

As artificial intelligence tends to become a commodity accessible to all, in the manner of electricity or running water, it is not our intelligence that disappears: it is the way in which we exercise it that shifts. No longer towards the search (…)

Rencontres photographiques d’Arles : “Pedagogy of the digital image” (conference)

Podcast of the conference.

Development of practical and creative thinking in the pedagogy of images, with digital photography.July 8, 2013, invited by Jean-Yves Moirin and Francis Jolly in the Seminar of the Photographic Encounters, I proposed a conference on the (…)

The sidestep as a craft

Growing what was not planned.

What is creating? Etymology places creation on the side of growth and work on the side of the journey, far from manufacture and mastery. What has just been born cannot yet be judged, since the criteria are missing, and welcoming it requires a (…)

The Name on the Closed Door

From empty second homes to robots, by way of remote surgery, our technologies make us exist in places where our body is not.

We increasingly exist in places where our body is not, from second homes bearing our name to robots that extend the gestures of their designers. I propose to call deposited presence the presence we entrust to durable material things that keep it (…)

Presence, commitment and denial of fear

A new approach to civic engagement.

Current political engagement, based on the denial of fear rather than authentic presence, creates fertile ground for figures like Trump and perpetuates the very system he claims to oppose. Reality and Fantasy of Political EngagementAt the (…)

Cultural rights and preservation of digital heritage

Bernard Stiegler’s technical philosophy sheds political light.

Have you ever tried to find a video you loved on YouTube from ten years ago? A blog post that made an impression on you? Your friends’ photos on MySpace? There’s a good chance this content has vanished. The Internet Archive’s “Vanishing Culture” (…)

Daylight

Art Press: article “Richard Texier, digital filmmaker”

Publication of an article in the special addon of ArtPress “Richard Texier, PANTHEO vortex” (June-July 2014).Download complete article (bilingual english-french)ArtPress devoted a special addon to Richard Texier, French painter and (…)

About the 21^st Century: Meeting with Paul Virilio

A film by Martine Stora and Benoît Labourdette (26 minutes, 1995).

Paul Virilio, a great philosopher of technology in the 20th Century, in 1994, gave us a vision of the 21st Century that seems to us very enlightening to give meaning to our present, 26 years later.This film, Grand Prix (Silver Wolf) of the (…)

Presence and nuance of thought

Psychosociology of democracy.

Nuanced thinking, unlike dogmatic simplism, embraces the complexity of the world and acknowledges the subjectivity of viewpoints. It is the source of democracy. It requires safe spaces for dialogue where everyone’s presence is legitimized. Nuance (…)

The red jars

A film by Benoît Labourdette (2’27s, 2021).

Man domesticates nature. For good or bad reasons? Maybe it’s a little more complicated than we thought. Hints for a philosophical reflection

The creative unconscious, a method for collective creation

When letting go becomes method. For a Taoist approach to audiovisual creation.

How can we explain that a group of people can produce a coherent cinematographic work in a short time without a script? A method that shows the creative power of the collective unconscious and non-action. Unconscious CoherenceFor years, I have (…)

The Mythology of Truth

For an Ethnological Critique of the Journalistic Claim to Objectivity.

When journalists speak of truth, they often confuse their professional method with access to reality. This confusion, far from being anecdotal, reveals a fundamental anthropological mechanism that deserves to be explored. The Confusion Between (…)

What is the place of human beings in the age of artificial intelligence?

From function to being: a plea for rediscovered humanity.

AI surpasses our functions. Rather than a threat, what if this were an opportunity? There may be a chance to redefine ourselves not by what we do, but by what we fundamentally are. The mirror of our functional incompetenceA tweet reporting a (…)

Book : “Mobile phone and creation”

Collective book to which I contributed, with the article “From economy to the conversation and audiovisual creation”. Publication Date : 19 February 2014 published by Armand Colin Link to the official website of the conference that gave birth to (…)

What defines us as human beings

Cultivating empathy and sensitivity in the age of artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence has now occupied our daily lives since the launch of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. How can we produce critical thinking about what is happening to us? That is to say, how can we think for ourselves, without taking refuge (…)

A Study Here, A Study There

The illusion of objectivity in the era of “fact-checking.”

Citing sources has become the new journalistic catechism, even though source confidentiality was once its cornerstone. This practice, far from guaranteeing truth, often masks a resignation of critical thinking in favor of conformism disguised as (…)

Natural

Scenario ontology, part 1

Isn’t screenwriting the opposite of cinema?

Cinema, according to André Bazin, captures reality through mechanical recording, creating a fascinating trace of what has existed. In contrast, the screenplay, crafted with words, does not rely on this ontology of reality. Yet, cinema can film a (…)

A definition of feminism

A thought movement in dialogues.

Here is my definition of feminism, from my place as a man: it is for me a movement of thought and action for equal rights between women and men, whose effects also go beyond.“Feminism” is a word that scares many, whether you are a woman, a (…)

The line

A film by Benoît Labourdette (4’06s, 2020).

Light is what gives existence.

Presence and memorisation

When silence becomes the founding act of knowledge.

A recent discovery in cognitive science reveals that ten seconds of silence after learning triples memory retention. This is not a mnemonic tip. It is an empirical confirmation of what I have been developing for several years in my philosophy of (…)

Robustness, antifragility, resilience

Bouncing back after the shock, gaining from disorder, holding steady through fluctuations: depending on the word we use, the effort demanded by crises falls on the person, the collective or the institution.

Resilience entered public debate through psychology in the late 1990s, antifragility through a statistician in 2012, robustness through a biologist in 2023, and everyday usage now blurs them together. I retrace the history of these three notions (…)

Building Co-Resilience

The practice of collective creation workshops brings concrete substance to the concept of co-resilience proposed by Serge Tisseron.

In the wake of the wildfires and heatwaves of the summer of 2026, psychiatrist Serge Tisseron argues in Le Monde that the capacity of a person, a group or a territory to overcome a disaster depends on that of all the others, which he calls (…)

Presence and power of the spirit

For a politics of non-conformism.

The mind defines humanity and the uniqueness of each person, beyond the physiological. This singular essence allows us to enrich others while resisting conformity. Cultivating one’s singular power is essential, even at the risk of social (…)

Born in the Machine

Toward an Anthropology of the Interface.

Five weeks spent in an incubator at birth, in a sterile environment where the only contacts came from the caregivers through the sleeves of the apparatus and the continuous sensors of the medical machine. My parents could only see me through a (…)

Work Without a Share

Faced with artificial intelligences, we fear being replaced, and since we do not know what to do with this fear, we reassure ourselves by seeing them as machines like any others. By comparing them to immigrant workers, Yuval Noah Harari breaks this frame and opens a question we were not asking: that of their place.

As long as we hold artificial intelligences to be mere tools, the question of their place does not arise. Yet these agents do the work of employees with the status of tools: their fabrications come back to whoever puts them to work, the fee goes (…)

Presence in the Unexpected

The art of grafting the unexpected.

Faced with the unexpected that thwarts the best-laid plans, should we resist or open ourselves? Perhaps the issue is not so much in this question. Let us explore the posture to adopt to enable ourselves to metamorphose what happens without (…)

Is nature a computer system?

Hypothesis for a digital naturalism.

The philosopher Mark Alizart, in “Celestial Computing” (2017), explores the idea that nature is computing, bringing together the living (DNA, genetic code) and the mechanical (machines, AI). By retracing the history of computing, from Pascal to (…)

Waiting

A film by Benoît Labourdette (2’20s, 2021).

Waiting for... who? Someone or yourself?