Franz Kafka once wrote: “It is consoling that the disharmony of this world seems to be only numerical.” I admit I’m not sure I fully understand the meaning of this aphorism, especially since the meaning of the adjective “digital” (zahlenmässig in German) has changed significantly since the advent of computers and artificial intelligence. So I won’t risk making Kafka, who died in 1924, say what he never thought.
The ambiguity of this sentence, however, sounds like an invitation to question the effects of digital technologies that are increasingly shaping the organization of our lives and our mutual relationships. They also modify our reading of reality by circulating in the same communication channels elements belonging to different registers: knowledge (scientific or other), beliefs, information, opinions, comments and comments of comments, even… canards. The respective statuses of these various elements, due to the fact that they are embedded in the intensity of the same flow, inevitably contaminate each other: how to distinguish knowledge from the belief of a particular community? A comment, a prejudice? Information, a lie?
Never in their history have human brains been subjected to such information deluges. So they don’t really know how to separate things. They adapt as best they can to this new form of drunkenness that is digitized communication, without however abandoning their reluctance to see their productions contradicted, whether they are ideas, judgments, feelings or appreciations. Thus they show themselves more inclined to declare true the ideas which they like rather than to like the true ideas if those do not like them.
Moreover, in such a new world, when it comes to explaining science, we are little helped by the fact that one of the hopes of the Enlightenment philosophers has been sorely disappointed. If, when designing their Encyclopedia, Diderot or d’Alembert chose to insert many plates and illustrations explaining in detail the operation of a multitude of technical objects, it is by virtue of a principle which seemed to go without saying to them: technical objects , by becoming visible and familiar, would implicitly be a vector of scientific knowledge; the more we come into contact with them in daily life, they thought, the better we will know and understand the scientific principles that made them possible. Certainly, there was undoubtedly a time when cultivated men could understand all the tools and all the machines around them. In ImmortalityMilan Kundera cited Goethe as an example: “[Il] knew with what and how his house had been built, why an oil lamp gave light, he knew the mechanism of his telescope; no doubt he didn’t dare to carry out surgical operations, but having attended a few, he could get on well with the doctor who was treating him. The world of objects was for him intelligible and transparent (1).
But the encyclopaedists had by no means anticipated another reality that would gradually become apparent: the more complex a technological object, the more its use tends to be simplified. Thus, almost none of us can tell how a computer or a mobile phone works, which does not prevent us from using it without consulting any instructions. Thus certain technical objects, both familiar and extraordinarily complex, end up masking or marginalizing the scientific knowledge of which they are nevertheless the consequences. This knowledge is then perceived as practically useless – useless in practice – and therefore simply useless.
Several international rankings show that there is a dropout in our country in the mastery of mathematical and scientific knowledge, especially among the young population. In 2021, a test was carried out with students entering sixth grade. They were asked to place the fraction “a half” on a graduated line from 0 to 5: only 22% of them succeeded. But that does not prevent those who have not passed this test from being as skilled as their classmates in using all the functions of their mysterious smartphone.
(1) Immortality, by Milan Kundera. Gallimard, 1990.
Etienne Klein is a physicist, research director at the CEA and philosopher of science.
