“In the com­ing years, some­where between 30 and 50% of all employ­ment posi­tions will be replaced by machines and auto­mat­ed process­es. The ensu­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty gains will be enor­mous, way beyond those due to imple­men­ta­tion of Tay­lorism. Notwith­stand­ing, from ware­house han­dlers to sur­geons, unem­ploy­ment will also take on huge pro­por­tions that will even lead to the ques­tion of short-term solv­abil­i­ty of Fordist com­pa­nies. We must start think­ing about new dis­tri­b­u­tion pat­terns for wealth”, feels Bernard Stiegler, who will short­ly be pub­lish­ing a book on the sub­ject, under the title « La société automa­tique » [Auto­mat­ed Soci­ety]. What the philoso­pher pro­pos­es to counter such changes is to invent a “con­tribu­tive income”, on the same mod­el as that used to pay part-time show world work­ers, which would make cit­i­zens val­orise the tile they have at their dis­pos­al, a time that will nec­es­sar­i­ly increase as Soci­ety becomes more and more auto­mat­ed. “ In par­al­lel, we must set up insti­tu­tions to devel­op and val­orise knowl­edge ad to rein­vent an eco­nom­ic mod­el that would be based notably on con­tribu­tive projects”, he sur­mis­es, invit­ing the lis­ten­ers to think about these ques­tions today inas­much as these will become more acute to answer in the next decade. 

Contributive neighbourhoods or “smart cities”?

“This is a work area which also involves UTC, to the extent that we must pre­pare teach­ing cours­es and launch research in line with the future con­text. Ter­ri­to­ries, urban dis­tricts and neigh­bour­hoods must also become con­tribu­tive and here tech­nolo­gies will have a major role to play, with the pro­vi­so that they are under the con­trol of over­ar­ch­ing poli­cies. Fail­ing to do so, the sce­nario we see in Sin­ga­pore may repeat itself with remote man­age­ment of urban process­es under the con­trol of multi­na­tion­al com­pa­nies. Devi­a­tions like this, inte­grat­ed to the con­cept of smart cities is dan­ger­ous”, warns Bernard Stiegler. Automa­tion is so to speak at the door of neigh­bour­hoods to con­trol, for exam­ple, their water, trans­port or pow­er sup­plies, among oth­ers. “Digi­tised urban­i­ty (and automa­tion in gen­er­al) are major soci­etal chal­lenges to the extent that it will tend to destroy our auton­o­my (or self-reliance)”, adds philoso­pher Stiegler. From dri­ver­less vehi­cles to big data eco­nom­ics, automa­tion will anni­hi­late deci­sion mak­ing by humans and indi­vid­u­als. We must there­fore take care to use tech­nolo­gies to give back their roles to the indi­vid­u­als, as cit­i­zens, con­sumers, mem­bers of a fam­i­ly, a com­pa­ny, etc., and not to quash any ini­tia­tives they might envis­age. “This is the task under­tak­en by May­or Jean-François Caron, I his town of Loos-en-Gohelle (French Region Nord – Pas-de-Calais). “The ener­gy per­for­mance sen­sors installed by the Town­hall are mon­i­tored by the May­or and his staff and not con­nect­ed to a data pro­cess­ing cen­tre that would man­age ener­gy con­sump­tion on behalf of the inhab­i­tant-con­sumers. It is the lat­ter who demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly take the rel­e­vant, decid­ed steps in meet­ing orga­nized for this very pur­pose. Tech­nol­o­gy we see here can also serve col­lec­tive intel­li­gence, rather than destroy it”. 

Innovation, somewhere between utopia and a fight to survive

On a wider scale, Prof. Stiegler analy­ses at the exam­ple pro­vid­ed by big data process­es in finan­cial spheres: fol­low­ing the sub­prime cri­sis, Alan Greenspan, for­mer Chair of the Board of Gov­er­nors of the Fed­er­al Reserve Bank (FED) admit­ted that eco­nom­ic mod­el­ling alone would not pro­vide all the answers and that we need­ed to use it only to sup­port and serve eco­nom­ic the­o­ry. Automa­tion, what­ev­er, the sec­tor where it is intro­duced, increas­es the local sys­tem entropy, viz., its lev­el of dis­or­der, going as far as destroy­ing it. “Thus, Google lin­guis­tic robots lead to a loss of seman­tic diver­si­ty, as has been demon­strat­ed by Frédéric Kaplan, research sci­en­tist work­ing with the Ecole Poly­tech­nique Fédérale de Lau­sanne (EPFL). Increased entropy cre­ates in indif­fer­en­ti­a­tion and final­ly to the death of the sys­tem. In reverse, negen­tropy gen­er­ates sin­gu­lar­i­ties and more val­ues. The future of inno­va­tions leads to two era options: entropocene or a negen­tropocene” adds Bernard Stiegler refer­ring to entrop­ic con­cepts. And, to con­duct the human species on a path that would enable a few spec­i­mens with their free will intact to sur­vive, we must use the time gained through auto­mat­ed process­es to fight the gen­er­at­ed loss of autonomy. 

‘Territory-schools’

Soci­ety tomor­row must pro­duce a lot of col­lec­tive intel­li­gence. Automa­tion autho­ris­es a degree of auton­o­my, as is proven in the case of pianists – they can only per­form by free­ing them­selves from learn­ing automa­tisms they first had to acquire by mod­i­fy­ing nat­ur­al automa­tisms è- in this way they can cre­ate, impro­vise and inter­pret in a “sin­gu­lar” man­ner. Physi­cists must use and free them­selves from what they have already learned in order to make new dis­cov­er­ies and enrich the sys­tem. A race-course dri­ver is a machine, to the extent that he can ‘dis­auto­mate’ him­self for a frac­tion of a sec­ond to avoid a crash or to win the trace. ‘Dis­automa­tion’ is only pos­si­ble if the indi­vid­ual has pre­vi­ous­ly auto­mat­ed an enor­mous quan­ti­ty of move­ments, reflex­es, knowl­edge”. In order to reach this degree of auton­o­my, we must accept to under­take exper­i­ments, at every lev­el of our orga­ni­za­tion. We must give indi­vid­u­als, the uni­ver­si­ties, the ter­ri­to­ries, the right to exper­i­ment. This indeed is the only way to test and retain appro­pri­ate solu­tions to face up to the major changes ahead. “That is why I am cur­rent­ly work­ing on the notion of ter­ri­to­ry-schools, where young PhD stu­dents car­ry out con­tribu­tive research tasks to study, for exam­ple, how one could dis­trib­ute con­tribu­tive incomes to replace social ben­e­fits. This research work also involves the inhab­i­tants, the eco­nom­ic spheres, the polit­i­cal and aca­d­e­m­ic milieus … all of whom are dri­ven by the right to inno­vate. To antic­i­pate on future changes, the Euro­pean Union should launch and encour­age such experiments”