In this op‑ed, the author judges that society has allowed artificial intelligence to take root without seriously assessing its risks. He describes a feeling of dispossession, that of “living in a country that is no longer mine.” The text is more of a personal plea than an investigation.
The author writes that he does not know “exactly where we stand.” He believes that events sometimes occur “without us being summoned to experience them.” For him, the presence of AI in collective life has imposed itself amid relative indifference: it provokes “our concern or sometimes our indignation, but never the terror needed to react.” He sums up this stance with a formula: “We remain spectators of our own replacement.”
A technological revolution without safeguards
According to him, faced with technological revolutions, the usual reaction would be excessive caution, even “cowardice,” consisting of legislating little so as not to hinder progress. He recalls the joke often aimed at environmentalists: “If the precautionary principle had existed in Prehistory, man would never have dared to use fire.” The author acknowledges that major breakthroughs are often “clumsy, reckless, risky,” but he warns: boldness can sometimes “remove any possibility of a backward step.” That, in his view, is the situation in which AI now finds itself.
Words against machines
The op‑ed also tackles writing. The author imagines that words, cramped within human thoughts, will be drawn to what he calls “the song of silicon sirens.” He anticipates “a flood of texts, magnificent, horrible, extraordinary, inaudible,” produced in a space he describes as limitless, where humans count words and forbid certain expressions. He raises the question of the place that will remain for human speech: “For without a word to tell us, what will be left to live?” He concludes with a quote from Samuel Beckett: “One must speak words as long as there are any, must say them until they find me, until they tell me.”
