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Our Time
A Web of Problems: The “Great Impasse”?
The human story does not resemble a steady progression toward an ever-better world. It is made up of advances, setbacks, turning points, discoveries, catastrophes, successes, and failures. Human beings have devised countless ways to respond to the challenges they have faced. They have created tools, institutions, knowledge, political systems, economic organizations, religions, technologies, and forms of cooperation that have profoundly transformed their living conditions. However, each of these transformations has also produced new constraints and new problems. Some decisions resolved an immediate difficulty while creating consequences that their makers could not – and sometimes did not want to – foresee. Some possibilities were not chosen. Others were rejected. Still others were not even considered. It is in this intertwining of choices, non-choices, decisions, indecisions, and sometimes refusals to decide that we can find one of the origins of our present situation. What characterizes our era, therefore, is not so much the existence of each individual problem as their intertwining. Environmental challenges intersect with economic challenges. These, in turn, intersect with social and political difficulties. Conflicts are rooted in ancient histories, but they also involve contemporary technologies and globalized economic interests. Migration is linked to war, inequality, climate, labor, borders, and perceptions of “the other.” Such a situation can therefore create a sense of a “Great Impasse.” Not necessarily because there is no solution to break free from it, but because every solution – whether proposed by individuals, communities, or even international bodies – seems to have to contend with a multitude of consequences, constraints, and conflicting interests.
“I believe that the greatest part of humanity’s misery stems from its misjudgment of the value of things.”
Whose fault is it?
When faced with a situation that is difficult to understand – and even more difficult to control – one temptation inevitably arises: whose fault is it? When there are multiple causes, when responsibility is spread out over time, and when the consequences of certain decisions may be far removed from those who made them, it becomes tempting to oversimplify. The problem must, therefore, have someone to blame. Both human history and the contemporary world offer countless examples of this dynamic. Depending on the context, the designated culprit may be an individual, a social group, a community, a religion, a foreign population, a political or economic power, a generation, a territory, or even a civilization. Current forms of conspiracy theories and the search for scapegoats can be understood from this perspective: they offer a simplified interpretation of a reality that has become difficult to grasp in all its complexity. Of course, such simplification comes at a price – often a higher one than we care to admit. It can transform a collective challenge into a confrontation between “them” and “us,” making it impossible to examine our own responsibilities and trapping each of us in a perception of the problem that actually helps perpetuate it. The “Great Impasse” can then function as a vicious cycle. The more incomprehensible the situation seems, the more we seek simple explanations. But by “finding” those to blame, we reinforce the divisions, making it increasingly difficult to listen to the experiences and arguments of those we consider adversaries, or even enemies. And ultimately, the more difficult dialogue becomes, the more each person may be tempted to confirm the view they already had of the problem. It is a tragic cycle, to say the least.
When AI Gets Involved…
To this already complex situation, our era has added a new and significant factor: consumer-grade artificial intelligence. In just a few years, AI systems have become accessible to a vast number of people and have begun to transform activities that until then seemed to be primarily the domain of human capabilities. By influencing our relationship to knowledge, information, writing, creativity, work, decision-making, and – more broadly – power, as well as to war, communication, and even spirituality, such systems can now change – or claim to change – the way we frame and solve problems. This development introduces an additional challenge because when we ask artificial intelligence to help us understand a problem, it does not necessarily limit itself to providing us with information. It plays a role in how the problem is formulated, represented, and ultimately solved. AI thus enters the realm of human problems not as an external entity, but as a new actor in the ways we know, decide, and act. Such a realignment is radical, and its consequences are difficult to gauge; for while AI can help solve certain problems, it can also create new ones that bear no resemblance to those we have known before. It can thus both make certain knowledge more accessible and, at the same time, complicate our relationship to the reliability of what is presented to us. It can facilitate communication and, in countless circumstances, contribute to or even promote the manipulation of information. It can equally enhance certain human capabilities while leading us to delegate activities that we should instead avoid relinquishing and continue to question the meaning of. This leads us to ask, along with her: What new dimensions is the human problem taking on as AI becomes more widespread in our societies? To what extent do global rivalries – whether commercial or ideological – play a decisive role in this?
A loss of points of references…
This entire situation is reflected in a difficulty that overshadows and underlies all the others: a loss of bearings, which can then give rise to two seemingly opposing tendencies. On the one hand, it can amplify doubts, fears, uncertainties, and forms of individual or collective instability. On the other hand, it can lead people to seek absolute certainties to cling to when the world seems too complex or too unstable. In both cases, the difficulty in recognizing the plurality of human experiences can make it harder to give fair consideration to all of humanity. Yet such consideration requires acknowledging that human beings do not all share the same histories, the same knowledge, the same interests, or the same points of reference. It also requires recognizing everyone’s right to exist and to participate in defining our shared world. This is precisely what makes solving the human problem so delicate: we must seek solutions in a world where we do not necessarily share the same points of reference for defining the problem itself.