Looking up

French version here.

Preamble. I started writing this text almost a month ago while attending a conference in Spain and thinking about our chance to do research, and its necessity, right after the first federal research cuts of the new US government. I thought of publishing it as an op-ed in a newspaper but the “Stand up for Science” collective emerged in this period, developing many of the same arguments, and leading to a series of large demonstrations yesterday. There is no doubt that I support the fundamentals of this movement overall. However, after reading and hearing many interventions by colleagues in French media yesterday, I noticed that my own vision of the problem was significantly at odds with their messaging. My point of view, I would argue, is more reflexive and critical of the role that our own scientific community has played, and continued to play in the ongoing wave of populism and fascism, notably through our contribution and immoderate enthusiasm for tech and its development. I am also very circumspect about the very top-down communication of the movement, and on how the societal role of scientists is presented. I fear that this communication can appear as condescending in the current democratic crisis context, and ultimately make the problem worse. I therefore decided to publish this text below, without further comment, to let this somewhat different point of view be part of the debate.

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The newly elected US administration is dragging the first world research power into dizzying obscurantism, cancelling and making research on climate, the environment, health and human sciences invisible. This demolition work is only serving a tiny minority using tech as a weapon, and threatens the future of the planet and of our societies. Beyond expressing our solidarity with our US colleagues, the European scientific community must take its share of responsability to avoid that a similar democratic disaster soon occurs on our continent.

The mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck already warned fifty years ago that research has technologically contributed to the genesis of societal and ecological crises: we must finally come to a reckoning of this huge problem, and work humbly so that our future work does not aggravate any further the ills and inequalities within our societies. For this, ethics and integrity must be our moral compasses. We need a more critical, reflexive and accessible research, independent of short-term private and political interests, a research that serves to make a better “live-together” society and to guide us towards a common future respectul of people, of our kids, and inseparably of our environment.

Take the two following striking examples. First, the eco-climatic emergency. We must tirelessly repeat that scientific consensus, as imperfect as they are, must be factored in in risk analysis and political decision making. We must clearly affirm the physical impossibility of boundless growth, and criticize the false promises of “green tech” solutions that currently serve as a quick and easy, superficial substitute for a real reflection and debate on our ways of life. Energetic and environmental analyses independent of industrial interests clearly show that, for the most part, these “solutions” are neither green, nor at the scale of the problems and of the emergency. Second, we must alert on the deliberately fuzzy “artificial intelligence” (AI) bubble. While well-controlled machine learning techniques can have targeted technical benefits in areas like energy management or medecine/health, the presumed major benefits of new AI “tech”, notably generative AI, for the future, and protection of our environment, are at this stage at best wishful thinking, at worst a lie. Their deployment is rushed outside of any really critical, constraining and protecting scientific or regulatory framework. Their ethical, reliability and security issues are systematically minimized by dishonest economic actors, although the structural weaknesses of these AIs (thirst for badly acquired data, absence of constructed reasoning, biases, hallucinations), their massive potential for surveillance and disinformation, and their gigantic consumption of energy and natural resources create huge democratic, social and ecological risks. The plan to substitute such “tools” – which are also currently highly dysfunctional – to qualified humans in education, access to health services or public services, is disgraceful and dystopian from a human perspective, and disastrous for future societal trust in science.

The focus on technical “solutions” to the crisis we are living in bears the imprint of vested economic materialism supported by dishonest communication. It is, in the end, inefficient and, even worse, aggravating the democratic and environmental emergency. This orientation however increasingly manifests itself in an excessive top-down management of research itself, fueling a race to superficial results, going all in on innovation and technological transfers conditioned to short-term trends, and still initiating large, non-essential projects tainted by hubris, with an enormous environmental impact. Unfortunately, we as a community are still complicit actors in this trend that contributes to take us towards a hellish deomcratic and environmental future.

Nurturing direct trust with the population is indispensable to make long-term, truly sustainable policies emerge democratically. In the face of disinformation, denial and fatality, we must more than ever work to get closer to citizens, schools, associations and local communities, to humbly listen, inform and have a dialog about the causes, consequences and complexity of socio-ecological problems. It is critical that, in so doing, we do not appear as superior keepers of reason, research and knowledge — which today way to often appears largely disconnected from citizens. The oceanographer Helen Czerski points out in her recent book “Blue Machine” that our societal values precondition how we can use our important knowledge: we must work on the ground with citizens to co-elaborate, on the basis of shared human values, a desirable, scientifically informed collective future.

Protecting the current environmental equilibrium of the Earth, this singular fruit of billions of years of evolution coined as the “pale blue dot” by astrophysicist Carl Sagan, is our only hope of a collective future in a inhospitable universe. We cannot resign ourselves to the planet being turned over just a hundred years into a dead blue dot by the cynical greediness and ego of a minority manipulating information, and the knowledge we have ourselves provided them with. Sure we must serve as vigilantes, but we must also reduce our own blind addiction to technology and “progress”. Even more importantly, we must urgently make our own scientific engagement significantly evolve to better serve a fair and humanist society truly respectful of its environment.