Each technological revolution takes place in two stages, over two successive generations: the first develops and learns to master a new tool, the second learns to live with it. If major innovations are most often developed for a specific purpose, we only qualify them as revolutions if, in addition to their technical contribution, they modify the way in which Humanity thinks of itself and of the world. Society must therefore adapt as soon as the tool is made available to everyone.
The birth of aviation can illustrate this process. On July 25, 1909, Louis Blériot crossed the British Channel aboard a plane made of wood and parchment paper. Future great aviators like Guillaumet, Mermoz and Saint-Exupéry were then respectively seven, eight and nine years old. Saint-Exupéry testified to the long assimilation by society of this new technology over a period of around twenty years. The adaptation of society was made necessary because the realities contained in certain words such as “distance” or “return” had changed by the simple existence of the plane. The same words having different meanings, the language then conveyed a completely different reality. He described the generation preceding his as a generation of "soldiers", for whom the plane was only a means of building a new reality, and contrasted it with his generation of "settlers", seeking to inhabit this reality made of planes.
I belong to the generation of digital “settlers”. Its members, who were not even ten years old when the first Internet browser was created, fully understood the new tools. Most people today struggle to envisage the reality of a world without computers (before they were born), or computers without the Internet (before 1993), of the Internet without Google (before 1998), of Google without maps of the world (before 2004) and mapping the world without real-time location on a smartphone (before 2007).
Like aviation in the first third of the 20th century, the technological innovations of the last twenty years have profoundly modified the notions of space and time. But society had been prepared for such changes ; first through innovations like the television and the telephone, and then through discoveries at infinitely large or infinitely small scales. This is why I am convinced that the greatest challenge in society's assimilation of modern innovations is not to overcome the loss of reference points in space and time. The semantic revolution is that of the words “knowledge” and “truth”.
For society as a whole, the challenge certainly lies in the possibility of knowing everything without learning anything - or even without understanding anything. We owe to Descartes the adage “Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum”: I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am. Today, there is no longer any room for doubt because the truth is within reach for those who know how to search. Since the act of searching appeals to our intellect, the worry is not whether humanity will one day lose its conscience. The concern is more about the nature of this new type of intelligence. It is much more adapted to identify what IS than what COULD be: this generation does not learn History, it reads it, without being able to draw lessons from it for its future. And the truth they think they get is only a mirage.
Google's truth is algorithmic. With the prospect of advertising revenue, web players quickly duplicate, on their own pages, information existing elsewhere, so that the dominant view takes up more and more space. It becomes so dominant that it pushes alternative versions beyond the third or fourth pages of all search engines. Those most familiar with the Internet will agree that any alternative is then invisible, making the dominant version a truth.
The Internet is not the tool of democracy, only that of the majority. According to probability theory, when an experiment is repeated many times, the result that appears most often is also the one that has the highest probability. And the "Google effect" makes low-probability results invisible -- those that are fashionably called black swans in reference to the theory developed by Taleb in 2007.
My conviction is that the errors of recent years can be linked to hierarchical networks which have multiplied probable information to the point of hiding the improbable from the eyes of those who were content to take the information for granted. If, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “Everything to be true must become a religion", my generation will successfully complete this technological revolution by not sacrificing foresight on the altar of Wikipedia.
