Robots do not have prostate cancer

This title does not come from a genius of science fiction like Philip K. Dick. It is a sentence of a neurologist interviewed by Anne-Marie Dussault on the program 24/60that the lover and I often look at by sticking.

In this interview, Julien Cavanagh, neurologist doctor at the Atlanta Emory hospital, commented on the words of Donald Trump who had just written on Truth Social that Joe Biden had been replaced by a robot before the end of his presidency. Cavanagh explained that the symptoms of Biden’s cognitive decline could sometimes give him the robotic air, but that it was part of the disease. And he noted that Trump wanted a speedy recovery to Joe Biden, suffering from prostate cancer, stressing, not without irony, that “a robot cannot have prostate cancer”.

Julien Cavanagh did not speak to us as if we were residents, adding that Trump, in this kind of absurd declaration of which he is specialist, probably makes a call of the foot at the most conspiratorial base of the Maga movement, which must remain solid. The scandal, real, to have hidden from the Americans that the president was in cognitive decline, it was not enough, it was necessary to add a layer to please the disciples.

By finishing my macaroni, I told my boyfriend, just as dismayed as I am: “What a dreadful waste of time as having to start Niaiseries like all day long. “While perils accumulate, will we have to start from scratch all the time like that? Having to explain that the earth is round and that vaccines do not cause autism?

You talk about a time to be alive, as they say.

It has become the “new normal” if I believe Giuliano da Empoli, the author of Mage you Kremlin that everyone seems to have read except me. I rather fell into his recent book Predatorswhich is a bit of the continuation of his other essay, Chaos engineerspublished in 2019. We feel that Predators Was written faster, as if to pour an overflow from the author against the Chaos who sets up, as he had announced. The tone is more serious too. This impression that the democratic world as we have known it since the end of the Second World War is perhaps only a parenthesis in history, which returns to the time of the Borgia according to him.

“The time of predators is, basically, only a return to normal,” he writes. The anomaly having been rather the short period during which one thought of being able to restrict the bloody quest for power by a system of rules. However shocking they may be for us, the actions of the Borgians are nothing other than the updated version of what is said in history books, in Vies de Plutarch and in the accounts of Suetonius, in the Renaissance chronicles and in the memories of the old regime. »»

It makes me want to reread the Life of the Twelve Caesars de Suetona, where everyone was spread out, but I also tell myself that the Roman emperors did not have the Internet.

This digital world, in the hands of the tech lords, is the new empire that has nothing to wax, borders and states.

“At the time of predators, the Borgians of the whole planet offer the territories they govern as a laboratory to digital conquistadors, so that they come to deploy their vision of the future without closing with laws and rights of another age. […] Under their conduct, the world is transformed into a patchwork of territories which rush towards a postthumain future, without the slightest safeguard. »»

Recently, one of my friends was outraged to discover in its neighborhood a new bakery where there are only employees, only machines. We take his croissant or his wand, we scan and we go. Of course, prices did not drop with the elimination of the workforce. Has anyone, somewhere, said, “Finally, no more human interaction”? Do we really want this?

When I see elderly people trying to understand what happens to them in front of machines in grocery store or pharmacy, I will think of this extract from Predators : “The fully imagined cultural future are a luxury of yesteryear,” says William Gibson, an era when “now” lasted longer. For us, everything can change so suddenly that future and those of our grandparents do not have enough “now” to stand up “.

The uberization of our lives is already well underway, but where the progress stops and where does control begin?

Giuliano da Empoli relates the case of a small town in France which has turned into a road hell because of the application Waze that use the drivers who seek to spare one or two minutes of traffic. However, it is impossible to speak to anyone about this problem. Like Uber’s deliverers, which we watched mercilessly on our phones, who are stuck with the machine as soon as there is a bug.

For Da Empoli, we are in Kafka castle. “The common sense and sensitivity of a human being have been deliberately dismissed. At best, the delivery man can speak, for the form, to a call center located thousands of kilometers where, after a long wait, he will find the comfort of a human being as devoid of power as him. »»

Robots do not have prostate cancer, of course, but it should never be forgotten that the machine has no heart either.

Predators

Giuliano da Empoli

Gallimard

160 pages