Sublime

Cette citation du futuriste Alvin Toffler reflète ce que père riche m’a dit il y a deux décennies: «L’illettré du 21e siècle ne sera pas celui qui ne sait ni lire ni écrire, mais celui qui est incapable d’apprendre, de désapprendre et de réapprendre.»

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This drive toward totalitarian technocracy is what educator and media theorist Neil Postman called technopoly, the “submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.”

An entirely new realm of economic activity that is not hostage to physical violence will emerge in cyberspace. The most obvious benefits will flow to the “cognitive elite,” who will increasingly operate outside political boundaries.

The merger of infotech and biotech might soon push billions of humans out of the job market and undermine both liberty and equality. Big Data algorithms might create digital dictatorships in which all power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite while most people suffer not from exploitation but from something far worse—irrelevance.

Through all of human history from its earliest beginnings until now, there have been only three basic stages of economic life: (1) hunting-and-gathering societies; (2) agricultural societies; and (3) industrial societies. Now, looming over the horizon, is something entirely new, the fourth stage of social organization: information societies.

Technology is not popular nowadays. As I write these words in early 2018, it even appears to be an enemy of our entire way of life: it disrupts whole industries; it displaces jobs; it widens the inequality gap; it endangers our privacy; it undermines the economic security that was at the heart of the post-war social compact; it even threatens democ

“The world is very different now, for man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.”