Philippe Bihouix

[00:00:05] Well, I have the pleasure of starting the last talk of the day. As you know, as we told you this morning, we launched a responsible track this year, we are very happy. And so, during this next hour, we're going to make you think a little about the limits of technology. We're going to ask you, or rather, you're going to question whether we should always innovate more and more, accelerate more and more, develop more and more products, complicate the world more and more. There you go, question. Uh, to answer, or at least to debate this question, Aurélie will play the journalist or the interviewer, interviewer, Aurélie Gatier, founder of Aspark Consulting. And she will interview Philippe Biwick, who is the CEO of La Rep and who has written works on the environmental cause. Especially the library, there you go, already 10 years ago. So I think in terms of perspective, we can have interesting things. Uh, that's it for me, I'll stop, I'm passing the mic to them.
[00:01:10] Good evening everyone.
[00:01:11] Good evening, how are you?
[00:01:12] Good evening, yes, very well.
[00:01:14] So a small question to uh to begin. Uh, who is a cornucopian in the room?
[00:01:23] Stop lying, there's at least one.
[00:01:25] No one, it's impossible.
[00:01:26] Copian, you know, yeah? No, you don't have it? So I'm going to explain to you, it's very simple, well, Philippe will explain to you what cornucopianism is.
[00:01:36] Well, that goes back a very long time, it's Greek mythology. So, uh, you know the god Cronus, for that matter, the god of time.
[00:01:46] There, that's it, I feel it starting again. So the god Cronus actually had a very bad habit because it had been predicted to him that one of his sons would dethrone him, in fact, he was the king of the gods. So he had a bad habit, which was that he ate his children at birth. Good. So his wife, the goddess Rhea, was not very happy, and when little Zeus is born, she plays a trick, she swaddles little Zeus, or rather she swaddles a stone instead of swaddling Zeus, and then Cronus is fooled, he eats the stone, and Zeus is raised in Crete with a nymph, a goat,
[00:02:18] Amalthea who will feed him her milk. And then, uh, little Zeus, who is already quite vigorous, he grabs a horn from the goat, he breaks a horn from the goat. And to be forgiven, he will say that this horn will always abound in fruits and flowers. It's the horn of plenty, cornucopia in Latin. So cornucopianism or being a cornucopian, well, it's thinking that we are going towards a world of abundance.
[00:02:48] thanks to technology. So it's an old concept, because it starts. almost in the 17th century with Francis Bacon, the New Atlantis, he's the first to theorize the application of sciences,
[00:03:01] the application, uh, of all human knowledge in all fields, in all techniques, and that it will somehow bring happiness to the human race. and he will thus describe this magical island of the New Atlantis and on his recommendation the royal academies will be created.
[00:03:18] uh, of sciences in England, France, etc., so it worked pretty well because now we have smartphones.
[00:03:24] So it's still very effective, Francis Bacon's method. And in fact, that's it, cornucopianism, the idea that we will always push back the limits, that we will never have a shortage. that human beings have always adapted to always innovate, to always find new things. You know these bar jokes a bit like, Well, that's the idea. Or, 60 or 50 years ago, the Club of Rome was already telling us that we wouldn't have any more oil in 50 years, well, look today, not only do we still have plenty, but we even have too much for the climate. And so, here's this idea of illimitism, we could also say, somewhat championed today by great tech figures as well, we could say Jeff Bezos who tells us we're going to the moon because there aren't enough resources on Earth.
[00:04:06] so we're going to go look for them in space and Elon Musk and so on. And so, that's it, that's cornucopianism, a bit of an illness that we all collectively suffer from, without knowing it.
[00:04:17] So, who has ever been even a little bit cornucopian in their life?
[00:04:23] OK, that seems closer to the truth. And all the others, well. Yeah, we'll give you the benefit of the doubt. But then, all this story of mythology and its relation to tech, what is it?
[00:04:38] Well, I'm getting there, it's that indeed I am not a cornucopian. I'm more on the side of the doomsdayers, as the Americans said. At one point, there was a debate between the 50s and 70s, after the end of World War II. In fact, there were some ecologists, a bit like whistleblowers, one could say, who claimed to be Malthusian, they called themselves neo-Malthusians without without being pejorative from that point of view.
[00:05:01] He said, 'Well, it's not possible, we're more and more numerous and we're consuming more and more per person, we're going to break planetary limits.' Well, he didn't quite say it like that, but that was the idea. And very quickly, on the other side, there were economists, futurists, etc., who said,
[00:05:22] the poor will be forced to travel by hypersonic jet, they won't have enough to pay for their personal rocket. These were things that were written very seriously in foresight reports from the 1950s.
[00:05:33] Is everyone okay with planetary limits? Would anyone like us to raise their hand if you'd like us to elaborate a bit?
[00:05:41] That's good, because I'm not a native speaker in planetary limits. but I kind of see which ones, phosphorus and all that. So the limits I actually saw, and I fell into this bath about fifteen years ago, is actually the question of resources. Because ultimately, yes, of course, we haven't actually run out of this or that thing, we've always pushed the limits, it's wonderful. But there's still a small subject, it's the subject of resource consumption, the fact that ultimately our our lives, our our objects, etc., well, they are based on the extraction of mineral resources that we call non-renewable. Non-renewable, why? Well, it's perhaps the opposite of water resources, perhaps fish resources, agricultural resources, if we don't damage the soils and biodiversity too much. Forest resources, all of that renews itself. It renews itself in one year or in a few years or in a few decades, in any case on the scale of a human life, it renews itself or on the scale of a human civilization. And then there are things, stocks, copper, cobalt, gold, whatever you want. Well, that actually doesn't renew itself, or rather, there's a lot of it, but it takes a very long time before sufficient concentrations for us to extract them are formed. It can take tens of millions, hundreds of millions, or even billions of years sometimes. In any case, there are certain reserves that come from that world. And so ultimately, we are in a world that is very material. In fact, we talk a lot about dematerialization, so in tech, in IT and all that, you are hyper dematerialized because you literally do cloud computing and all that, it's great. But in reality, we've never been in such a material world. And we have never extracted so many resources each year. we are even in a, you know economists talk about decoupling, so the fact that we can have growth and then maybe CO2, energy could rather decrease or increase less quickly than economic growth. Well, in metallic resources, we are in over-coupling. We extract more and more each year, and at a faster rate than the growth of global GDP. So it's really very impressive. So what does that mean? It means that in the next 20 to 30 years, we will extract more of all metals than we have extracted throughout human history. Yes, well, it's not very hard to do, it's called an exponential. An exponential curve, the last period consumes, it always takes more than all the previous periods, that's the very principle of the exponential. So, uh, we could say, Because in fact, the idea is to extract a sufficient quantity to effectively fuel industrialization, urbanization. uh, consumption, the fact that we can all have, I don't know, uh, there you go, even everything on earth, a lamp to be able to do homework and read a book in the evening, for example, I don't know. And then, once we've done that, we're going to do circular economy, we're going to do recycling. And indeed metals recycle very well, that's actually the advantage compared to plastics. For example, you know that plastics are polymers, somewhat long chains that eventually degrade, so by recycling them, you have to reinject some virgin material. Well, for metals, it doesn't work like that, a copper cable is easy. You remelt the copper, you make a new copper cable, no problem. Oops, it doesn't quite work like that. In fact, recycling is very difficult in reality, we recycle very poorly because we design increasingly complex objects. In a smartphone, there are 40 different metals ranging from a few milligrams to a few grams depending on the metals. All of this is very miniaturized, very integrated. The way we recycle, broadly speaking, and I'll keep it short, is I separate the screen, the board, the battery, and then I grind it. And then we do pyrometallurgy, hydrometallurgy, a bit of the same stuff as in the ores we extract from mines, it's the same kind of process. Except that in mines, we extract 2, 3, 4, 5 different metals from the same mine. Here, extracting 40 different metals, well, that's a bit difficult, there are metallurgical incompatibilities, all of that is very difficult, there are losses during melting, there you go. And so in the end, we find ourselves with many metals, especially in tech metals, those found in all our electronic objects, from the data center to the microphone, and so on.
[00:09:49] And so on, there aren't all the same things, I'll spare you Mendeleev's table, we'll cover it in the questions if you want. But there you have it, this idea that we have about thirty metals out of the sixty metals in Mendeleev's table. Notably emblematic metals of new technologies, such as phosphors, rare earths for colors in screens, tantalum in capacitors, and so on and so forth, are recycled globally at less than 1%. Scientists tell us. Less than 1%. Scientists are cautious, which means zero in real life. So there you have it, this idea that the more we technologize our lives, the more we surround ourselves with complex objects, especially electronic ones. Not just that, recycling problems are also found in cars, there are many things. But generally speaking, the more we technically enrich our lives, the further we move away from the circular economy, and the faster we deplete our stock of non-renewable resources. We could almost say perhaps, I don't know, that this smartphone will be made, was made, at the expense of the 23rd century dentist, I don't know, I'm projecting far enough not to scare you. Uh, but it's this idea that every resource extracted, which is then poorly recycled, will be dispersed, dispersed in incinerator bottom ash, dispersed in the ocean sometimes because we also use resources for sunscreens and I don't know what, well, then we won't be able to recover them.
[00:11:09] That's still very negative, all of it.
[00:11:14] my phone is second-hand, Philippe, I'd like to defend myself on that point. Uh, but tech still allows for a lot of things to be done, to provide many services, there are things that are perhaps more important than others, we'll come back to that later. But on the Haiti side, there are still quite a few initiatives to improve the situation. You've heard of Green IT, of the Institute for Responsible Digital Technology. So, aren't we finally solving the problem here?
[00:11:43] Yes, well, first of all, I'm an engineer, I'm not a defrocked engineer, I continue to work as an engineer. So I am fascinated by technological progress, also by the ability to do a certain number of things we have been able to do. I am also fascinated by the foolishness of how we use a number of technological advances, if I may say so, or technological innovations. But indeed, there has been an awareness in recent years and this has indeed led to to. to a lot of reflections and desires from companies, etc., regarding digital sobriety. Uh, that's very good, this awareness indeed of the environmental impact. So the environmental impact, by the way, is not just about the inevitable consumption of rare resources, it's also about electricity consumption, of course, that's probably the one that emerges first. But well, to put it simply, today the digital sector emits more greenhouse gases than the aviation sector. There you go, about 1 billion tons of CO2 per year. That's if you stack everything up, meaning networks, the manufacturing of phones, well, of equipment in a broad sense, the operation of data centers, etc. So you're immediately going to tell me, Uh so there, it feeds the world, if I may say so. Whereas aviation is a more negligible part of the world's population that benefits from it, so ultimately, well, yes, every cloud has a silver lining, we know there's this environmental impact, now let's work on it.
[00:13:11] So, there are indeed two answers that you mentioned, Aurélie, the first is Green IT, we could say, so it's how we're going to lower the environmental bill.
[00:13:21] And then the other, we could say, I don't know if these terms are still used, I admit I'm not entirely connected to the right associations perhaps, but there's a bit of Green by IT, so to speak, we were saying this idea that ultimately yes, there is an environmental impact.
[00:13:35] but it's for a good cause, and in fact, it will help by digitizing a number of other sectors, and thus we will ultimately help to lower the environmental bill. So in Green IT, the avenues are numerous indeed. We have equipment that is quite robust, consumes less because there was an impact on the battery, so we stopped making increasingly powerful things because we were also looking for autonomy. Uh, there are things about networks, 5G is incredible, 5G is amazing, it's crazy. Per byte of information, it consumes perhaps, I don't know, 50 to 100 times less per unit of information. uh than 4G or 3G or 2G. Data centers now, well, we're improving power usage effectiveness, so we try to optimize the architecture, put a part to sleep when it's not in use, recover waste heat, cool with cold water rather than air conditioning, so many, many, many techniques, great.
[00:14:30] Except all of that is swept away. It's swept away by what we call the rebound effect, so the rebound effect isn't a new thing, it arrived in the 19th century. Well, it was brought to light in the 19th century by an economist named Stanley Jevons, William Stanley Jevons. So he was an economist who worked on the issue of coal in the United Kingdom. at that time a great power in the 1860s, the United Kingdom exported a lot of coal and was then the world power. And already voices were rising, a bit like the Malthusians, one could say, of the era, it's not it's still copian. uh, who said, So he seizes upon that. Uh, and then he meets manufacturers, designers of steam engines and we realize that steam engines consume less and less coal to produce the same amount of mechanical work. Because, well, we improve efficiency, so there you go, we're making progress. We understand a bit the thermodynamic concepts of heat loss, etc., and so there you go, it's improving. So pretty quickly, people say, And it was, and he had this sudden insight, in fact, to realize that it doesn't work like that at all.
[00:15:45] What will happen is that if steam engines actually consume less coal, then what happens? Mechanical work will be cheaper since it consumes less coal. If mechanical work is cheaper, more people will be interested in taking on this mechanical work and replacing human labor or equipping manufacturing plants, factories, and so on. And so each machine will indeed consume less individually, but there will be many more machines. And so in the end, the coal bill will increase. This is indeed what happened, obviously, and it is the entire technological trajectory of humanity. That is to say, we are haunted by the rebound effect. All companies love to do things more efficiently, consume less energy, consume fewer resources to provide the same products, the same services, it's obvious. It's good for competitiveness, especially at the moment, and for growth besides, so it's good to find something where I'll consume less than others.
[00:16:38] So a part, a good part of the technological progress of the last decades, the last centuries, is indeed to consume less. Today, producing a ton of steel consumes much less energy than 20 or 50 years ago, and even more so than 100 years ago. But we're caught up by the rebound effect. The rebound effect is everywhere. Cars have never consumed so little per kilogram transported. But cars are heavier, more powerful. There you go, and uh, there you go, we find that everywhere. And in IT, obviously, in IT, it's taking on phenomenal proportions. Because obviously, yes, the progress, for that matter, is very, very significant.
[00:17:13] Huh, and then they even promise us quantum computers and I don't know what. But facing that, obviously, the amount of data we produce, that we need to transport, exchange, store, and calculate. Well, it's increasing phenomenally, roughly doubling every 18 months, I think, and now with, I think, it's going to be a bit faster now with artificial intelligence. But there you go, and so in fact, we're caught up, caught up by this kind of thing. So Green IT actually doesn't work very well; it's getting greener and greener, but we consume more and more of it, and so in the end, the environmental bill for digital technology continues to increase. As for Green by IT, well, I'm going to brush it aside because I feel that otherwise Aurélie you're going to stress me out with the timing, we're good, I don't know, no idea, there we go.
[00:17:53] I'm not extended on the subject.
[00:17:56] So Green by IT is another idea, you know. Well, obviously, for a long time, in fact, it's not for 10 years or 5 years that digital technology, if I may say so, has helped to improve processes in industry and so on, well, automation.
[00:18:10] uh, the logic of sensor and control of production lines, steel, cement, many things. That starts in the 50s and 60s, it's not new at all. So, uh, so of course we can count on a number of things like that. But we've fantasized a little further, in fact, an idea that ultimately, by digitizing the world, we would optimize everything and create, for example, Smart Cities. I don't know if this concept, which might already be fading, but this idea of a smart city where, thanks to many sensors and a bit of cybernetics, that's the idea, it comes from the 50s. Uh, and that we would be able to optimize flows, consumptions somewhere.
[00:18:50] that we would have buildings producing solar energy and then charging electric cars in the basement, which would then send part of their energy back to your coffee maker at 6 PM during the peak electricity consumption. well, and so, that idea is actually a bit, it's a bit distorted because we have a very, very strange image of technology today. We've developed bad habits with smartphones, with the internet, this bad habit is to tell ourselves that ultimately, there's something invented, available, that's there, that comes out of the researcher's lab bench or an company, and then within 10 years, we'll spread it across the world. quite simply. Huh, it took 10 years to spread the internet or mobile internet or to spread smartphones and their uses. Not everywhere exactly, but close. And so now we say, And in fact it doesn't quite work like that because the internet and the smartphone. It was about stacking a technical system on existing systems, logistical systems, energy systems, industrial transport systems, you know. And actually, it's more complicated. The Smart City or the hydrogen electric civilization, etc., we can take all the promises. Here, it's about replacing technical systems. And in fact, we have to confront the existing, the existing factories. To the existing cities, there you go, so before transforming Mon rouge into a Smart City, you see, even with a lot of desire, well, in fact, we won't necessarily succeed in doing it at the scale and speed at which it would be desirable to do it. uh, because we don't necessarily have the organizational means, the human means, the financial means to deploy this uh as it should be.
[00:20:39] If I do that, it's because
[00:20:41] It's time to stop. Yes, okay.
[00:20:42] Uh no, but in fact, it's uh, we're talking about adding, adding, adding, we add, we accumulate like little rodents, lots of things, lots of services, lots of goods. We do the same in IT, we do the same everywhere. It's a bit like Jancovici's graph with consumption. I say Jancovici, but it's because he's known, but it's used everywhere with we have never managed to replace one energy with another. Every time we discover a new form of energy, it adds up and it allows us to accelerate the transformation of the world. And uh, and so in fact, once, well, if I understand all your reasoning correctly, uh, you're going to talk to us about sobriety for a while, in fact. So, what's the solution, actually?
[00:21:26] No, but that's it, of course. In fact, the good news is that, particularly in the digital sector, we could actually divide the environmental impact by, let me try a number, 100. And 100, I'm really, uh, calm, you know, it's, it's really by taking room for maneuver from everywhere, actually. Because the waste is so phenomenal and so immense that in reality, we could do a lot of things. So, what could we do? We could effectively work on sobriety first, and then on eco-design. Uh, so sobriety, well, that's uh, sobriety in the number of equipment we manufacture, in the speed at which we replace them, uh, in obsolescence. So it's not just technical obsolescence, by the way, often, in the digital domain, it's systemic obsolescence. It's obsolescence between hardware, software. It's a moment the evolution of software that makes an object technically obsolete that still functioned. Uh, it can be sobriety of uses when we talk about networks. Today, networks. So, I'm just going to give you an example. Uh, so, I, well, I got a little sweaty about the question of 5G deployment, which I told you earlier, is very efficient. The problem with 5G is that, of course, it built on the 2G, 3G, 4G network. So today in France, to organize competition, to ensure that you can choose your operator, we have four 2G networks, four 3G networks, four 4G networks, and four 5G networks.
[00:22:56] Each one has its antennas, its stuff, it mutualizes a bit in some regions, a little bit, well, let's say marginally. But well, to organize competition for me at home, I don't have four gas pipes, four water pipes and four electric cables coming in, we decided that there were things called networks and that the networks were mutualized, we don't put roads in parallel, we don't put rails in parallel either. So we mutualize the networks. Except in telecoms, because somehow Moore's law, if I simplify outrageously, it's not the right way to use it, but it's a bit of that idea. So, finally the gains are such that it's not a problem for everyone to have their own. Today we could ask ourselves the question. Mutualize the networks, have a single access network on which all operators would be, and you divide your electricity bill by two, for example. After that, the question that will indeed arise regarding data centers, uh, well, it's actually the amount of data that we need to move and connect. So it's, it's uh, well, it's the use of video, it's uh, it's the increase in video formats, right? Today, we have videos, we exchange videos, which we know pertinently that with the formats with which we view them, well, the quantity of pixels per square centimeter or per square inch, the quantity of color and the quantity of images per second, all three exceed the capacity of the human eye and brain. Okay, there's no point in going beyond 24 frames per second. and there's no point in having I don't know how many millions of colors and there's no point in having, well. So, well, these are things we could go for. So it's, there are still historical things, you know. If you look at Wikipedia, for example, Wikipedia is about people who, at least at the beginning, didn't have money, not much money. Uh, well, there you go, finally, there was no video on Wikipedia, there were only low-resolution images, there was mainly text and so on. And so in the end, Wikipedia in English, all the knowledge of humanity. I'm simplifying a bit by saying that, I'm being a bit provocative by saying that, but it's not far off, it fit on two CDs, you know, maybe three today now. So, that's a bit of that idea. So, sobriety, we can find it everywhere, we can also find it in the way we design, so it's in the way we design objects. So, objects that are simpler, that have fewer functionalities, that have less computing performance, because ultimately, today, computing performances have become very much about marketing rivalry rather than about real needs. But it can also be on web pages, on software, you know, and we've become a bit lazy, even when we when we when we develop somewhere, we copy-paste, big things, with stuff that's stuck deep down, that will make some code errors deep down. Well, when we could, we could do much simpler things. So that's a bit of that whole idea. And then, uh, there's another idea that I like, it goes a bit with, it echoes the logic of sobriety, but it's what I call technological discernment, techno-discernment.
[00:25:39] That is, well, finally, to tell ourselves, 'Tech always has an impact.' There, an object, but even a non-technical object for that matter, will always have an impact. There's no free lunch, said Baricco, who is, well, an economist, a bit of an environmentalist from the 70s in the United States. So, well, we're going to extract precious resources, I told you earlier that these extracted resources will probably be lost forever. So, don't panic, because in fact there are still a lot of resources, we can go further, we can always go further, there will be a bit of cornucopianism, no problem. We're going to continue to progress in the way, today we're able to open mines with resources that are more, with ores that are poorer, we're going to, well, we're going to, we're going to manage to push the limits. The problem is that it's by consuming undoubtedly a bit more energy, that we have to make deeper holes or bigger holes, simply. Uh, and then there's an impact on biodiversity. Today, it's not necessarily pretty, pretty, for example, what's happening in Indonesia with nickel mines, which are mainly used in electric car batteries, but well, that's an example. Uh, and then tomorrow, we might go, I don't know, to Antarctica, to polymetallic nodules underwater, well, it's going to be a bit horrible, but there are still many, many, many quantities, but still, from a point of view So the idea isn't to say we need to change to avoid scarcity in 25 years, in 15 years, or in 40 years. For me, it's almost a moral obligation, actually, it's about saying, well, it's to avoid or reduce scarcity somewhere in the future, real, real good scarcities, you know. And so, to tell ourselves, I extract these resources, I incorporate them into objects, but good heavens, what for? And so, to ask ourselves the question, well, there are uses about which we could say, well, yeah, it's really practical, I don't know, the surgical assistant robot, the MRI, the digital X-ray at the dentist's, these are cool things, you know. Well, the dentist in the 70s, you probably didn't know him, I knew him, it was really not nice. But uh, well, today, it's still good, they've made progress on anesthesia, but well, there was still, today we manage to do things more, more, well, that's good. Well, I took medical uses, obviously, because they're a bit, they're a bit, they're often the ones that are a bit undeniable. You know, by the way, 5G at the beginning, we were told 5G was for remote surgery. Then we said, but it's not possible, even if you do remote surgery, you need a recovery room, an anesthesiologist, nurses, yes, but no, but then it's, yes, you're right, it's for industry. Well, but when you are told, well, there's always a bit of that, when we want to stop air transport, private jets, at the beginning they tell you it's for transporting hearts and kidneys, so and then after you say, well. It's a bit of that idea. So, medical, we could say, even if medical, we could say there are limits too. Are we going to enhance human beings? Are we going to implant chips in our brains and all that? So we could say, there are perhaps medical uses that themselves could be debatable, but let's assume and simplify by saying it's okay. And then at the other end, at the other end of the chain, well, there's uh, the connected cat food dispenser. It's not the cat that's connected, it's the dispenser. Uh, with facial recognition device to not feed all the cats in the neighborhood, a scale to check that he's doing well, that he's not depressed during your vacation, it sends you the curve of his weight on your smartphone. But it really exists, I mean, it's 299 dollars, I think, on the best sites. You have the connected bikini, the connected bikini that warns you it's time to turn the meat maybe because, well, there's a UV sensor that tells you there. You have connected dresses, connected to your Outlook calendar to make sure you don't go to a party wearing the same dress as a friend.
[00:29:05] But that's awesome!
[00:29:06] But of course, it's great. But there you go. But suddenly, on the other hand, well, economists would talk about cost-benefit ratio. There are environmental costs and then we could say there are social, societal benefits and so on. Well, ultimately, well, where do we draw the line and then obviously I took two rather extreme, rather idiotic examples, but between the two, well, there's a whole range of, ultimately, what we really need or not. And is it true that this world that continues to digitize, this logic of citizens who have become, well, we have become somewhere more and more demanding, it's finally if imagine that you go down into the metro. And that you don't have the arrival, well, in minutes, of the next subway, we're all impatient because we're used to having high-quality passenger information or whatever. Uh, yeah, well, maybe the example isn't well chosen, but if you see what I mean, and then, in fact, there was a world where there were just lots of metros. Maybe even more than today, and well, we didn't know when it was coming, but by ear, it wasn't going to be long.
[00:30:01] So, it's a bit this idea of technological discernment and uh, and uh, well, I think that as a result, today, compared to, for example, the arrival of, of the whole tsunami or the mini tsunami or the semi-tsunami, I don't know, of generative AI, well, there you go. Honestly, if it's for making shopping lists, the week's menu list and the shopping list because mom is burnt out and the mental load is important or dad too, uh well, uh there you go. Uh, well, what's the point, what's the point of running data centers at the end of the planet for that, you know.
[00:30:36] Thank you very much. Uh, a small question, uh, that wasn't planned, if you allow me. Uh, yeah, how, well, how does humanity, what's your vision of things on how we can make sure that humanity manages to make this technological discernment? Manages to become wiser, to finally leave when I see my two boys constantly on their phones, we are actually completely the same on the scale of humanity. How to slow down? What is your vision of things, your convictions on this, what are your convictions?
[00:31:16] So, I'm going to take a precaution, which is that from now on, we've entered another category, and that category is the opinion of a citizen, which is worth what it's worth. Because I'm not an anthropologist, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a political scientist, a sociologist, none of that. I'm just a dumb engineer. So, to tell you what happens in a smartphone and how it will be recycled, I guarantee you what I'm telling you. But to tell you what to do, uh, well, not sure, and so never give me power because I immediately put on my khaki jacket and it's going to go badly. Uh, so, what I some ideas, the first one is that I think that I don't agree with the fact that all this is deeply rooted in our humanity, that ultimately there's the story of the striatum and all that, you see, and that ultimately there's dopamine and that we consume and we love to consume, we're big boors and the more we consume. I don't agree with that. Uh, because we're not just doped animals, we are precisely political animals, said I don't know, Aristotle no doubt, and that as a result, we have a capacity to have an overlay and a capacity for discussion. And there were moments in humanity, for once, we proved fleetingly, of course, and perhaps only in certain places of humanity, I don't know, that it wasn't necessarily always more that was better, always higher, always further, always stronger, consume always more, go on vacation. There were moments, for example, in ancient Greece, philosophy, the cardinal virtues in ancient Greece, one of the cardinal virtues was temperance. Temperance, what is it? Well, it's the opposite of hubris. Hubris is excess. So the idea, the idea that in fact, one had to rather restrict somewhere one's desires, one's cravings, the craving, some needs, you might say, but that's for ultimately having a good life, having a happy life. A bit like Rousseau's idea too, who said that to be happy, you just need to align your desires with your capabilities, your capabilities. So, it's a bit dangerous because it doesn't really encourage pushing oneself, but well, you see this idea that ultimately, we actually self-manipulate. When I say 'we' from a systemic point of view, well, it's in the newspapers, among influencers, stuff like that. Oh, effectively, now with amplified means that are the smartphone and others, well, it's that we tell ourselves it's great to go on vacation to Dubai, to have your private pool, to fly back and forth to New York to eat ice cream and I don't know what. And in fact, no, it's not necessarily, it's not necessarily a foundation of humanity. Another example, I don't know, in Melanesia, in Oceania, well, in Melanesia especially, the Big Men, so the people who were the most respected, the great men in the villages, they weren't the richest, they were often the poorest in fact, because to be respected, you had to give everything. You had to spend your time offering gifts everywhere around you, and in fact, finally, the ability to, well, to be recognized by others, it was the ability to give. There was a bit of that in the Roman Empire, but you have to be careful with Roman examples, but there was what we called evergetism, where the rich were forced to pay, they paid for fountains, they paid for games, they paid for aqueducts, they paid for roads. So, to get themselves elected. Well, it's not great, but and then they had money for many others, in distant provinces, but there was this idea of a bit of systematic redistribution by the rich. Well, today, it's not like that. Today, you're not respected because you have the capacity to give a maximum. You're respected because you're super rich, so you've taken a maximum. There you go, these are examples like that. So I think that for me, there's no there's no ineluctability, sorry, it's hard to say, from that point of view. After that, there's the question of the economic system. Indeed, we are in a complicated economic system that compels growth, that compels growth because no one wants to not have growth. When you are a company, you want to have growth, the state wants growth, etc. And besides, we don't really know if my technological discernment would work, we don't really know, because ultimately, imagine if we said, well, I want to keep the microprocessors and therefore the nanometric etching in Taiwan, I don't know, because I want to keep MRIs, scanners and then I don't know what, still some phones that we change less often, but still, to call the firefighters, it's practical. Well, in fact, ultimately today, the price of MRI depends, it's mutualized, all the development costs, all the factory costs, all the industrial tools, they are mutualized with the hundreds of millions of smartphones, computers and so on that are churned out every year in factories. And if I can do this part, because I say it's great, I'm going to make my phone last for 10 years and my computer for 15 years, because we'll enter a world, into an age of maintenance, into a world where we repair, we have modular things, we're able to open it, to change only one part and so on. Well, ultimately, can I keep MRIs at the same price, or in any case, what is the economic system that I manage to put in place in such a logic? It's not true only in IT, we could say, can I tomorrow have ball bearing factories to continue making bicycles? If I no longer have millions or billions of cars, well, millions, sorry, of cars to manufacture each year. Can I keep some SMEs that manufacture cranes if I if I build much less because ultimately I have millions of under-occupied or vacant homes? So, that's that idea. But I think that still, well, there are leads that are interesting. Uh, uh, there's the path of innovation that is not only technical. An innovation that is social, that is societal, that is cultural, that is organizational, right? So, the world of zero waste where I bring back my packaging, it's washed, I don't know, it's not a world of technological innovation, it's a world of organizational innovation. You have to bring companies together around the table, a logistician, transporters, bottlers, consumers, and all that, for it to work, it's social innovation somewhere. So there's that idea and then maybe we also need political and economic innovation. There, and there we are very timid. And that's quite funny because we go back completely into the world of Francis Bacon in the 17th century, so Bacon who, well, encouraged technological innovation. Well, he didn't use those words, but that was the idea. And then in other works, he said, however, everything that is innovation other than technical, that's too dangerous. That causes revolutions, those things, it's really painful, social innovations and all. And even, by the way, innovations at the time, probably. And even, by the way, the innovations at the time, probably a century before, there were the wars of religion, and in the 17th century, there were still quite a few problems with that. And so, for example, innovation from a religious point of view was punishable by death in some countries, there were edicts like that. So, you had to innovate in technology, but certainly not in everything else. And in fact, I think we've stayed like that. We've stayed in this logic, in fact, of, well, we're in a society that is perhaps almost a new religion, the religion of tech, you could say, which has all the codes of religion. There is the holy place, it's uh, Silicon Valley, there are the great masses, the Consumer Electronic Show, there are the oracles, the high priests, whom we will comment on in the lower clergy will comment on Twitter all of the, well, the things. Yeah, there are all the codes, actually, it's, it's, and if you are, and if you are against innovation or against the expenditure of public money to support innovation and so on, you are a heretic, literally. So I'm a bit of a heretic. I allow myself to be a heretic because I went to an engineering school and uh, and comma, and I annoy them. But, but actually, if I wasn't an engineer, I'd have a hard time having this conversation because I wouldn't be as I should be. So, that's a bit of the idea. Well, in this world that glorifies innovation. If it's about making a fiscal innovation, a political test, I don't know, for the citizen's convention on climate or whatever, we're good, we're fine. There you go, very good. Uh, and well, in fact, well, in this world, we are on the contrary very timid, very fearful about any possible innovation other than technical. So it's still quite interesting to say that. Uh, and besides, I would add to that that for me, human beings are not innovators. I said just now, well, the striatum and all that, I don't really believe it. I don't think that fundamentally, human beings are innovators. I'm taking up the thesis of a great man named Lewis Mumford who wrote in the 60s. Uh, well, that's a, well, I'll tell you if you want. Uh, The Age of the Machine, I think it's called. Uh, And so he, in fact, he said that man, in fact, had been selected in the Paleolithic for his capacity, for his capacity to imitate. The King Gouran also said that, by the way, the great prehistoric man. This idea that in fact at some point we had a fragile technical capital, we I wasn't there but so it was how we hit a flint, how we sewed some mammoth skins and I don't know what. And that after that, well, there were some complicated moments, glaciations and all that, oh dear. And so in fact, what was needed was to preserve a very fragile technical capital by being very few in number, and if we lost something, it was better not to take the risk of innovating so as not to lose the fragile technical capital. Well, that's kind of the idea. So I translated that from a Darwinian point of view, meaning if you hit flints, not like dad or mom, well, you'd get your skull smashed in and you wouldn't reproduce. And what does that give? It actually gives the fact that human beings are not innovators, human beings are above all formidable cooperators and formidable imitators. In fact, that's what it is, ultimately, we don't innovate, we imitate others. It's also the logic of mimetic rivalry, you know, of René Girard. This idea that when we do something, everyone else will imitate. And I think that's also a very interesting resource. Because, precisely, we live by codes where we imitate people, we ultimately use this capacity for imitation and not innovation. So after that, once in 100 times, once in 1000 times, there are people who innovate, that's great, let's go and imitate them when they innovate in the right direction. But that, well, ultimately, uh, we could perfectly well imagine deploying these levers uh, in the service of a just and real transition somewhere.
[00:40:51] This is the famous social tipping point, we need to have early adopters of certain things so that others imitate. Among others, of course. It was my little transition phrase to, I think it's time to move on to audience Q&A. So, enjoy. Do some have questions over there in the middle?
[00:41:16] Yeah, he's going to put the mic. No, I don't think so. innovation. So after, once in a hundred, once in a thousand, there are those who innovate, it's great, let's go and imitate them when they innovate in the right direction. But that's it, ultimately, we could very well imagine deploying these levers to serve a just and real transition somewhere.
[00:40:50] It's that famous social tipping point. We need to have early adopters of certain things so that others imitate, among other things, of course. This was my little transition phrase because I think it's time to move on to public Q&A. So, take advantage of it. Does anyone have any questions over there in the middle?
[00:41:20] Yeah, you're going to put the microphone. No, I can, yeah. Hello.
[00:41:27] Uh, quick question, so if uh if GDP growth is totally correlated to resource growth, and we need to stop having resource growth, does that mean we need to stop, we need to stop having general growth? Can the capitalist system work in that framework? And if the capitalist system doesn't work, are there other alternative systems that have proven themselves or on which there are experiments in the four corners of the world?
[00:41:58] Well, same, I'm not an economist, so but yes, a small precaution is that earlier I voluntarily took uh so global GDP and global extraction growth uh of of of metal resources. Afterwards, we could try to look at uh country by country or region by region, because there's still a good part of this growth that was also a catch-up in urbanization, industrialization, digitalization of large countries uh in Asia, starting with China, but not only. But indeed, even in a country like France, we could say it's great, I don't know, well actually yes, we still consume more and more resources, but rather in the form of imported products or something else. Well. Uh, this clarification being made, so the so yes, today uh even in energy, even in CO2, we manage to do a bit of relative decoupling but not absolute decoupling. There is no GDP rising today and uh and uh CO2 falling. When it falls, uh it falls with the balance of imports and exports. Uh and then it can fall once, indeed, if I replace a coal-fired power plant with a gas-fired power plant, for example, I make a big gain, so countries that were very coal-dependent, for example, that have switched to much more gas and/or renewable energy, they managed to close a gap. But you do that once, you know, you pull out the, you take off the slice of ham, and then you're down to the bone. And once you want to switch from a gas plant to something else, it becomes more complicated for many reasons. I'm not saying it's impossible, it just becomes more complicated. So yes, I think we need to invent a world of post-growth uh in the sense of GDP. So I don't know if uh well, if we need to break indicators or anything, there are many things. It's a bit of a sea serpent, the question of indicators uh indicators of of of happiness and economic health and and human health in GDP. But we would have to reinvent that. Today, alas, there is no real school of post-growth economics, so to speak. There are you have somewhat normal economists, well, mainstream, well, rather liberal, with more or less sub-trends, and then you have uh rather, well, neo-Keynesians or uh with Marxist tendencies, possibly, I don't know, I'm not a specialist, but you see who will be more on more planned things. So it's more about questions of do we let the market do more or less, do we subsidize more or less, what types of taxation, redistribution are there to accelerate the energy renovation of buildings, to accelerate the deployment of RES, renewable energies, sorry, etcetera, etcetera. But there isn't, I don't think there's a school today of post-growth economics that says, well, in a contracting world, how will we pay for pensions, uh how does it work, redistribution, etcetera. I think it's a bit of a desert to date because it doesn't interest many people to finance that, no doubt, uh for now, neither from the public authority's point of view, nor from the private sector's point of view.
[00:45:00] Uh, thank you very much. It's been a few years now that I go to all the conferences that talk about raising awareness of environmental impacts, and I've given talks on the subject too. And now I'm at the stage where I wonder if we shouldn't actually give talks on sociology, on politics, at events like Flo Cone, but also Agile Tour and so on. Uh because in fact, we're starting to be well aware of the impacts, there's digital waste, there are many things. I don't know if you've given it at other events for professionals like us in IT. But now I'm starting to think that actually, well, we're finally coming back to the end of the discussion that I found very interesting, in fact, when you discussed, well, what's your vision and how could we do things differently. And now, I'm at the stage where I'm telling myself, well, we really should talk about economics, because we're not sufficiently trained on the subject. We are professionals, we have great responsibilities because we earn money to be in tech, and so for me, there's training to be done on this subject, in fact. So I don't know.
[00:45:50] So, the organizers of the Flocon, are we ready to move to the political side of things? Uh, in black, uh, economic already, it's perhaps less less divisive. Do you want to do you want to answer something or I think that, well, I well, there you go, we can imagine many things. But uh the idea is especially that if it makes you want to do it, well, go into politics. I wish you good luck, but uh but for example, creating discussion groups, there are there are tons of things happening in the field of ecology. And I'm very committed to it, it was really for Well, there you go, but so in this system, what do you think about it, actually? Because in the end, we always end up discussing it. And so that made me wonder. Like, just your opinion like that, it's not at all a criticism or anything, not at all, really.
[00:46:43] No, but yes, I've done a few events like that, but it's not, it's not my main lane, that's for sure, and above all, I'm not a full-time speaker, so, but uh, well, I think anyway, as I said earlier, this question of digital sobriety is gaining momentum, uh quite strongly. And afterwards, we can resolve the question in a more or less cavalier way, meaning that, well, the tech giants, basically, their idea is to say, uh, anyway, I'm only sourcing from renewable energies, so move along, nothing to see here. Possibly, I can put little robot disassemblers in my phones and all that, yeah, yeah, I know what I'm talking about. So it's true that it's quite quickly dismissed because in fact they say, yes, I consume more and more energy, I don't care, because in fact, with the money I make, I even help you to use renewable energies, even more than what I consume. So everything is fine. In fact, that's it, it's, it's, it's a bit of a cavalier way of looking at things because obviously not everyone could buy this green electricity because at some point otherwise, uh, well, at night and all that, it would be more complicated. Uh and then there's, well, and after that there's, there's, there's more or less depth and experience, but there are things happening. I mean, even in slightly, I don't know if we can call them startups, but we see people uh trying to design uh more modular, more repairable phones that last longer. We're seeing that with computers now too. We're seeing telecom operators offering to bill you uh based on the data consumed. Just as we're seeing electricity operators who also tell you the less you consume, the more I'll pay you, or the less it will cost you, etcetera. So we're seeing these little experiments that are not uninteresting. I think it's difficult to completely convince people, but perhaps for teenagers, things like that, we could prohibit from a regulatory point of view the flat rate. The notion of a flat rate is quite astonishing too. Ultimately we could say, well, it doesn't exist for water, it doesn't exist for energy. Why does it exist in digital, things like that?
[00:48:53] Hello, well, I'm granting myself 15 seconds of advertising because actually tomorrow I'll be in your place, my dear Philippe, at 4:35 PM to talk about the end of Moore's Law. So, uh, we're good, well, thanks for the intro because it was wonderful. Uh, end of advertising, and before resuming normal activity, I'm going to ask Philippe a question, which is: what is the possible tipping point for there to be this or this inflection point, I mean, what is the event or what could it look like, the moment when we start to take another direction regarding growth? How could we, at what point could we, I mean, what is the trigger in society that makes us stop seeking growth to uh, finally move collectively towards temperance. I, I think something is needed because for me, I've been writing about ecology for 20 years, uh, I've had a podcast on the subject for 4 years, and I see almost nothing moving. I see more and more people getting interested, but I tell myself something is needed, a trigger is needed, it's needed, and it wasn't the pandemic. it could have been, and what does it look like, what could it look like, that moment when collectively we say, 'Okay, this can't go on anymore.' We need to decide to change and go in a direction that is one of temperance and no longer one of hubris.
[00:50:21] Yeah, well, I don't have the answer, because I'm not a futurologist, so sorry, I'm going to disappoint. But actually I think there are these are questions of maybe are there big movements, big swings of history, I don't know. We could look for example at the face of ultra-performance. So it's not the pandemic but it was related ultimately to consecutive disorders and the pandemic and then to an accelerated digitalization of the pandemic, but we saw for example uh certain industries that were strongly affected by by the difficulties in recovering microprocessors that were essentially manufactured in Taiwan at that time. Well, that's developing elsewhere now, but uh well with car factories that were putting back analog meters to get cars out, because there weren't enough chips for a car, a car now contains a lot of electronic chips. Uh and we could disenrich them on many things. Before before removing the chip, there's one that's very useful, which is the optimization of the engine to avoid particles. Too many particles, but there are many others that are not very useful. Uh so between this ultra-performance that's very globalized, because in fact, we are still very exposed to these global value chains, it's crazy, because what's engraved in Taiwan is with machines made in Holland, whose scientific bridges are in Belgium with Swiss optics and American lenses. Uh because you have to guide the laser beam to the nanometer, even better than the nanometer. So these are beautiful toys. So all of that is very globalized. And in fact, facing this globalization and perhaps, well, a century that won't be much more serene, perhaps, I don't know, I hope so, but than the 20th, I mean from a geopolitical point of view, from the point of view of relations and so on, well, there's also this question of resilience ultimately. So we could say, well, a slightly more low-tech world, a world where we tinker with bikes, we repair, we know how to do things, there are repair cafés everywhere, there are there's really a fabric of SMEs that knows how to tinker, well, things, well, it's a world where perhaps we'll suffer fewer shortages uh perhaps linked to events left and right. So the industry, the hydro industry, I don't want to create any scares of 2040, so let's go easy, because again, humanity is very adaptable, but uh I don't know, the hydrogen industry, for example, it's based today, well, maybe it will progress, but it's based on electrolyzers and and fuel cells with it's with platinum, platinoids, there you go. Well, platinum, platinoids, that's Russia, South Africa. These are the only two places on earth where there's enough concentrated to recover it. You have to be friends with one of the two or both. Well, there you go, will it be stable long enough. There you go. And we can take many examples like that. And so, well, the question of resilience, I find it interesting. The question perhaps, but the problem is that each generation asks it a bit: are we happier with all of this? And so indeed, we realize today, uh I don't know, yeah, the digitalization of school, the digitalization of childhood and all that, does it make, well, I don't know, what does it make from an anthropological point of view, I'm projecting myself into the Paleolithic and in fact they are perhaps a bit normal because we had other ways of doing that. I don't know, but it's still a bit, it's still a large-scale experiment without a safety net, so. Uh so there you go, maybe maybe in the swings of history, it will happen, but I've been interested in a lot of texts written in the 70s for example that were quite innovative from that point of view because it was, well, a bit like post-68 and all that. And then there was still full employment or almost, so I think there was less stress, there were a lot of people doing a lot of things haphazardly, psychology studies and then ending up in big careers anyway, uh who are still here today by the way, those who are messing us up a bit. Uh but in fact, ultimately today, we almost only reinvent things that were already all written. So in fact, we are almost catching up, well, contextualized of course with a different technological world and all that, but almost catching up on lost ground from the 80s and 90s. So it's a bit, it's a bit scary to say that. For me in the West, in the West now.
[00:54:20] Well, I think we'd have, well, tons of questions. I think we'd have, well. But unfortunately, time is up. Uh so thank you very much. Thank you very much.
[00:54:31] Thank you. Thank you.
[00:54:32] Thank you. Thank you.

Transcript (Translated)