Portrait(s) de France(s) : Digital, what's at stake for society?
In the "metaverse", that fictional virtual universe that Mark Zuckerberg seems so passionate about, will we be able to detect artificial agents (also known as "chatbots") - which don't represent any human being - from avatars representing real people?
Laurence Devillers, Sorbonne UniversityAnnie Blandin-Obernesser, IMT Atlantique - Institut Mines-TélécomElodie Gentina, IÉSEG School of ManagementFabrice Le Guel, Université Paris-SaclayMichel Robert, University of Montpellier and Pierre-Antoine Chardel, Institut Mines-Télécom Business School
There are two types of chatbots: the ones we use every day in banks, whose responses are planned in advance, and the more recent ones, which take advantage of numerous technological advances such as "transformers" and are capable of producing unprecedented speech.
Soon, digital technology will offer personalized, emotional systems, a kind of "virtual friends", even "guardian angels", but also "deadbots", which emulate deceased people after assimilating mountains of data about them.
What are the stakes of this digital posterity and these new worlds opening up to us? These are the questions we ask ourselves in this fifth edition of our special newsletter on the 2022 presidential election, "Portrait(s) de France(s)".
Generally speaking, in France and abroad, this deployment is opening up new avenues of reflection on the links between sovereignty and digital technology, through regulations - notably the European regulation planned for 2022 - and the control of resources and infrastructures. The deployment of metavers also raises questions about digital costs.
Who is deciding tomorrow's society and the deployment of digital technologies? What are the major digital divides?
Finally, as young people turn to the Internet for information, with social networks as their first point of access, will we all be seeing the same world tomorrow?
Digital orientations in France: a democratic and civic challenge
Digital technologies are having an ever-increasing impact on our lives, but decision-making on their deployment oscillates between a culture of horizontality and technocratic decisions.
Sovereignty and digital: mastering our destiny
How is digital sovereignty being built in concrete terms, at a time when it seems to be threatened by the strategies and ambitions of foreign companies and certain states?
The physical reality of the digital world
Michael Kauffmann/Wikimedia, CC BY
Far from floating in the ether, our data is hosted in data centers that are subject to industrial risks and consume enormous amounts of electricity. What's the future? What are the solutions?
Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, Brut... a new way for young people to get information
Long gone are the days of family gatherings to watch the 8pm news. It's often on their own, during breaks in the day, that young people follow the news, preferring social networks and videos.
In pictures: access, uses, artificial intelligence, the three digital divides
There isn't just one digital divide, but several. Discover them in illustrations and graphics.
Laurence Devillers, Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Sorbonne UniversityAnnie Blandin-Obernesser, Professor of Law, IMT Atlantique - Institut Mines-TélécomElodie Gentina, Associate professor, marketing, IÉSEG School of ManagementFabrice Le Guel, Economist, Université Paris-SaclayMichel Robert, Professor of Microelectronics, University of Montpellier and Pierre-Antoine Chardel, Professor of Social Sciences and Ethics, member of the Observatoire de l'éthique publique, Institut Mines-Télécom Business School
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.