Here is a fifth excerpt from Jacques Limouzy’s memoirs. This text is located at the end of his work and opens up perspectives that the author calls “The future of intelligence”.
It is not enough to seek to know where the world comes from and what the news is doing if one does not imagine what a society which has become post-industrial proposes to accomplish. Is the qualification of an information society sufficient to draw its probable destiny and will man, who has become ultra-communicative, become the citizen or the slave of this network society?
We would have to be naive not to see how much hyper-communication, or if we want the incredible acceleration of exchanges, subjects us to the tyranny of the immediate and the instantaneous.
This is the case, for example, with the constant presence of the portable which, used without limit and without precaution, eliminates any delay, any duration, essential to a healthy reflection, making the course of life inevitably more operational than conceptual.
However, everything that is operational presupposes an objective whose maturity is not instantaneous and a practice that requires training, and there is no longer any!
The accumulation of information of varying densities, of various origins, from sometimes contradictory sources brought to the attention of a subject without delay, imposing on his reflection a formidable exercise of eliminating and choosing obscure, incoherent elements, supposes that a truly rational examination can be exercised under less brief conditions. The concentration in a single instrument of little thickness, considerable archives of various news, achievable and storable iconographies, receptions and transmissions of messages of all kinds should lead to consider that Man will not exist. perfectly that provided with this instrument, to the point that if some malicious one were to deprive him of it, he would hardly know either who he is, nor what he is going to do tomorrow and sometimes immediately.
Become a numeric permanent researcher hanged at the end of the networks which are essential to him, amnesiac of his cultural anteriority for not having accompanied or even dominated his own creations while he was capable of it!
Should we believe that the new instruments of the digital world would have in their acceleration exceeded the intellectual dimension of today’s man and should we propose to destroy them as we did in the past of these idols which we discovered one morning? the probable tyranny?
Or is there a deficit of intelligence?
Certainly not: the problem of the adaptation of Man to his own creations would only be worrying if we expected the resolution of the only natural evolution that would not follow them.
You have to look elsewhere. Examples are before our eyes since in developed countries in just over a century, human life expectancy has doubled. This means that Man, renouncing to undergo evolution, undertook to precede it while waiting one day to lead it.
Admittedly, it is not a question of manipulating intelligence, but how can we not see that the new digital world is capable of stimulating it, of offering it not only the support of oversized calculations but also real adjuvant prostheses of the thought, facilitating creation going, because this digital world can be a liberation, to the point of breaking beyond its own limits, the intellectual dimension of Man, the one who from his origins has faced the unforeseeable and the fantastic of a stranger also constantly renewed.
This is why if he wants to prolong his destiny, Man can only be on the move.
Jacques Limouzy
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