In our hands, the computer contains and manages what we used to call our ‘faculties’: a memory thousands of times more powerful than our own; an imagination stocked with millions of icons, and a faculty of reason too …The learning process has left us the incandescent joy of invention. Has this condemned us to become intelligent?’ (Thumbelina, page 19) 

Michel Serres was a great optimist in terms of the potential of information and communication technologies (ICTs). He was sometimes naïve and downplayed the dangers of, for example, the monopolisation of information by big tech companies, the prevalence of misinformation, and the harms of social media.

His hope hinged on access to information, growing connections between people and the transformation of education and learning.  Rather than encouraging tribalism, he saw the potential for building a common ground.

Serres frequently underlined the fact that all living things share four elements of communication. Bacteria, plants and animals all receive, process, store and send information. Computers, the web, the internet now open a new revolution in human communication that Serres thought would be profound. AI has also made rapid strides and Serres anticipated how it possessed further transformational possibilities.

Shannon Vallor in The AI Mirror notes the many dangers of AI but also finds hope that is in line with Serres’ thinking about ICTs. Vallor sets out how AI might help to ‘reclaim our humanity’. The main danger for Vallor is that AI is ‘too much like ourselves.’ Many of those who promote it ‘reflect an utterly barren ideal of human life, one constantly optimized and optimizing for a singular, predefined goal’ (page 91).

‘Today’s data-hungry tools are being built by powerful corporations to feast like insatiable parasites on our own words, images, and thoughts’ (page 63).

Vallor asks a apposite question: ‘Could AI one day not merely reflect our intelligence but enable our wisdom?’ We have ‘to go somewhere we have never been’ (page 204).

Unclogged by memory, Serres saw a potential release of creativity. The internet would replace ‘to know is to remember’ with ‘to think is to invent.’ We might even catch up with the inventive powers and intelligence of the rest of nature.

Serres never supports ‘tech fixes’ to the crisis, but he sees new technologies might initiate a global movement for change and bring us much closer to the rest of nature:

‘Inert or alive, the universe speaks like us, writes like us, says and expresses itself like us, creates data banks, remembers, translates … (Récits d’Humanisme, page 65)

Starting points 

The first book I read by Serres was Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials (2015). I would also recommend Biogea (2012), one of his most autobiographical books. 

Branching Out

I find several of Richard Powers’ novels particularly stimulating in terms of envisioning the future of digital technologies. I would be keen to branch out from the themes found in, for example: Galatea 2.2, The Overstory and Playground.