Engineers, frankly, you don't hear them much. They are numerous, much more numerous than economists. They write a lot, read a lot. They write reports for their companies, but they express themselves very little in the media.
For example, in the debate pages of the major dailies such as Le Monde, Le Figaro, Libération or others, you never read a column written by engineers. You read forums written by sociologists, by philosophers, by economists, by lawyers, by sportsmen sometimes, but never by engineers. But engineers are what we could call the intellectuals of technological action. They are the ones who make all the transformations: 5G, nuclear power, GMOs, etc. And so we need to hear more about what engineers know, what they do, what they think, that they speak, that they write books, that they intervene to say what they think of what they do, what they think of what they know.
That would help us to fuel the debates we've been talking about. Because their silence gives way to other forms of discourse that are much more radical, much less educated, much less competent. Engineers in general are people who have rather moderate positions. They are capable of weighing the pros and cons, of seeing the advantages, the disadvantages, what we gain, what we lose... In short, we need them in public debates.
There are many engineers, nearly 100,000 in France [875,000 in 2019, source CDEFI, editor's note] and they have a weight in public discourse that is very low compared to other professional categories. There are almost no engineers in Parliament, almost no engineers in the Senate, and that is something that should be corrected.
Now engineers to boost the imagination or to set it up, they are in the best position. They are capable of thinking dystopias, capable of imagining the future from projections that they are able to build from what they do and what they know. And they can do it in a positive or negative way. There is the myth of Jules Verne that can be declined in a thousand ways. There are some very positive myths that trust technology to solve the challenges we've been talking about. And then there are others that show that technology leads us to forms of dead ends. Engineers among themselves, in the first instance, are best placed to have these discussions.
There are engineers who are technophobic, some engineers who are technophile, some engineers who are
technolatrous. And to have them discuss among themselves what they expect from technology, what they want to leave to humans, especially with artificial intelligence, is absolutely fascinating. And so I think they are capable of inventing an imagination that is quite realistic. And that's what we're asking for. We're not asking for utopia, we're not asking for dystopia. We're asking to think about the future from what we are capable of imagining while taking into account what we already know.
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=== Étienne Klein ====
Born in 1958, Etienne Klein is a physicist, director of research at the CEA and doctor in philosophy of science. He heads the CEA's Laboratoire de Recherche sur les Sciences de la Matière (LARSIM).
He teaches philosophy of science at Ecole Centrale de Paris.
Every Saturday (at 4 pm) he hosts a program on France-Culture, "La conversation scientifique".
He has just published :
Ce qui est sans être tout à fait, essai sur le vide, Actes Sud, 2019.
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Негізгі бет Ғылым және технология Etienne Klein: "You don't hear Engineers often"
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