0:02 Michel Serge first, is that right? I am good. For a very simple reason, and one that is very serious, is that I have been teaching for about forty years now , and for 40 years, I have witnessed the victory of women. Why? Because the best of my students were almost always female students. They are more professional, more attentive, more hardworking. Why? Because arriving on the job market, they have more to prove
0:49 , because since society is still very male-dominated, women obviously need to show a bit more professionalism, and they do show it. But that is not a subjective, personal judgment of mine. It is simply in the statistics; you can see it very clearly. If you look at the success statistics for exams and competitions, you notice that women win by 10 to 12%. Yes, the drawing is Michelangelo, and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, it fits well today. It shows the creation of the world. And what I wanted to show in this drawing is that in a certain way, there is a new world appearing, and that this new
1:36 world is still dominated by coding. So, we took two hands as in Michelangelo's case and coded them entirely. It shows that the new world is subjected to the digital realm in general. It is true that if we look at the computer, it is a machine that has an original solution to the support-message pairing. This support-message pairing has been transformed three times. The first time was in the first millennium BC. We were at the, let's say, oral stage. There was only language; the support was the
2:22 body and the message was the voice. And all of a sudden, with the arrival of writing, the support moved from the body to paper, and the message went from language to writing. And so there, there was a gigantic revolution with the arrival of writing, and this revolution was considerable. Law, politics, commerce with the invention of currency, science, the invention of geometry, and then finally the writing prophets of Israel, the holy scripture. The 2nd revolution is the invention of the printing press. 1500, 1600, let's say the Renaissance. Today, it is the arrival of new technologies, that is to say, computer science. And suddenly, we look at the crises that we are
3:07 experiencing. They are legal, they are political, they are economic; they cover almost the same scientific and religious spectrum. You see, what is in crisis today is basically the same crisis we experienced twice before: at the time of the invention of writing and at the time of the invention of the printing press. Ah, you know, when " Thumbelina" arrives, she stirs up a sort of harvest of grumpy grandpas in her wake. There are a lot of grumpy grandpas looking at Thumbelina with a jaundiced eye saying "it was better before," you know . Yes, but "it was better before," and
3:52 I generally reply to them, it's true, it was better before. We were governed only by such fine people. Stalin, Lenin, Pol Pot, Franco. Yes. And it was much better before. There were 150 million deaths. Yes. 20th century. Really, it was better before. There you go. Yes, it poses a problem for a very simple reason: when I walk into my lecture hall and teach a given subject, I ask myself what the probability is that a fraction of my students already looked up the subject of my lecture on Wikipedia the day before. Consequently, a certain number
4:38 of my students, especially in the United States, come to see me and say, "But sir, why pay so much to get information we've already had at home for years?" You see, it poses a real problem. The teacher at that point is forced to adapt to these new situations , and they adapt in the following way. They know what information is on Wikipedia and they assume what I call the presumption of competence. They no longer assume the students are incompetent, but they do assume they have had access to this information, and the lecture must take into account precisely the fact that students have already had access, and consequently, the nature of the lecture is simply changing. That is to say, this whole
5:31 revolution acts as a sort of pivot, a tipping point for civilization, culture , human relations, and so on, which makes us think that the institutions under which we live today were invented in a period when the world was not what it has become. So there is a sort of obsolescence of the old world and the arrival of a new world. So obviously, it is true that everything is being reinvented in a certain way. There is no doubt. We actually think today that screen-based practice does not involve quite the same neurons as the neurons that were involved in traditional
6:18 reading. And we have very strong proof of that. For example, since Mr. Dehaene from the Academy of Sciences wrote a book where he discovered the neurons of reading, he asks a very interesting question at the end of the book. What were these neurons used for before we invented writing? Well, I simply believe that there are shifts in the exercise of neurons in this regard. It is not the first time that the head has changed. The proof is that before the printing press, whoever was a historian —let's invent someone who was a historian—was obliged to know by heart Titus Livius, Tacitus, the Latin historians, the Greek historians, Thucydides, Herodotus, etc. Why? Because they did not have access to the manuscripts, of course. Or else they had to be in Alexandria or Rome where they had access. Well, one was not always in Alexandria. And consequently,
7:05 they knew them by heart. But the moment the printing press arrives, at that point, uh, Michel de Montaigne, in his tower near Bordeaux, in what he called his library, he has books like Titus Livius and so on, and consequently, he no longer needs to know them by heart. And therefore, he says, "I prefer a well-made head to a well-filled one." And that means the head was well-filled before. It no longer needs to be well-filled. And consequently, the printing press is what changes the head . Well, what is changing today is the head. I believe so, and I tell the story in the book precisely regarding the
7:52 martyrdom of Saint Denis, who had his head cut off. Yes, the computer in front of us, if you will, has a colossal memory, millions of images, and then with refined software, operational possibilities to solve problems. So memory, imagination, reason. But back when I was young, in philosophy treatises, it was written that human knowledge was divided into three faculties. The faculty of memory, the faculty of imagination, the faculty of reason that we had in the brain, in the head, etc., and now it is in front of us. And so there is a sort of objectification, an externalization of our faculties. There are two kinds of
8:45 negative questions that are asked of me . Firstly, questions that are easy to answer because the person is not competent and has never seen new technologies, and then questions of risk, astonishment, danger, suspicion, and so on. And there, we can see precisely, among those on the other side of the crevasse, a kind of anxiety , telling themselves: "I'm not quite used to this world, how could I get used to it?" And that is where the book comes in, and I will tell you why. Because the number of mothers or fathers who tell me thank you, I understand my children better. The number of teachers who tell me thank you, I understand my kids better, even
9:30 elementary teachers if you like, and the number of HR managers now who tell me I understand the new generation entering the job market better when I conduct an interview, it's considerable . That is to say, I get the impression that this book is a guide for these people you are talking about. See, they read books indeed, they are a bit anxious, and thanks to this book, they have a little window onto what is new. Exactly. All I know, indeed, is that this access to information gives young people a kind of motto, and it made me discover the meaning of the word now. And now, holding in hand what? Well,
10:16 she holds places in her hand via GPS, information via Wikipedia, and anyone else by calling them on the phone. You see the mathematician's small-world theorem, and as a result, she holds in her hand a new time, a new space, a new access to information, a new world now holding the world in her hand. Yes. And yet, if you ask the question to someone who could have said "the world is mine" before, you might find Augustus of Rome , X, etc., very rare people. Today, there are 3.75 billion young people in the world who can say that. And that is , after all, the promise of something new from the point of view of political
11:02 relations, institutions, etc., that precisely so many people can say something that even the most powerful could not say. Yeah, that's a new world . So, old media, television for example , I would like to see, someone watching television, he is watching television, he is in front of his computer. When you are in a car, there is the passenger position and the driver position; it is the passive position versus the active position. And that is the difference between old media and new media. On one side, a passive
11:49 position where we fall asleep; we can even become relatively stupid in that position. When you are in an active position, you have a chance to become intelligent. Do you see what I mean? And there is even a figure that amused me a lot. Women today in France have 84.8 years of life expectancy. Which is practically 85, and we tried to divide that figure to show how much is gained per day. Agreed. And today, compared to our ancestors, we have gained 3 hours and 37 minutes of life expectancy per day, which is colossal. And that figure, 3 hours and 37 minutes, corresponds exactly to the average time people spend in front of
12:36 the television, that is to say, the life expectancy they gained. They lose it becoming stupid. It is extraordinary , nonetheless. Extraordinary. Extraordinary. It is extraordinary.
