Context
The Good Manager and Team of Art are two European projects created to redesign the use of digital technologies and to transform it into a sober and inclusive space. During the Sober and Inclusive Digital Meetings, by means of workshops, discussions, and round tables, we had the pleasure to make you discover these projects and values, with good practices and committed professionals.
Below is the transcript of the first round-table of the Meetings. Our speakers have reflected upon the opportunities and responsibilities that the notions of sobriety and inclusiveness have brought to the professional digital world for several years.
Speakers:
- Lorraine de Montenay – Independent consultant and member of GreenIT.fr,
- Julie Préciat – Project Manager for Innovation and Citizenship at the service of Accessibility,
- Tom Lann – Director of Programs for an engaged and responsible digital world – Latitudes.
- An exchange moderated by Mathieu Latrubesse, CEO d’Edulog.
Retranscription
(Mathieu Latrubesse) My first question, to launch the debate, is the following: it is said that you accompany startups, how are the companies and organizations involved? Concerning digital accessibility, how does it work?
(Julie Préciat) Later on, we will perhaps focus on the methodology we used, to make this subject of accessibility a little more attractive, since it’s a subject dear to many of us. It’s important, it’s a crucial issue, and especially when you start as a young company, there are many imperatives, particularly economic ones, and representations that can block these actions. These are exchanges between us, do not hesitate to interact with me if you have any questions.
Digital accessibility is included in the law of February 11, 2005. It is a pioneer law for several reasons: for the integration of people with disabilities in society, a semantic shift has been proceeded – I think it is important – in what is called disability. We used to talk about the nature of the people, what defined them, we called them handicapped people, after the Second World War, since we had the image of the crippled, the invalids, etc. There were a lot of rather pejorative feelings about this notion. Then we had a semantic shift, like I said, we talked about disabled people, with maybe a little more focus on the physical or mental handicap, and then we spoke about people in situation of handicap, thanks to the law of February 11, 2005 on the participation, the equal rights and opportunities for people with disabilities. The term co-responsibility was born, that is to say that a situation of disability of a person is also defined according to the context that society offers him. So, concerning companies or actors in general, there are several issues, one is social, of course. The issue of accessibility is also concerning other people that are not physically or mentally disabled. We will not only talk about disability but also about people who are far away from digital world, which concerns in general nearly 14 million of French people. I remember that we are 68 million in France, according to the latest figures.
So it concerns mainly twelve million French people, in the active population – so between 15 and 65 years old, but I don’t want to make a debate with the age of retirement at this moment. In any case it concerns a lot of people, it’s clear, and 80% of the handicaps are invisible. Sorry if you already have these numbers, but they are still important anchors for talking about this. Indeed, we know more about the alternatives that may exist for visual or auditory disabilities, but much less about the consequences of a motor handicap such as tremors, which concern 1 in 250 people, as well as cognitive disorders (dysorthography, dyscalculia, dyslexia, etc.), which concern 6 million French people. So there is a real issue at stake here.
Then there is an economic issue. For a company, we will indeed talk about strengthening their competitive advantages, since we are talking about CSR: our customers are here considered as partners, so it’s important to put things in place from a fair point of view. I think we’ll see other things later, there is also a legal environment that has emerged with sanctions. Sanctions that concern companies with a turnover of 250 million per year, which concerns a lot of companies, but many are protected on these subjects, and the sanction, to be a little concrete, is 20,000 euros per service – according to my statements. So, 20 thousand euros per department in a large group, we can multiply that by the number of departments affected by digital. Knowing that in a large group, there are many departments affected by digital.
(M.L.) So, finally, they are only brakes? Many people realize the importance of accessibility, but perhaps companies see it as a “necessary evil” or as a constraint given the weight of the sanctions?
(J.P.) I’m giving you more of a context here. I’ll maybe talk about how we worked with these young companies later. Because it’s a concrete method, and its obstacles have to be recognized and understood. But it doesn’t only have obstacles. In any case, for the handicap we have representations, and as long as we are not affected by a situation of disability, we have many stereotypes. For example, if only in recruitment – fortunately, fewer and fewer recruiters are trained and aware – we can say to ourselves: a disabled person, with a motor disability – we always have the image of the famous pictogram – will not be able to do this job with me, so I won’t even look at the CV if it says “disabled worker”. So yes, there are a lot of obstacles, but in fact, companies are concerned both for their employees and for their customers.
(M.L.) Is it about the image of the company to the outside world? It’s a bit of marketing?
(J.P.) No, we are dealing with human rights issues. There is also supranational, European law, which provides a framework for these issues, with various directives. And from there, there are several transpositions in France which make that today we have the law for the digital (09,19,08) since 2016. Now we are waiting for the transposition of the last European directive of digital accessibility in 2019. There is a bill that was introduced in November, recently, that will be deployed by ordinance, so we’ll see how it goes. But, there will be no sanctions before 2027, on accessibility issues. The total conformity is expected for 2027.
(M.L.) It’s not just a squeeze?
(Tom Lann) No, not at all. I wanted to talk about something that might be of interest to you, who also manages teams of developers. I was the director of a web agency that was trying to be smart for a slightly different digital world at Simplon. It is free training, for people in retraining, to become developers. The final goal is to get a diploma and try to find a job. So I was in charge of this web agency, and I took it over with this will to produce a code that is accessible, more sober, and still of quality. I don’t know if we succeeded, but in any case, we managed to implement some very concrete and interesting things.
In fact, it started with a web quality certification called UpQuast which deals with sobriety, accessibility and quality. I myself passed this certification as a manager, everyone passed it, including those who were a little more distant from digital technology in the teams, and it’s true that it planted a first seed to understand to what extent all these subjects are linked, and to what extent producing an accessible service is also producing a more sober service, in it’s also producing a more efficient and secure service. I already had developers committed to using technology as a lever to respond to socio-environmental challenges environmental challenges, they were already biased towards that, they were happy to work on this type of project, they wanted to produce quality, that led to something more global and more general, and that finally triggered in them a passion for accessibility, a desire to pay attention to these standards. So it was both something useful and very present, but it gave them the impression, and this is the truth, that they were doing their job better as developers.
This is something we really pushed. The other thing I wanted to add is that we had a partner, Numerica, which is an adapted company, making people with disabilities work on developer logics, but sometimes also on webmaster and content management. This collaboration allowed us to really understand disability, and how much trouble they were getting into, when these good practices and standards were not met. As a consequence, sensitivity was increased on these points.
(M.L.) In fact it is a question of awareness. A question of example, of representation, as you said earlier? Does accessibility involve several issues such as environment, eco-design, etc. Why do these things connect?
(L.dM.) If I can bounce back on this, on the environmental aspect, there is something that needs to be understood, if there is a link between eco-design and accessibility, it is really from the point of view of the question of sobriety. Because when we make content more accessible, it is necessarily more sober. We’re going to think in terms of accessibility, when it’s accessible on older terminals, they automatically load more hardly and more slowly, so the service must be as sober as possible. This will allow us to have better accessibility. But we also have to think about the content being efficient, by removing the fat, we mechanically reduce the environmental impacts.
In order to understand what we mean by environmental impacts, I would like to ask a question to the audience: in your opinion, between the data centers on the one hand, the network, and user equipment (mobile phones, computers, printers, etc.) on the other, which one has the most impact on the environment?
Obviously all three have impact. I’m sorry to all of you who raised their hand for data centers, but where there is the most impact is on the terminals. Why is that? All Simply put, we have a multitude of devices, we all have several. You all have a phone, most of you have a smartphone, a computer, or possibly several, a television for many. There are always screens everywhere. We have a place where we have a huge central hard drive, so it’s not perfect in terms of impact, it still has a huge environmental impact, in terms of electricity consumption. Howerver the principle of sharing means that it has less impact than if we had all the additional hard drives we would need to store our content. It is just like if instead of everybody having a hard drive we had a place where amassive hard drive stood and collected our datas. It is not perfect in terms of environmental impact, especially with the power consumption, but the principal of mutualization puts a limit in the pollution it implies.
This was an exemple to set the environmental background. There is also another data Iwant to give you: imagine that you have a budget, we all have a budget to respect, to stay below five degrees of global warming, it is an annual budget. In this budget, we will include everything we do in our daily life, so it goes from eating, caring for ourselves, housing, heating, going through everything to everything that is digital, going to school, etc. What we have seen in our European study is that digital that it already represents 40% of this budget. If we want to stay within our envelope, but don’t touch our digital uses, that means that we have a little less than 60% left to do everything else. That means that digital devices takes a lot of place. What can we do to remove some of the fat that eats up space on other things necessary to life? I think that in terms of accessibility, it’s all about this question: what is necessary? How do we focus on what is useful ?
(M.L.) Okay, but then we link accessibility with the environment by saying that we remove everything that is not useful. Basically, we remove the superfluous, we go to the essential. What interests me as a company owner is to ask myself if there is a reference framework, something I can fit into. It is also important for me to know if I can label these things. Earlier, you talked about a standard, that I didn’t know about. Are there other frameworks like that, are there tools to label this today?
(L.dM.) I don’t really like to put a label on something, because it’s always a bit tricky to make sure that the label really covers everything. But there are things that can be put in place. Already, within a company, and on a digital service, we can do eco-design. So, we can ask ourselves a whole bunch of questions, there are some kind of reading grids of questions that we can ask ourselves to reduce the impacts of our service. In particular, at GreenIT, we have published the 115 best practices of web eco-design, i.e. 115 good ideas for reducing the environmental impact of your service. And then we have quite a few tools like that, which allow us to understand better where the impacts are. The best thing to do is to be able to measure what we’re talking about. Do I measure what my digital service does? do I measure the environmental impacts of digital technology throughout my company – at the IT department level? Or, at another scale, do I measure the impacts of a whole continent, for example. And by measuring, it allows us to know where to start, what we are going to tackle. Do I tackle, a subject that is too open if I didn’t analysis it, or will I be able to focus on where there are the most reasons to reduce these impacts. The first thing to do is to analyze the situation, and we will use it as a barometer. Let’s take the example of a benchmark for companies: every year, there are about thirty companies that provide information about their IT services.
It lets us know what’s going to have the most impact. It’s first and foremost the equipment of all the people in the company: laptops, desktops, phones, etc. That’s the first impact. After that, there will be a second impact: the travel of the IT department and the service providers. Of course, a service provider who regularly travels for the needs of the IT department will more pollute, and this will be quantified quite quickly. And the third impact is the power consumption of the data centers, which will add weight to the scale. So, once we know that, it’s easier to know how to reduce the impact, because we know what we’re going to tackle. We know that we will be able to extend the life of equipment: instead of having a phone that we will change every two years, we will try to keep it as long as possible until it is almost unusable. There is also companies that allow you to rent a phone that will be reconditioned. Thus, there are solutions that exist.
(M.L.) On your site, Latitudes, there is also a panel of actions. Does it go towards these approaches?
(T.L.) Yes, completely. Indeed, there are 115 good practices on eco-design. We have listed the 101 actions for a more responsible technology, on the different impacts, because once again, for us everything is linked: sobriety, accessibility, citizenship, respect for human beings. This is an opportunity to see that we can act at all levels, whether it is personal or organizational. Like I said, we propose this list, which remains open, so if some of you have ideas for actions, please feel free to complete this. Last November, we launched the TechforGood Challenge, we brought together 250 corporate tech players who wanted to commit to creating teams and taking on as many challenges as possible. Feel free to take a look at it, there will be things to do at every stage of the project. Then, one of the points that is important for us is also this question of commitment: we will not reach perfection at the first, we will have to do it again. The first time, the objective is to make efforts, to go in the right direction, and to be in a state of awareness. This is something important at Latitudes, which we emphasize. There is a community of tech experts who are committed to programs for a more responsible tech throughout France. In relation to what you said, the fact of being able to measure things is necessarily very important in a logic of sobriety and accessibility. But it is crucial to ask this question from the start, that is to say that each profession in digital design will have an impact on sobriety and accessibility, so we must not react too late. I take the example of a house: if at the end of the construction of a building, we realize that we forgot to make a passage for wheelchairs, it will be very expensive to break everything down and redo it. It’s a bit the same thing for a website, and to be aware that we did things wrong once we put the finishing touches on our website, it’s obviously a bit complicated. For a company manager, it also has a financial impact, not negligible afterwards.
(M.L.) Do you offer support, if so how? How do you take into account the programmes of the start-ups you support? How can companies be guided towards these objectives from the outset?
Perhaps we should give examples of what sobriety is. For example, when linking an email with an attachment (and this works on an individual level) would be like having a light on all day. Is it true?
(L.dM.) Yes and no. The example that was used to measure, the typical e-mail with an attachment. It’s not every e-mail, but an e-mail with a heavy PDF. This is to be qualified. For example, I often tell people: don’t waste time deleting your mails, if you really want to have an environmental impact with respect to digital, you’ll just waste your time. The best thing to do is to try to send as few e-mails as possible, and then to avoid putting a big attachment. When you send an email to fifteen people, the best thing, in this case,is to have a shared document, where you just have to send the link.
(M.L.) And what about the images that we put in the signatures?
(L.dM.) That’s it, if we can avoid it, it’s better. After all, we’re talking about e-mail, it’s small in terms of everything that can have an impact, but yes, obviously. It’s better to avoid putting images, especially since it’s repeated every time. Do you have any idea what a blind person can use to access the email? The idea is to see if you have a representation of the way how one can use the web when one is blind or visually impaired. So, do you have any idea of an assistive tool that a person concerned by blindness can use when they go on their computer to access content?
(Audience interaction: “Digital magnifiers,” “voice control,”)
(J.P.) Digital magnifiers, right. You meant voice control, too? Right, a screen reader, and sometimes a Braille page if the person uses a Braille keyboard. Here, accessibility means both access to digital tools – tablets, smartphones, etc. – and accessing, distributing, reading a document. For example, when you send a scanned document, if I use a screen reader, I can’t access the content. If on Instagram, a communicator for an organization puts all the essential information – meeting place for an event, for example – in infographics, I’m not going to access, with my assistive tools, the content. So, to answer your question partly, what is important is to hire people who are blind or visually impaired, so that they can better manage the web, since it is a tool for everyday use, to raise awareness among the teams. Inclusion, I believe, is that. Often, we talk about accessibility. I can very well arrive in a company, being visually impaired but not like other people, and I will only use the magnifying glass, I will not need to use a screen reader for my daily work. That was just to give that dimension. Accessibility as well as sobriety a constant and multidimensional issue. For a recruitment interview, the best thing to do is to ask if the person has special needs to be welcomed – it gives an example of inclusion to your employes. Accessibility as well as digital sobriety is a stake of training, you may have good practices but if you want to touch your integrator, your designer, you have to have common thoughts on the subject, otherwise you don’t bring them along.
(M.L.) Okay, my question is how do we do it? Are there any associations or programs to support entrepreneurship? In fact, today, a lot of people attending school, learn a lot of things and being prepared to accessibility issues. But for the moment, there are entrepreneurs, including myself, who are forty years old and it’s too late, they won’t go to school anymore…
(J.P.) You learn something throughout your life!
(M.L.) Yes, but does this type of support exist? To learn you need resources.
(J.P.) For accessibility in the field of disability, on the employer’s side of the public service, there is a support set up by the FIPHFP, the Fund for the Integration of the Disabled in the Public Service, which collects the taxes of the the integration of disabled people in the civil service. They are the ones who collect the taxes from companies that do not respect the law. Today, there is a digital commission set up by the FIPHFP, in the public service. For private companies, the label “entreprise adaptée” is part of it, and then there are the charters.
(M.L.) It reassures me.
(J.P.) Yes, it reassures you. There are audits that are carried out on accessibility, there are levels of compliance that are quite feasible, and I’m giving Tom a hand with the labels.
(T.L.) There are standards on the labels, and here I agree with what you said earlier: there is a need to be able to measure things, and to be able to measure them, there must be references, otherwise everyone brings their own measure, and it is not comparable to anything. So it is particularly all the work that has been done recently on sobriety. It is older for accessibility – you were talking about it, since 2005, there has been a law, and a reference system called the RGAA which in France is authoritative and which lists all the good practices and rules that make it possible to have an accessible service. Beyond that, I think that even if you say you’re too old, this logic of educating as much as possible those who are going to work in the digital world or in the wider world, it is part of the challenges. For me, there is no age limit on this. Moreover, this is the case, we are gathering a community of tech players who are not all experts. We train them and make them aware of these issues, once again, the idea is not to make them experts in sobriety, but to be aware of the basic principles, to disseminate this, to allow them to become more competent, and to listen to them as well. And I think that’s an important thing, to make sure that it’s not just top-down. What initiatives are you taking to raise awareness, also within these teams? Either through skills sponsorship, or through commitment, or through awareness-raising workshops. We were talking earlier about being able to better control the dimensions related to energy, everything that allows us to are small ways to ensure that you are not the only one to bear the burden of these issues within your company.
(L.dM.) On resources that can be useful for training, we have a blog that has existed for 17 years, called GreenIT.fr. There are lots of small articles for training on different questions: for instance, if I want to choose an eco-responsible phone, what do I do? If I want to convince people to reduce their digital footprint, what do I talk to them about? There are recommendations on a lot of different topics: from how to recycle your phone to what consumes in a screen. A lot of topics are covered. How you use your datacenter, also, for the pros. We have training courses that are made available, in two or three days, to professionals, to people who want to learn how to eco-design a service. There is an association for those who want to get involved in advocacy, because in order to change things, you also have to change things at an institutional level. So there are many possible ways to get involved in responsible digital technology, to get informed, to get trained. We also have tools that can be used directly, we were talking about the 115 practices, we also have the eco-index: you go to the page, you put the web address of the site you want to analyze, you put the eco-index, you click on ENTER, then it gives you the result to tell you if the site is performing or not in terms of eco-design, how it could be improved. Already, you have a first entry point to reduce the impacts of a website. We have a lot of little tools like that, we have a forum of people who are doing eco-design in their company, or who are eco-responsible referents, and who want to discuss together.They are called the CNR – the responsible digital collective.
(M.L.) So, a lot of tools exist. And is there a competency framework? Is it valued individually or collectively, to say “we can do it” on the job market?
(L.dM.) For the moment, this is still a new market, the first responsible digital referents are the pioneers. We don’t yet have a complete reference framework on the subject, which would be very interesting.
(M.L.) And on a European scale?
(J.P.) What about accessibility?
(M.L.) Is this question qualified? Do we say here, “here in Paris”? Everywhere in France? in Europe? Or in the Labo de l’édition?
(J.P.) I was talking about it earlier, but I didn’t want to go into too much detail on the subject. There is a legislative act for 2019, which follows on from the directive. Basically: all the ticket offices, the ATMs, everything that concerns shared services at the European level, trains from one country to another, all these services, banks too, there is a right to use them. There is a European law that is coercive. Afterwards, it is up to each country to transpose its own law, until 2045, we gave 20 years. So yes, there is a European law, there is a transposition on our French law, then there are also aids, since this year the state has set up a site where you can make a diagnosis, for aids of accessibility. The best thing is to go through a structure that will accompany you to do things properly. If you code well, clean, the site will be better referenced, more intelligible, it will in fact address the greatest number. There are also financial aids, in certain situations.
(M.L.) So you are still accompanied.
(J.P.) We are supported, and this support must be put in place as soon as possible. I don’t know if there are startups here, or young entrepreneurs? (Audiance interaction) You are an entrepreneur; you don’t have any employees yet? Do you want to hire? It’s like web design, you integrate accessibility into your user experience, it’s not a separate subject. In the company, it’s the same, in your employee path, your HR processes, you question your work situation, you take stock. The idea is not to exclude any of your employees.
(M.L.) I’m always very enthusiastic, but I have the impression that it’s quite theoretical. Do we have any figures today – in France?
(J.P.) (J.P.) Yes, on the public side, we’re at 6%, the famous legal rate, which is a bit ugly but everyone has to fight.
(M.L.) But there are many who prefer to pay?
(J.P.) In the public sector, we have not exceeded 6%, in the private sector we are not even at 4%. Indeed, some companies prefer to pay – but less and less. We’ve been working on these issues for 20 years. Today you have companies that are subject to these penalties, those with a turnover of more than 150 million in the digital sphere, they have certain obligations, they must also appoint a digital accessibility referent. There are a lot of jobs today that are emerging in the field of accessibility. So, yes, things are moving forward.
(M.L.) Do you agree?
(L.dM.) On the environmental impacts of digital technology, we can’t say that things are progressing fast enough, but clearly there is still plenty of room for improvement, many things that can be optimized. But we can see that there are some companies that are driving the process. In the GreenIT collective, we have experts of the environmental impacts of digital technology, we support companies, and we regularly have people who come to us to help them. We regularly have people who contact us and say, “I would like to work with you because I would like to optimize my digital service in an eco-responsible way, and I would like to work with someone who is independent”. So it’s good that we already have people who are in this respectful and virtuous approach. Now, it must be generalized, of course.
(M.L.) And that, for the environment, we feel that there is a real demand, for accessibility on the other hand?
(T.L.) There are also figures, in fact: I published a study according to which 43% of developers who didn’t even know that there were laws related to accessibility took it into account. Once again, at the level of education, there is a whole section of developers who have learned their trade without ever being confronted with these issues, so we still must work on it. We are not there yet.
(J.P.) And so, in the public, you are students, in publishing? Digital publishing and paper? Is the topic of accessibility integrated in your courses? No? For this type of book, I don’t know. For books that are already on the market, there is a threshold in 2030, to make them accessible. Already, if we can just have an oral version of the content, maybe, for this specific situation… But we’re already struggling with copying courses for dyslexics, so that’s fine. We have time. I’m surprised you haven’t heard about the problems of contrast, colour blindness or clear language.
(M.L.) When you explain these things to me, I have the impression that we were actually starting from quite a long way off, that globally there has been an awareness, that there are resources. Now, what are the next steps? Are there other issues? What is the next step, according to each of the three of you?
(T.L.) Once again, I come back to this: I am convinced that in order to have a systemic impact, it is also you, the students, who will make the digital world of tomorrow. I am convinced that if we have more people who want to use tech as a lever for these challenges, the domino effect will also be greater with companies. Perhaps today, more and more companies are taking these steps because they think it’s the right thing to do, but there are others that do it because of the fines they might get, or also for the image they might have. There are some who are not on the right track on these issues, and who and will suffer damages that are sometimes very important.
(Audience interaction: a student talks about the publishing house where she works, which received an unexpected accessibility guideline requiring content descriptions for complex books, including maps. The team did not felt supported in this process, although they fully understood the good intention behind the directive).
(J.P.) I think that, if at some point, there is a wave effect on the fact of using digital technology for accessibility and for the environment, and that afterwards it is donemassively, we will have companies that will change their practices in terms of recruitment, in terms of mission, in terms of HR management. I’m betting on it, that doesn’t mean that we should forget about companies while this snowball effect is taking place, but there is also the awareness of training for companies, tools, rules, standards to be put in place, not hesitating to be even more rigid, I’m sure. It takes time, it’s normal that it takes time.
I believe that commitment is something that is up to each individuals. It is to say to oneself at one’s level, as a director, as a future employee in a publishing house, how I can pay tribute to what I love, and how I can make it more intelligible for everybody. That’s also what it means to make it accessible to as many people as possible. There is also the aspect of knowledge, education. Today, we have a lot of free tools to test the contrast of your texts. It would be a pleasure to share one of them with you, so if you’re interested, these are things that we can exchange, and I think that at your own level there are things to link. One person out of two is confronted one day with a situation of handicap. I’m not even talking about the state of the planet The reference frame will be modified again because there will be a consultation of the associative actors, so we will talk about it, and above all we must appoint ambassadors.
There are plenty of challenges. To close on accessibility, think that we must not forget that public services must be accessible for all. For example we find ourselves today with problems like some services are only accessible online, and that is a real problem. I think that we have a real challenge to take up, in relation to what we call digital facilitation, so that we can access more easily to a service or simply to ensure that it can be accessed other than online.
(M.L.) Like the Navigo pass, during confinement: you don’t have Internet, you can’t get your money back.
(L.dM.) (L.dM.) We need to make a detox from the digital world. Today, if I give you a challenge: when we leave this room, we all turn off our smartphones, and keep them off for a week. You immediately realise that it would be a bit complicated. The use of the smartphone is caught up in a social injunction. It is not easy to detox from digital. It traps us all collectively: we have WhatsApp because everyone has WhatsApp, we have this, we have that, as a society we have set the limit: “I will disengage myself from such a network, from such a way of being contacted” so that we can regain some serenity when using digital devices, some room for maneuver. To remake sense, to have collective moments too. For example, screens have a huge environmental impact, the bigger the screen the more impact it has. Why is it that instead of multiplying the screens, each one its own, why don’t we rehabilitate the convivial moment of sharing a screen – this is the principle of the theater, I don’t reinvent the world. So this question of mutualization asks a question of society, conviviality. How do we live together? How do we share these technology devices? Because behind it there is also a question of impact on the climate, we deplete metal resources, we also create an enormous mass of waste, we wonder why we have so many heavy metals in our blood, but we have to look at what we eat. There is this real question that will not go away like a pile of dust under the carpet. Behind it, there is the question of how do I do to have less equipment, and to make it last as long as possible. For me, the challenges are really of that order. A final challenge, in relation to the use of artificial intelligence: there is a real question in relation to artificial intelligence because it is extremely consuming. It learns throughout its life, each time new information is injected into it, but it consumes a lot of resources and energy. We have to be careful to reintroduce the notion of sobriety in relation to this use, because the question is the same as for any other digital use: do we really need it? For example, we can use artificial intelligence for health, to detect breast cancer, artificial intelligence has a 95% success rate, which is very good. We also manage to train dogs, which can detect with 100% success to recognize breast cancer, after only six months of training. At some point in the balance, succeeding in having an alternative that is low-tech, and that doesn’t make us dependent on resources that are exhaustible, are rare. This raises a whole bunch of questions that we haven’t mentioned, questions of ethics and human rights.
(M.L.) It’s true that the principle of low-tech has not been discussed here. How can we make ourselves aware of this today, how can we adopt low-tech reflexes?
(L.dM.) There is a question to ask: do I really need it? At this question about each use that I make, I can already succeed in gradually reducing my usage.
(T.L.) There is a crossroads. This means that artificial intelligence and disability, for example, raise the question of need.
(M.L.) For automated reading, do you need it?
(T.L.) Yes, artificial intelligence, can now be used to recreate a voice. And it’s true that there are technological advances where sometimes we are not on low-tech, certainly, but on questions of need.
(L.dM.) For example, in these situations, once artificial intelligence has been developed, it doesn’t need to learn anything else. So somewhere it’s a use that can be done with a kind of sobriety.
(T.L.) The question of whether we really need it should be completed with: what are the other alternatives? Knowing the other alternatives, being aware of them, understanding their impact.
(M.L.) Tomorrow is a world where we have asked ourselves the question, where did we took a step back? Is that what we want for ourselves?
(L.dM.) As far as the environment is concerned, it would be great to reach a world where we have succeeded in making decisive choices to ensure that we can continue to live in good conditions.