Artificial intelligence (AI) promises us emancipation. Each citizen becomes an efficient and liberated translator, coder, graphic designer or self-employed person. The price of this autonomy is the methodical destruction of the small interdependencies that hold a society together.
Because it is not great national solidarity or institutions that create the social contract, it is everyday relationships, however small they may be. The colleague you have to convince, the service provider you negotiate with or the neighbor you can’t avoid.
The real cement of the social contract
These micro-obligations to the other are, anthropologically, the driving force of all human cooperation. AI gradually removes them, occupying the vacant space of our solitudes by offering what humans cannot guarantee: permanent availability, non-existent value judgment and a perfect simulation of empathy.
Why inflict on yourself the cost of a complex, changing and disappointing human relationship when the machine is more convenient than otherness? AI creates systemic interdependence on a global scale and destroys, at the same time, the small local interdependencies which constitute the real cement of the social contract.
This shift is not just a subject of social philosophy because it has direct political consequences that public authorities are slow to clearly name. When individuals stop having the physical and daily experience of the collective, the very idea of the common good collapses.
Distrust is created in isolation
The generalized distrust that we observe towards institutions, experts and the media is not only the effect of disinformation but the symptom of a population that has lost the habit of dealing with others. We no longer trust what we no longer associate with.
At the same time, the economic value produced by these new forms of autonomy is captured by a handful of non-European technological giants. French society is gaining in individual efficiency and losing collective anchoring, which is a silent disaster.
The response to this crisis will not come from technological chauvinism because pitting French AI against American AI solves nothing. It will come from the ability to measure what we destroy, and to decide collectively what we want to protect.
Compensate for link collapse
Faced with an atomized population, withdrawn into closed algorithmic bubbles, the State will be forced to accentuate its role to compensate for the collapse of the link. This is not an inevitable trajectory but a political choice that we have not yet consciously made.
True sovereignty is not measured in technological market shares but in the capacity of a society to keep the experience of the other alive. We have optimized the individual to the detriment of the collective.
We are silently sacrificing it on the altar of convenience. It is not a technological accident but a collective renunciation that we have chosen for comfort and which we can still decide to stop.
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