Our conversation is “difficult”. Not because with have opposed opinions (we could agree on a lot of things) but because our perspectives are very different. I will say that the main effort of Alan Liu is to criticize the present and that my main effort is to envisage the future. Alan is part of a “pessimistic” tradition, that includes, for example, Adorno when he analyses negatively the cultural industries, the jazz and the television. I am part of an optimistic tradition, to which belongs, for example, McLuhan. I think that both traditions are important and even necessary.

Since Alan quotes Kurzweil and Lanier, I’ll have some words about them.

Kurzweil’s singularity is purely based on techno science and ignores almost completely the cultural and social evolution. This is his main flaw, in my opinion. By contrast, I think that the main revolution ahead is not bio-mechanical but cultural. It will be a transformation linked to new writing systems, a new literacy and a radical scientific revolution in humanities that will exploit the ocean of digital data and the automatic symbol manipulation (computing power) that is now available. We still don’t have any strong and valuable intellectual tradition for the use of  the digital medium because it is only one or two generations old. But it is our responsibility of scholars and humanists to build it and to recollect and enhance in this new tradition the hermeneutic knowledge that we inherited from our predecessors.

Several years ago, Lanier predicted the triumph of virtual reality and the dismissal of symbolic systems because he thought that humans would soon interact mainly in a sensori-motor way in 3D virtual worlds. At the time, I strongly disagreed with him. The experience proved that he was completely wrong. He is still wrong today in his condemnation of  collaborative intelligence because – again – he ignores symbolism. He cannot imagine the emergence of (still unknown) intellectual and social conventions that will accommodate the new technical conditions of communication.  By contrast, my predictions of the merging of computer networks and hypertexts (in 1990, before the Web), my forecasting of the emergence of new forms of collective intelligence in the digital medium (in 1994) and my general description of cyber culture as a socio-cultural mutation in a new “social medium” (1997) were rather correct...

The goal of my first slide is to put in perspective the current revolution in communication and to suggest that we should expect... surprising cultural and epistemic mutations from the new “Ubiquity, interconnection and automatic manipulation of symbols”.

My second slide explains my (testable) hypothesis according to which the coming century will witness a huge scientific mutation in humanities and social sciences.

My third slide presents a fractal (at any scale) model of human development based on collective intelligence that could be fed automatically by digital data and explored online by various communities. The main idea here is that collective intelligence could become reflexive (in the minds of individuals) in the digital medium.

The model highlights the symmetry of the relationship between two dialectics. Vertically, the virtual/actual bipolar dialectic juxtaposes and joins the two complementary 3-tuples: networks of documents/persons/bodies and networks of knowledge/will/power. Horizontally, the ternary dialectic sign/being/thing juxtaposes and joins the three complementary pairs: networks of documents/knowledge networks of persons/will and networks of bodies/power. The diagram shows that a sustainable collective intelligence implies a continuous exchange of resources between the six human development capitals.