Tech & Innovation

Technè, among the Greeks, names the knowledge that transforms matter into a willed result. Nothing that the hand or the mind makes is ever neutral: every technology bears the intention of the one who conceived it. A glass, to drink. A car, to move. Instagram, to connect people to one another.

That intention may serve man, raise his condition. Or it may fail him, most often by subjecting him. Thus TikTok may boast of contributing to human creation and to freedom of expression; that does not prevent it from being addictive and stupefying, its algorithm reinforcing in each person the confirmation bias by flooding them with content that goes their way, when exposure to contradiction is essential to the development of a critical and nuanced mind.

A world in which man is subjected to technology is dystopian. It seems nevertheless to be the paradigm toward which we are advancing, by dint of “technological progress.” An animated film, Wall-E, pushes this drift to its paroxysm: humans have entrusted every task to machines, until they spend their days motionless, a screen stuck to the face, no longer building or undertaking anything.

But what, then, is the end of technology, if not to simplify human life? To answer that question, it is necessary to know what the end of man is, and whether a possible “elevation” would allow him to reach it. Forgr is convinced that the simplification of man's life is not his end. One cannot say what man ought to become. But whatever the answer, if it exists, it will only come through the exercise of his reason and his discernment, never through their atrophy.

And that is precisely what a technology that subjects us threatens: not to answer in our place, but to deprive us, through the habit of a delegated faculty, of the very instrument by which an answer might one day arise.

The end of technology then becomes more modest, and more certain: to unburden man of what belongs, in Hannah Arendt, to labor — that necessity which repeats itself without ever leaving anything behind — in order to give him back the time and the capacity to exercise what belongs only to him.

This domain welcomes every project carried by that demand: to free man from what occupies him without raising him, in order to give him back what alone could, one day, raise him.