Digital technologies, Ethics and Society

Introduction to the course

The digital age, marked by the rapid emergence and evolution of new technologies, has profoundly transformed the traditional structures of our societies, which are now traversed by new ethical, economic, and political challenges. We have entered forms of life accelerated by technology, in which human cognitive capacities often remain vulnerable when it comes to grasping the full scope of the transformations under way.
This course aims to examine not only these transformations themselves but also the problems they generate and the stakes they involve. It will also consist in analyzing the new professional and interprofessional practices that have emerged—sometimes even been imposed—under the pressure of the accelerated introduction of digital technologies. The destruction of certain jobs and their replacement by new, increasingly technical occupations, oriented toward a primarily mechanical use of technologies, entail certain advantages but also numerous and significant drawbacks.
On the other hand, the course will also invite reflection on the fact that our societies are now often imagined as incapable of generating new myths. In recent years, however, prospective ideas have emerged that seem gradually to construct such mythical representations. We shall examine one of these myths, that of “technological singularity,” together with its more “human” variant, which concerns the prospect of human immortalization through hybridization with technology. This observation offers an interesting standpoint from which to conceptualize and delineate our contemporary societies in the face of technological transformations, particularly about issues of public health, care, and mortality.