Hello.
Schools in 2014 are as archaic
as medicine in 1750.
(Applause)
Schools have not evolved for many centuries.
There are some minor differences.
In my time, the board was black;
today, it's white.
(Laughter)
This inaction is unsustainable today,
for three reasons.
First, a war of the brains has begun.
We wanted a knowledge economy?
We've got it!
And in a knowledge economy, the neuron is the only fuel;
innovation, IQ.
In the world of algorithms,
unbelievable inequalities are created between the most innovative,
gifted people, and less talented people.
An absolutely caricature-like example sums up this situation well.
WhatsApp; 55 employees, around for four years,
and worth $19 billion.
Peugot; more than a 100 years old, more than 100,000 employees,
is worth $12 billion!
55 little geniuses with stratospheric IQs
create more economic value in four years,
than more than 100,000 employees in a company more than 100 years old.
The second reason why the status quo is completely untenable
is that after a failed launch in the 60s,
robotics and artificial intelligence are really reaching maturity now.
The neuron is 550 million years old.
The transistor, 60 years old.
The transistor, the microprocessor, is 10 million times younger
than our neurons.
In 40 years, or something like that,
the transistor will have surpassed the abilities of the biological brain.
This race is lost.
Between ENIAC,
- at the end of the war founded by the great Turing -
and its 350 operations per second,
and the TN2, which carries out 33 million billion operations per second,
and a million billion operations by 2019,
there is an extraordinary leap.
This explosion of digital power
today allows for the emergence of a 2nd generation robotics,
of which Google is the world leader.
Google, which bought up eight of the finest global robotics companies.
The Google Car is just a special type of robot.
Silicon Valley is very optimistic about artificial intelligence.
Ray Kurzweil, the head engineer at Google,
explains that in 2045,
artificial intelligence will be a billion times more powerful
than our eight billion brains put together.
In 30 years.
This alarms a lot of people.
Bill Gates, who's not known for joking around,
estimates that in 2035, that is to say in 20 years,
as near as the death of François Mitterrand,
half of our jobs will have been automated.
Stemming from the convergence of artificial intelligence and robotics.
He even cites nurses,
whom he predicts will be replaced by machines by then.
A huge fear is emerging.
Education is not adapted to allow our kids to compete
against second generation machines.
The third reason why the status quo is unthinkable in schools
is that the society of tomorrow will no longer accept inequalities in IQ.
On average, in this room,
you have an IQ of 130.
The French average is 100.
Everyone thinks that's normal.
In reality, it's intolerable.
IQ gaps will be the last of the major inequalities,
even more so than differences in money.
And intellectual differences are the mother of all inequalities.
Between the most and least talented people,
there is a 14 year difference in life expectancy,
an income gap from one to 15,
huge differences in social classes, degrees, and access to culture.
In 1750, we accepted that a poor child died in the street, without care.
Today, that's unacceptable.
Today we accept enormous differences in intellectual abilities.
The society of the future will no longer accept that.
Ultimately, the NBIC revolution,
that is, nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology,
and cognitive science, that is, artificial intelligence,
neuroscience, and robotics,
are in the process of turning society on its head,
and upending the work market.
School, as we currently know it, is completely unprepared
to allow our students to compete in a world
where smart machines will be ubiquitous
in the coming decades.
What is society to do?
What will society decide upon?
In my opinion, society will demand that schools use
all the resources of NBIC technology to respond to these challenges.
Tomorrow, schools will use MOOCs,
which are a type of second generation online teaching,
and cerebral strengthening technologies,
which we call "neuro-enhancement."
It will tolerate legal doping.
It will accept, in the future, intracerebral implants
to enhance us.
And it will accept intellectual eugenics
via embryonic selection.
In the world of tomorrow, teaching will no longer be about knowing.
Teaching will be about the brain.
We will have the convergence of education, medicine,
information technology, genetics, and neuroscience.
And the teacher will become a "neuro-hacker."
There's still some work left to do.
(Laughter)
They'll become a "neuro-cultivator."
This bringing together of education and school will become natural.
Education will begin before birth.
The brain is an extraordinary organ with high plasticity.
The environment, school, and stimulation
are fundamental in developing our neuronal and synaptic wiring.
Unfortunately, the genetic aspect of our intellectual abilities
is important.
It's a bit more important than we imagined a few years ago.
Recent studies such as this one
tend to show that about 60% of our intellectual abilities
are of genetic origin,
while a whole third is linked to familial influences,
the educational environment, and school.
Silicon Valley, as usual, is at the forefront of this battle,
for better or worse.
Here you have a patent filed by "23andMe", Google's genomics subsidiary
- whose CEO is the ex-wife of Google cofounder Sergeï Brin -
for "designer babies" à la carte and genetic selection of gametes
to make more beautiful babies.
It's even more troubling to our moral norms
that China has launched a huge program
to sequence the DNA of the extremely gifted,
led by an exceptionally gifted person, who is shown here,
with the goal, admitted in the international press,
of using these results
to increase the average IQ of the 21st-century Chinese person.
Will society resist using these technologies?
When we know that Bostrom, the English academic,
demonstrated that, using these technologies,
we could increase a country's average IQ by 60 points in phase one,
and then 120 points in a second phase.
Which would make Bill Gates or Jacques Attali
just within the average in a first phase,
and intellectually deficient compared to the norms of the time
in a second phase.
(Laughter)
Of course, this all seems very far from our own experience.
Eugenics is not for us.
However, we have already gotten caught up in the works of eugenics;
we are already eugenicists.
We are already in a eugenicist civilization.
Here in France, 97% of children with Down's syndrome
are detected and are aborted.
Only one in 30 trisomic fetuses survive past screening.
And in the USA, 28% of Americans,
say they are ready to use genetic scanning technology
to have smarter babies.
What will the parents of the remaining 72% do?
But the transgression doesn't stop there.
Silicon Valley is ready to go even further.
Again, Ray Kurzweil, the lead engineer at Google,
explained to us last March at TED Vancouver,
that in 2035, 20 years from now, we will have intracerebral implants
to connect us more quickly to knowledge and to be more intelligent.
And he warned us that we need to prepare ourselves
to have a hybrid thinking,
a mix of our biological brain
and artificial intelligence connected to our cortex.
This creates an upheaval in our moral and political norms;
it's the end of "Humanity 1.0",
and the arrival, to borrow the phrase of Google's CEO,
of a "Humanity 2.0".
All of this could lead to a neuro-dictatorship,
to a neuro-nightmare.
That's why, if the NBIC schools of tomorrow
will undoubtedly use, alongside teachers,
educational engineers,
neuroscientists and geneticists,
it is especially necessary that we have neuro-ethicists;
"brain ethicists".
To make sure that neuro-education does not turn into neuro-manipulation.
What must be done?
I don't know.
What do we have to do?
I don't know.
I have two convictions, though.
The first is that we don't prevent Silicon Valley
from manufacturing machines that are smarter than us.
As the cofounder of Google, Sergeï Brin, says,
"We will make machines that reason, that think,
and that do things better than we do."
In that context, are we going to leave
people stuck with average, or modest cognitive abilities,
completely outdated in the face of second generation machines,
resulting from the convergence of artificial intelligence and robotics?
I don't believe that's possible.
My second conviction
is that if we collectively and politically decide
in the years and decades to come,
to block technologies that allow us to reduce differences in IQs,
we would be judged very harshly by future generations.
In reality, we are all terrible neuro-conservatives,
who are perfectly content with intolerable IQ gaps.
Thank you.
(Applause)