So I'm Harry Halpin and I'm presenting "The philosophical technical legacy of Bernard
Stiegler." I'm a researcher at the Center Leo Apostel as part of the Free University of Brussels
and also the Ceo of Nym Technologies. Now this is a very personal and
tragic presentation because Bernard was my postdoctoral advisor at Centre Pompidou but
he also passed away last year in August and what we hope to get from this presentation to really
understand the philosophical repercussions of his thought in terms of human computer interaction,
design and the future of the digital itself. Now what does philosophy have to do with computing
and AI? It has quite a lot and while there's been a lot of talk of embeddedness and embodiment and
somehow Heidegger is viewed as a revolutionary thinker, I think it's good to remember
that a lot of this thought has already been absorbed uh by Google and as evidence I present
Hubert Dreyfus who introduced at least the first division of Being and Time into computer science
with his critique of AI entitled "What computers still can't do: A critique of artificial reason"
and this work was followed up by Terry Winograd - who's standing next to him - who with his
co-author Fernando Flores wrote a wonderful book called "Understanding Computers and
Cognition: A new foundation for design." They explicitly took Heideggerian thought
and applied it to technological concepts like ready-to-hand, "zuhandenheit", as when one is
interacting with computers so much that it appears almost invisible. However these insights have been
absorbed into Google - and the Googleplex. Can we find another way out? I think we can as Stiegler's
philosophy points towards a way out. He starts at a similar place to my Ph.D. advisor Andy Clark
with his extended mind hypothesis, yet Bernard uses very difficult to understand vocabulary.
I'm just going to give a quick overview of it. So Bernard believes that our very memories are now
externalized outside of our mind in a process he calls exosomatization. He builds on Husserl as he
says, well, you know when you see something your initial phenomenon - as phenomenology - is
the primary retention and then your memory of it which is different from what you've seen,
your memory of reading a book is different from the experience you had as the book
is read. This is your secondary retention. The ternary retention is your notes perhaps on paper,
perhaps or on computers or perhaps in visualizations or in data. These ternary
retentions as put forward by Stiegler are the most important as they are necessary because
it's through a process of turning to our retentions that we become true individuals
via what Simondon called "individuation" as part of society and technology over time. Stiegler's
critique is that this digital revolution "short-circuits" this transmission of memories,
retentions,between generations. So what Stiegler hoped to do is that, based on his own advisor
Derrida's pharmakon, turn technology from something that poisons our existence - that
"short-circuits" - into something that could restore this relationship between generations
which he believed could be done through integrating humanities and the sciences into
what he called Digital Studies. This was necessary to prevent even white-collar workers like Alan
Greenspan from being stripped of their knowledge so becoming proletarian and - proletarianized!
Stiegler pushed forward a contributory economy based on contributions to knowledge which he
believed could preserve rather than destroy difference and even exit the climate crisis,
leaving what he called the Neganthropocene - a new epoch where technology takes care of the biosphere
rather destroying it, as negentropy is the growth, rather than destruction. of difference.
Now how Stiegler wanted to create this new society was via software programs. So I worked with him
on creating collective and decentralized social networks based on the "crabgrass" software from
Riseup.net, which combines features of wikis with social networking and collective creation
of what Stiegler would call ternary retentions and he also wanted to add dialogue and discourse
to these kinds of retentions. So at his yearly conferences he used a piece of software made by
Samuel Huron called Polemictweet. Polemic tweet essentially let you ask questions, disagree,
agree, and and otherwise try to structure the kind of horrible unstructured conversations we
see currently on Twitter. Finally, he wanted people to read and understand text and video
collectively and he longed talk about what was his, I think final most important, work in this
regard: A way of annotating collectively digital data which he believe again could help us form
and become true individuals. This is incredibly important at the end because
Stiegler believed individuals - again, this was his favorite diagram - formed through a cycle
with their software interactions and feedback...but not to control them but
to harness their inherent power and to give them the ability to restore their dignity, how to live,
savoir-faire and savoir-vivre. This I think is Stiegler's final and most important legacy,
and i can only say that I do hope you sincerely have a time to read his actual works and watch
as many excellent video productions. He was a kind and gentle mentor. When I came
to france looking for help and he told me, "I don't care about your political issues,
your problem being accused of terrorism, I care that I think you misunderstand Heidegger.
It's important as a computer scientist that you understand Heidegger and understand philosophy."