Friday May 3, the Université populaire des Landes did not fail in its objective of being a place of meeting, conviviality and participation in the life of the city. Nearly 450 people from all walks of life came to Les Jacobins to attend a dramatized conference entitled: “No(s) Futures, the worst is the future? »
On board the UP40 plane, one-night passengers took off on an immersive journey to the 2050s. In stand-up or lecturer mode, Léa Falco, figure of the climate generation, Raphaël Doan, essayist and specialist in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Louis Gautier, former Secretary General of Defense and National Security, addressed, in an exercise in dystopia, the consequences of climate change and the loss of biodiversity, the hazards of ‘a loss of control of the AI and the return of war to Europe. Each, through a fictional writing on the borders of a threatening reality, challenged the conscience of the listeners.
AI, like the industrial revolution in the 19th centurye century, constitutes a change of magnitude. For Raphaël Dolan, more than the rebellion of robots against humans, the overriding concern is the collapse of knowledge, through laziness or comfort. “We would be homogenized without common references,” he warns.
Literary stroll
“From the re-election of Biden to Ukraine’s difficulty in winning the war against Russia, the tearing of Europeans, the pressure from China, the crises in the Middle East and Africa”, Louis Gautier weaves the tangle fictional but disturbing events on a planetary scale.
In a “letter to Élise”, a little archaeologist, Léa Falco tells how global warming is slowly creeping into our minds. “First of all, it’s far. Then at one point, it’s our home… The rise of the sea, the floods of the Adour until the burning of the Landes forest in 2031. » The pact with nature has been broken.
After having defined it as “a fluid, fragile and volatile notion”, the writer Laurent Gaudé, in a literary stroll, proposes to build happiness by favoring the meeting, the sharing banquet, the accomplishment instead of the objective . Without forgetting to cultivate the beauty of mystery such as “his wonder at a flight of starlings”, he says he wants to “reconsider collective happiness. [Pour cela] we need fallows in our lives! »
The UP 40 intends to soon reissue this innovative evening in form, during conferences around the end of life or even on a more local subject: hunting.
