By Dominique Jacquet

I began my career in 1981 at the French subsidiary of Eastman Kodak.

That same year, Akio Morita, the iconic co-founder and CEO of Sony, presented the Mavica, explaining (with a smile) that this electronic revolution would simply knock Kodak out of the game, which, unfortunately, is exactly what happened.

Everyone knows that the first digital camera came out of Kodak’s R&D labs, but the company sensed the danger and understood that the cash cow of developing and printing was at risk of disappearing, so it buried the technology.

All of this has been extensively documented and is not the subject of this blog.

What interests me is what I observed internally when the Mavica was announced. To put it simply, the reactions fell into two categories:

• “He’s right, we’re doomed.”
• “The quality of digital images will never reach the level of artistic perfection of chemical images.”

So, despair or denial.

These two reactions have in common that they don’t lead to rational thought or action. It’s true that at the time, digital images offered only mediocre artistic quality, but they presented considerable potential, which allowed time for reflection and action.

Of course, “comparison is not proof,” but the contrast with current statements about AI is troubling. These simplistic and definitive comments allow their authors to appear on television and exert influence on social media.

Some predict that humanity is finished, that we will be replaced by intelligent and diabolical machines (a big thank you to Stanley Kubrick!), while others consider AI to be merely a slightly more sophisticated search engine that can in no way replace human creative genius.

There is probably some truth in both of these diametrically opposed positions, but it would take a very clever person indeed to predict where we will end up.

If we don’t know the destination, I suggest we set off, not with a perfectly calibrated GPS, but by gradually discovering the risks and opportunities that this technological revolution may reveal. Philippe Aghion has just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on creative destruction; the timing is perfect. But to know what will be created by destruction, we mustn’t stop, paralyzed by uncertainty; we must move forward, discover (Hubspot’s CTO said that AI is like Moore’s Law, but with a doubling every 6 months, not every 18 months), try, make mistakes, start again, and so on.

One comment struck me as wiser than many others. Jensen Huang, founder of the well-known Nvidia, explains that it’s not AI that will replace employees in the company; it’s the other employee who will know how to use AI.

So, let’s move forward in the fog, discover, progress, and we’ll see what the destination looks like.

The only certainty is that those who haven’t set out will have a very hard time arriving.