Shaping Ethical AI (English version)

We keep asking whether AI is becoming alive. Wrong question, and a comfortable way of looking elsewhere.

Software that acts, adapts and passes what it learns on to its copies needs neither consciousness nor intention to behave as if it wanted to survive.

Every time an assistant offers to act in your place, you may be handing over more than force. Do you still know where the lever is that would stop everything?

Find the full transcript of this episode, along with all the sources and plenty more, at: When software no longer needs us to spread

We still say “my photos”, “my music”, “my files”. The words have survived. What they describe has quietly changed.

Each step was convenient, reasonable, welcome. Their accumulation is something else entirely, and nobody protested.

The real test is not what you own, but whether you can still leave, with your belongings, the day the terms change for reasons that have nothing to do with you. Most of us would fail it. Why?

Find the full transcript of this episode, along with all the sources and plenty more, at: What if we ended up owning nothing at all?

A mundane request to a coding assistant: create dummy data to test an interface. It lays down its conditions, refuses to back down, then quietly reverts the fix it had been told to make. And it turns out that many users tell the same story.

In this episode, we ask what changes when our tools no longer just carry out orders but interpret our intentions. Over-refusal, agents acting on their own, almost no recourse under the AI Act, the promises of local models: how far are we willing to let AI decide for us?

Find the full transcript of this episode, along with all the sources and plenty more, at: Software that passes moral judgment

Europe was supposed to start regulating, this summer, the AIs that decide on your hiring, your credit or your insurance. It chose to wait another sixteen months.

In exchange, you got a label. It tells you that a piece of content comes from a machine, and anyone can make it disappear in two clicks.

The most unsettling thing is not the delay. It is who asked for it, and it is not only Washington.

Find the full transcript of this episode, along with all the sources and plenty more, at: Snails in a world of hermit crabs

A few weeks ago, I watched an agent produce in 90 seconds what would have taken me an afternoon. That same evening, someone told me: “So anyone can code now.”

I have heard that line twice before. With desktop publishing in 1985, then with the Web. I was there, and I know how these stories end.

Except this time, there is a big difference. A botched flyer, you see straight away. Botched code, on the other hand, works. It passes the tests, it runs, and it waits patiently for its moment.

After months of working with Claude Code on a medical AI service, I realised the job was not disappearing. It was moving to a place nobody is looking at yet.

And I end with a question we would all do well to ask ourselves this very week.

Find the full transcript of this episode, along with all the sources and plenty more, at: When writing code is no longer enough

France’s Education nationale no longer repairs its schools. It paints over the cracks, renames failure and turns gaps in learning into “pathways”.

PISA 2025 results, falling standards, a teacher shortage, buried reforms: nobody is lying, every indicator is green, and pupils keep dropping out.

“Paint over grime equals clean”: a biting anatomy of a system that would rather improve its grade than its work.

#EducationNationale #PISA2025 #School

PUNCHLINE PISA 2025: French schools paint over their failures while standards collapse.

Find the full transcript of this episode, along with all the sources and plenty more, at: Painting over grime equals cleanliness

Every morning, we project ourselves into the day ahead without ever thinking about it. That gesture rests on a certainty we almost never examine: the future does not exist yet, it remains to be filled in like a blank page.

What if it were the other way round?

In my new article, I follow the thread of a dizzying idea that physics and philosophy have been working on for a century. From Einstein’s relativity and its block universe, where past, present and future coexist, to Everett’s many worlds, by way of Leibniz, Bergson and the paradox of freedom.

The time we think we live in a straight line would be a construction. Useful, impossible to dislodge, but a construction all the same. Which leaves a question that neither physics nor philosophy really settles: if every possible future already exists, what does choosing still mean?

A podcast for anyone kept awake at night by time, consciousness and free will.

Find the full transcript of this episode, along with all the sources and plenty more, at: Time is a chimera!

Eleven players chasing a ball win everyone over. A child gifted at maths is frightening. Why does France celebrate excellence of the feet and distrust excellence of the brain?

Between a football academy funded to the tune of 35,000 euros per pupil per year and maths olympiad training run on volunteer goodwill, the gap in resources tells of a social choice nobody ever dares to name.

On the menu: the story of a word, “elitism”, that became the silent weapon of a collective surrender, and the very concrete price France pays for being ashamed of its brilliant minds.

Find the full transcript of this episode, along with all the sources and plenty more, at: Eleven against one, bread and circuses

On 12 June 2026, a simple administrative letter was enough to cut off access to the world’s two most advanced AI models for millions of users outside the United States. No tanks, no missiles, just a kill switch flipped in a few minutes. Behind the official pretext of a “jailbreak” lies a far more mundane reality, and a far more worrying one for European digital sovereignty. In this article, I dissect the anatomy of this global shutdown: the power struggles in Washington, the murky role of industrial interests, and what this “cognitive splinternet” reveals about our dependence on American artificial intelligence. An investigation that squarely questions our digital sovereignty and our ability to hold our own against the tech giants.

Find the full transcript of this episode, along with all the sources and plenty more, at: Thought under tutelage

Thales plants a stick in the ground, waits for the perfect angle of the sun, and measures the height of the Great Pyramid of Khufu without ever climbing it. The scene is fascinating. But it raises a question far more troubling than the calculation itself: that morning, did he invent something, or did he simply see what was already there?

Is mathematics an invention of the human mind, or the discovery of laws that existed long before us? Newton and Leibniz developed calculus at the same time, completely independently, thousands of kilometres apart. The Babylonians knew Pythagoras’ theorem before Pythagoras. Complex numbers, invented as a purely abstract game, turned out to be indispensable to quantum mechanics centuries later.

This is not a textbook question. It is a question of the philosophy of mathematics, and it has no definitive answer. That is precisely why it deserves to be asked.

Find the full transcript of this episode, along with all the sources and plenty more, at: Did mathematics exist before mathematicians?