Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, PDF - Dss-edit.com

"Yet in spite of its fragility, its sensitivity, how have we treated it?"Like an uncomplicated development project that could unfold insuccessive phases from the drawing boards to a metro system that wouldrun with 14,000 passengers an hour in the south Paris region everyday, twenty-four hours a day."Here is our mistake, one we all made, the only one we made.You had a hypersensitive project, and you treated it as if you could getit through under its own steam. But you weren't nuclear power, youweren't the army; you weren't able to make the ministries, the BudgetOffice, or the passengers behave in such a way as to adapt themselvesto Aramis' subtle variations, to its hesitations and its moods. And youleft Aramis to cope under its own steam when it was actually weak andfragile. You believed in the autonomy of technology."If the Budget Office can kill Aramis, what should you do, if youreally care about it? Impose yourselves on the Budget Office, force itto accept Aramis. You can't do that? Then don't ask Aramis to be capableof doing it on its own . If elected officials from the south Paris regioncan kill Aramis, what should you do? Make them change their minds,or get other ones elected. You don't think you have the power? Thendon't expect that Aramis will. The laws of physics and the three-bodyproblem make it impossible to calculate the displacements of more thanthree pairs of cars? Can you change physics, redo Poincare's calculations?No? Then don't charge Aramis' pairs of cars with the overwhelmingtask of handling, all by themselves, knowledge that even GodAlmighty may not have. It's only in horror stories and epistemologicaltreatises that omniscient humanoids invade the world on their own andreshape it to their own needs. In worlds like theirs, don't ask theimpossible. You want Aramis to be automated, irreversible, real? It willbe, it could be, it could have been. But at the beginning it is still unreal,reversible, manual, terribly manual. Don't ask Aramis, don't ask aproject, to do something you, as individuals and corporate bodies, findyourselves incapable of accomplishing. Either you change the world toadapt it to the nominal Aramis, or else, yes, you need-you needed-tochange Aramis.EPILOGUe