Les Rencontres du Cercle

Digital transformation is underway, with an increasing use of AI in the economy and our everyday life, affecting the organization and nature of work as a consequence. Beside the expectations of job creation and fears of job destruction, the deployment of AI is impacting the reality, sometimes with unexpected effects, but we are just at the beginning of a more profound social transformation. What we observe today is that AI is affecting different groups of workers through different paths, the way we organize our work, and even the scope of work. In fact, the capacity of humans is tested, competed and challenged by AI at the workplace, raising the question of competitive advantage of human vis-à-vis AI, since, focused on the routine tasks by the past, the substitution effect of AI is expanding its scope to the manual tasks and even more to the cognitive tasks. What will be the future of work? In this panel, we will bring different perspectives on this question, quite simple but of substantial significance for our future.

The purpose of this roundtable is twofold. First, it will be an occasion to remind us of some important steps of the activities and research programs of FFJ during the last decade. Second, it will give the opportunity to the members of the Cercle, in a bottom-up approach, to inform us about their current research activities in order to share some insights and, eventually, to promote some collaboration among them.

The health crisis has changed the way we work, especially in the case of activities based on international cooperation, whether in academia or business. The Fondation France-Japon de l’EHESS, whose objective is to promote exchanges and collaboration between Japan and Europe, wishes to mobilize the members of the Cercle and its partners to take stock of the unique experience of confinement, under more or less strict conditions depending on national and local contexts, while reflecting on the next world, from the point of view of international cooperation. The paradox is indeed that we have been forced to change the terms of our exchanges, which has led to significant instability in the networks of both companies and researchers, even though we were in a context that in fact requires the highest level of cooperation. This change in exchanges has highlighted the importance of developing intense international exchanges, while highlighting the weaknesses of these collaborations when their weakening at the time of a crisis calls into question the notions of industrial dependencies, national sovereignty and the capacity for collaboration. Far from challenging globalization, this crisis above all allows us to better understand it.

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