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THE images from France over the past two months have seemed hellish enough – mounds of rubbish, sometimes on fire, serving as backdrop for violent clashes between some of the more extreme protest groups and body armourclad riot police. Enough for my parents to repeatedly ask over FaceTime if it was really OK for me to be out and about in my neighbourhood, which borders a main protest square. (It was, I assured them each time, just France being France: the overaggressive nature of the confrontations and the dismissive and “arrogant” government response simply the self-fulfilling result of everyone assuming this was just how things would unfold.)

Of course, France isn’t a literal paradise. It has had four decades of structurally high unemployment; a lost decade of stagnating incomes after the 2008-09 financial crisis; lower levels of social trust than its happier northern European neighbours (made worse by Emmanuel Macron’s use of article 49.3, which forced the legislature to choose between passing the unpopular retirement reform or holding new elections); a population shifting away from rural towns towards urban centres; and a slow, rolling recognition of its relative decline on the global stage.

But there is an incredible disconnect between what tourists see, what foreigners living in France see, what French people living abroad see, what this recently naturalised français sees, and the hyperbolic, catastrophist nature of France’s own domestic discourse about itself (that is, the French people convinced their country has gone to hell).

In this tale, France has been submerged by immigration and Islam, or by ultra-neoliberalism, or by authoritarianism (or some combination of these). This doesn’t correspond to measurable reality, but the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are powerful.

Several weeks ago I took a straw poll of my students – nothing statistically significant, but a snapshot of the general outlook of bright, politically aware first-years at Sciences Po, one of France’s most prestigious and globally high-ranking universities. I showed them a chart of inequality levels among Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations, but with the country names chopped off. They had no problem identifying where on the chart the US fell: nearly every hand went up to indicate that it had the highest inequality of any rich democracy.

They were almost universally wrong when it came to accurately identifying France on the same chart. Nearly every student placed it just a few spots behind the US, easily in the top 25% of inequality. In truth, France’s position is in the bottom portion of the chart, just shy of Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway.

In fact, France’s Gini coefficient, the measure of inequality in a society, is lower today than it was during les

Unemployment – the perennial problem – is almost below 7%, a level that hasn’t been reached since before the 2008-09 financial crisis, partly due to the public investment made in promoting apprenticeships over the past two years. Intentions to hire are the highest they’ve been in 20 years, and in less than a decade France has gone from being woefully absent in the startup world to taking the continent’s crown for startup investment.

When you adjust economic performance for climate footprint (which we should do for every country), France leads all of its peers. Whereas the US generates 0.28 tonnes of greenhouse gases to produce $1,000 of GDP, France does the same with only 0.14 tonnes of emissions. French per capita emissions are the absolute lowest of any large, wealthy country, and have been continually declining – down 25% from 2005 – while since 1990, France’s total forested area has increased by 7%.

And France can still build big things. It has connected its major cities with the fastest trains in the world more cost effectively than China, and the Grand Paris Express (more than 200km of new metro track and 48 new stations) is being built for 20% of the per-km cost of New York City’s most recent line extension.

At a European level – the one that actually matters when it comes to most of the society-shaking, collective challenges we face – a French approach to public policy is ascendant: for the first time, the EU has issued collective debt, and is willing to counter protectionism from the US and China with support for its own green industries.

The term “performative miserabilism” has been coined to explain France’s confusing penchant towards self-cynicism. There’s something almost laudable to it – a type of solidarity, in the sense that endless optimism might actually seem boastful to those who are struggling; a negative narrative is at least one that acknowledges their pain.

But narrative can make perception more powerful than reality, and dangerously so. On the far left and far right, large swaths of the French electorate have bought into a nostalgia politics – ironically, for a time when the country was less well off and less equal, but more confident in itself. They are looking backwards, engaged in a debate that is almost past its expiration date. Both the climate crisis and AI are following the same type of exponential growth curve; who under the age of 35 honestly thinks the basic structure of work and retirement that we know today will look anything remotely similar in 2060?

How sad if the real narrative about France – a remarkably successful social democracy – were lost to the lowest common denominator of the challenges it faces. But far more worrying is that an angry debate, often played out in the media on skewed terms, is monopolising attention and sapping the country of the social trust needed for flexibility, creative public policy, and to resist populists selling a siren song of c’était mieux avant (things were better in the past).

Alexander Hurst is a France-based writer and adjunct lecturer at Sciences Po, the Paris Institute for

AI replacing humans

But then again, how will millions of families survive at all, let alone prosper, in the shadow of all these innovations, when their breadwinners lose their jobs? Unsatisfied, I probed ChatGPT further, asking for a more genuine, even witty and sarcastic take on this “complex issue”. To my surprise, after few backand-forths, it responded to the effect that AI is bound to replace human jobs faster than the Kardashians replace boyfriends. Hmmm! The response was a bit too American for my taste, but it was right.

AL JAZEERA Marwan BisHara

THIS Labour Day, working people around the world have little to celebrate. Amid climate change, war and pandemics, inequality is rising, wages are stagnating or even falling, and inflation is skyrocketing, leaving billions of people struggling to make ends meet.

In France, where in 1889 labour unions and socialists first designated May 1 as International Workers’ Day, hundreds of thousands are demonstrating against a pension law raising the retirement age to 64.

However, the sad fact is that many of these workers out on French streets and throughout the world today may not have a job at all come retirement. The speed with which automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are replacing humans in the workplace is breathtaking and poses an unprecedented risk of major economic disruptions and social upheavals.

In 2017, the international consulting firm, McKinsey estimated that between 400 and 800 million jobs could be lost to automation by 2030. And in 2019, the Brookings Institution concluded that some 36 million, or a quarter of the American workforce, may be replaced by robots. Today, AI seems to threaten white-collar middle-class workers as much as – if not more than – blue-collar workers.

The applications of AI go beyond driverless cars and automated retail cashiers to take on financial accounting, medical diagnosis, legal documentation, graphic design, 3-D printing, text and film editing, commercial art and design and hundreds of other tasks.

And as with previous technological advances that ultimately benefitted capital more than workers, AI will enable a few patent holders and investors to enter the 1 percent club of other hi-tech and finance billionaires, while millions go poor. But it cannot be all that bad! It mustn’t!

To provide some “balance” to this dramatic scenario, I asked the AI chatbot, ChatGPT, for its take on how AI will affect human labour, but was told that it has no “take” on it per se. Instead, it went on to cite and summarise various reports, rather generically and somewhat conservatively.

It listed the main pros and cons for the economy, suggesting that a higher number of jobs may be created if businesses and governments joined hands and invested more in education and training.

The new technological revolution will certainly have positive ramifications and is already transforming our lives like never before. It will improve productivity, create new more sophisticated jobs and speed up the search for solutions to various problems of healthcare, climate change, finance, transport, etc. And, it will take on the tedious tasks that no one wishes to do, and do them even more efficiently, requiring no lunch or coffee breaks.

Job replacement is inevitable and will proceed at a high pace. In fact, AI has already begun to disrupt the labour market and is sure to create a major surplus of labour and exacerbate income inequality. Disruption is the key word here. As human civilisation, we must avoid at all costs hyper-automation that leads to the utter destruction of the labour market. Not only are humans needed to run, guide, and, yes, humanise all industries, but also surrendering any economy to a fast-learning, autonomous “divine-like” digital intervention is sure to bring on the apocalypse.

That is why an ethical and legal oversight and management of AI systems is paramount, and must go hand-in-hand with creative national solutions to preempt a major labour catastrophe that are bound to lead to major social and political upheavals and widespread violence. Preemption is also the key word here. Because even though solutions may be found and jobs eventually created, timing is of the essence to avoid calamity.

Already, a couple of obvious remedies have been suggested, such as investing in better education, training and retraining for workers who will handle more sophisticated operating systems as well as new occupational tasks. But with governments preoccupied by pandemics, war and inflation, and corporations falling behind on training and preparation, there has been little or no real national or international effort to avoid a human redundancy disaster. This must change. Fast.

Another interesting remedy could be “universal basic income”, which would see governments distributing a minimum monetary handout to everyone to help them sustain a decent standard of living. Until recently, this was an unthinkable policy in mainstream circles, but today, it is embraced by hi-tech executives, defended in media bastions of capitalism, such as the New York Times, and taken on (at least rhetorically) by the likes of the neoliberal French President Emmanuel Macron.

Implementing this policy would be crucial, especially during transitional periods to avoid social mayhem, crime, and a rush towards populist fascism. But ultimately, people want and need good-paying jobs, not government handouts. And AI-guided automation could free many people to pursue more charitable, creative and artistic endeavours that enrich societies and counter the robotic dehumanisation of the digital revolution.

Meanwhile, watching the French revive an old traditional form of protest, known as the “casserolade”, banging pots and pans in public squares and handing each other lilies of the valley on this glorious spring day, I cannot but think of the tenacity of the human spirit and the grace of human solidarity. After all is said and done – and digitalised – let us hold onto our humanity, elevated by our common pursuit of liberty, equality and fraternity.

Marwan Bishara is an author who writes extensively on global politics and is widely regarded as a leading authority on US foreign policy, the Middle East and international strategic affairs. He was previously a professor of International Relations at the American University of Paris.