Hey! I am Jean-Baptiste Cadart and this is my personal website. This website is still ugly, I’m working on it ;-)
Contact information
Contact: jean-baptiste.cadart@univ-brest.fr
Office: C103
About me
I am a PhD student in complex geometry at Université de Bretagne Occidentale (UBO) and Chalmers University of Technology, under the supervision of Carl Tipler and Lars Martin Sektnan.
Where I stand on AI
Experts diagnosed Trump (and thus the system behind him) to be a fascist. To get stronger, fascism usually builds an alliance with the capital. Leaders of the main AI companies showed themselves many times to be part of the US oligarchy. Some experts talk of techno-feudalism, others go further and name the situation as a capitalism of total subsumption and of total control.
In democracies, universities have the role to develop and spread knowledge to fight power when it lies to the public. Likewise, I believe mathematicians and scientists have the moral obligation to work with the aim to benefit human kind, or at least not to worsen the human situation (this remark could be enlarged to include the other inhabitants of our world). This is not the case when one promotes companies who are co-creating fascist regimes, who are known for stealing intellectual property, methodically destroying antique books and making their content private (do you hear the sound of obscurantism?), undermining our chances to limit the consequences of global warming, encouraging excessive consumption of resources (which is the main reason for the extinction of biodiversity in number of species and number of individuals), developing weapons for military purposes and mass surveillance, destroying our spaces of creation and freedom.
The good news is the following: AI companies base their economy on a financial bubble, very close to a circular tech bubble. It means that these companies need to keep our trust at all cost. So not only do we have a responsibility not to support companies who make fascism possible, but we also have the responsibility not to help them in making us public billboards for their businesses. Their survival partially depends on our current reaction. Mathematicians, academics in general, are considered as part of the elites of their countries. A signal from us can make a difference in the behavior of the population. The AI companies perfectly understood that, and that is why they try to convert scientists in their favour so badly. Don’t fall in the trap, my friend. For the ones who don’t have the power and the privileges we have, we need to fight.
The objection of conscience raised by Atécopol is the closest stance to mine. I naturally agree with the analysis of Vladimir Lazić and Max Weinreich.
Activities on my free time
I am an active member of AHM and I run a series of seminars called Ethics in Mathematics and Science.