In a society that doubts itself to the point of denying science, what role should engineers, and more broadly scientists, play? This crucial question also arises in the context of the democratic crisis we are experiencing, and is closely related to the theme of this issue of the magazine. Indeed, we can't address the relationship between digital technology and democracy without thinking more broadly about the respective fields and functions of (techno)science and engineering.

This is why it seems important to be able to re-create a narrative that speaks to each generation of engineers, and helps answer two fundamental questions: what are the reasons and objectives associated with the engineer's work?

A recent comparative study of European countries by economist Daniel Cohen, after the first 18 months of the pandemic, came to the opposite conclusion to conventional wisdom: Europeans' confidence in science was generally stable during this period, hovering around 90%, with the exception of France, where it fell sharply by 22 points...

Beyond the French cultural exception, we need to question the meaning of the expression "confidence in science", which remains vague. And for good reason, it can be understood in at least three different ways:

• Do you believe the word of scientists? Or only the words of some of them?
• Do you believe that science is a path that reveals knowledge that could not be accessed by any other route?
• Do you trust science to use technology to meet the contemporary challenges facing human society (climate change, protecting biodiversity, various forms of pollution, etc.)?

Faced with these questions, which are felt by society as a whole, engineers remain mute in the public arena, as evidenced by all the press publications relating to the 5G debate that we collected during the pandemic with my laboratory at the CEA. To our great surprise, not a single article was written by engineers. This is in stark contrast to the number of engineers in France, whose corps is particularly prolix in reports and within companies. What can we conclude from this lack of presence in the public debate?

As soon as scientific issues are brought into the public sphere of deliberation, there is unfortunately an almost complete decorrelation between competence and militancy. By militancy, we mean taking sides: being for or against, pro or anti.

So it seems that having a clear-cut opinion absolves the sender from having to educate himself about what he's expressing an opinion about. As it happens, if we return to the case of 5G, all the opinion polls showed that the proportion of French people "without an opinion" was close to 15%. So everyone had an opinion without being able to say what 5G is.

This would seem to be the necessary (and sufficient!) signal to encourage engineers to finally speak up and say what they do, what they think, and what they think about what they do. Otherwise, militancy will drag the debates into sophistry where all argumentation will eventually disappear.

So, engineers need to bring their perspectives to bear, because in our society, the value of a value depends on the price an individual, group or entity is willing to pay to defend it. Too often, competent people are moderate, and this contributes to stifling their voice. This has to stop: moderate experts have to commit themselves without moderation!

Otherwise, extreme, ideological positions will further divide debates and prevent the emergence of authoritative opinions.

The wager of the Enlightenment philosophers to use technology as a vehicle for scientific education has failed in contemporary society. The postulate that the very existence of familiar technology would disseminate scientific knowledge has been refuted in practice. Today, the opposite is true: the more complex a technical object is, the easier it is to use without understanding anything about it. One of the most striking examples of this in our time is smartphones, which are sold to us without instructions. These objects have become so user-friendly that we don't even need to understand how they work to operate them. As the futurologist Arthur Clarke once said, the more complex a technical object is, the closer it seems to magic.

In this way, technology distances us from science, in the sense that it renders scientific knowledge practically useless. Or rather, as scientific knowledge is useless in practice, it becomes practically useless.

The growing ease with which we live our daily lives - and even more so among young people, who are practically born with a smartphone in their hands - is accompanied by a growing unease about the experience of uncertainty. And this is no stranger to the growing unease that society feels towards science. For while science produces knowledge, it is now also a source of uncertainty of a very particular kind: since science is no longer embedded in the idea of Progress, it doesn't tell us what we should do with the technological potential it gives us.

In the past, these possibilities were explored on the basis that science was the engine of progress. We then took stock at the end of the process. But, in our time, we've realized that this strategy doesn't work... On the contrary, we need to decide which of the applications that science enables us to adopt, and which we reject. However, the organization of debates to enable these choices to be made is thorny, and often leads decision-making bodies to procrastinate...

Isn't putting things off until tomorrow an attempt to escape the need to evolve? Rather, it's a flight out of time. The word "innovation" has replaced the word "progress". It is now widely used both in the corporate world and in research organizations.

The use of the word "progress" began to decline in popularity in the late 1980s, disappearing from business, economic, social and political rhetoric after Nicolas Sarkozy's five-year term (2007-2012). How can it be that a word that has structured modernity has been abandoned in such a short space of time? One might be tempted to retort that the terms "innovation" and "progress" are synonyms, the former being a modernized form of the latter. But this is a mistake, as their etymological meanings are quite distinct.

The term innovation first appeared in French legal vocabulary in the 14th century. At the time, it was used to describe what we now call an amendment to a contract. And this meaning is eloquent when it comes to understanding the meaning of the word innovation. A rider is a legal act involving the drafting of an additional clause enabling a contract to be modified under certain conditions so that it remains valid. Thus, innovation is "what you have to do to keep things the same". The word then circulates in other spheres, and is found in politics in Machiavelli's The Prince, which advocates that when the sovereign holds power, he must not innovate unless his power is threatened. Innovation is therefore a principle of conservation: it's what you do to keep something. The first to associate innovation and technique was the Englishman Francis Bacon in 1632, in his essay Civil and Moral Advice, in which he devotes an eponymous chapter to innovation, and advocates it as a means of countering the irremediable deterioration that results from the passage of time...

Progress, on the other hand, was originally a word with a spatial connotation. We used to say "an army is advancing". The brilliant idea of the Enlightenment was to extend what was said about space to time. So, we could not only advance in space, but also in time, i.e. improve, progress in a positive way over time. But today, this projective horizon has disappeared. We no longer talk about 2050. Nobody makes the effort to draw 2050 or 2100: the future is left to lie fallow intellectually. The future is left in political levitation: an unacceptable situation for an engineer who needs to project himself. For it is this projection that gives meaning to our work!

So, to believe in Progress is to consider that the passage of time is the builder and accomplice of our freedom and our will. But we mustn't delude ourselves either: adopting the philosophy of Progress means accepting the risks, uncertainties and failures that accompany it, even from time to time. As Kant explains in his little treatise What is Enlightenment: "the idea of Progress is doubly consonant and sacrificial". To believe in Progress is therefore to accept the sacrifice of the personal present in the name of a collective future, which presupposes a philosophy of History no longer available to us.

In other words, innovation is not shaped by a certain image of the future, dreamt up in advance and which we would like to achieve, but by the critical state of the present.

I dare say that this is a deadly message being communicated to our young engineers. They are being taught that only innovation represents salvation, while at the same time rejecting the very idea of desire, i.e. a desirable future understood as Progress. On the contrary, the engineer, most often a believer in Progress, must submit the idea of Progress to her/himself, i.e. make it progress.

It's important to remember from the Enlightenment philosophers that believing in Progress means thinking that the negative is relative. Thus, what goes wrong in a society, a company, a nation, a person or a technical object is not irremediably doomed to go wrong. On the contrary, the negative is the ferment of the better!