The marketing of fear around science and technology is seriously starting to wear me out.

I recently reacted to a post presenting biocomputing as “a worrying technological leap”. The tone is set from the start. It is neither interesting, nor fascinating, nor exciting, nor incredible, nor even intriguing. No, it is “worrying”. It is hardly as though we are short of words, yet fear is always what they are trying to sell us.

And it is not the only one: every day, dozens of posts, videos and articles serve up the same old stuff. Most of the time, I do not react, but sometimes: I snap. I can no longer stand this habit of telling the reader what they must feel. And above all, they must not form their own opinion, just in case it might be different. Never mind that nothing has been explained to them yet: first, they must be afraid. Afterwards, they get the explanation (possibly).

It reminds me of a very personal and very unpleasant experience, when a long-standing business partner handed me a document and said: “sign, I’ll explain afterwards” (good one)…

This systematic invocation of fear bothers me deeply. Instead of inviting readers to ask their own questions about a technology, a little seed is planted in their minds from the outset: the seed of anxiety. That is the starting point imposed on them, whether they like it or not.

A discovery can raise ethical questions, and that is not a problem. But the existence of those questions does not, in itself, demonstrate danger. “We do not know yet” does not mean “we should be afraid”. It simply means there are still things for us to understand. And personally, that is precisely what usually makes me want to dig deeper.

Now, to be clear: obviously, we do not have to wait for a problem to happen before taking an interest in it. But there are differences between what we observe, what we can reasonably anticipate and what we imagine, and they deserve better than a fear-inducing adjective to wrap the whole lot up.

What risk, under what conditions, with what evidence to support it? What can we do to reduce it? That is a discussion that interests me. But the other questions must remain on the table too: what progress, what benefits, what problems solved, today and tomorrow? Not just a competition of scenarios in which whoever imagines the worst is automatically considered the most “clear-sighted”. Spoiler alert, they are not: imagining the worst has never been proof of clear-sightedness.

In the example I mentioned, in fact, once the marketing was put aside, I personally saw nothing but positives and benefits. Absolutely not a hint of anything we should have “feared”.

I would also like us to stop setting enthusiasm against critical thinking. You can find an advance wonderful and seriously examine its limits: fascination does not rule out reflection, any more than anxiety guarantees its quality. Putting “worrying” in an introduction does not make an analysis any more rigorous than putting “exciting” there.

And finally, I will add that if this anxiety is then used to justify slowing things down, restricting them or banning them, those decisions deserve scrutiny too. What consequences? What lost possibilities? How many future human lives lost? Who decides what others will be allowed to develop or use?

Giving something up does not become a cost-free option because it is presented as “prudent”. Not developing a technology also means giving up what it might have allowed us to understand, build or solve. Why should those consequences have any less of a place in the discussion? We demand that the consequences of acting be examined. Very well. Let us examine the consequences of not acting too.

I am not asking anyone to sell me a wonderful future or to sweep problems under the carpet: I am capable of forming my own opinion, in line with my vision of the world I would like to live in. But I do ask that we distinguish facts from hypotheses and emotions, rather than passing off the latter as a conclusion drawn from the former.

Understanding how it works, what we might do with it, what remains to be discovered: that is what I expect from explanations of technology and science. Not anxiety delivered with an instruction manual. Tchouss!