Comparison and Reason

— Eva, are you there? I called out, a bit too loudly for the solemn silence of the press area.

Eva stood a few meters away from me, a badge from the Élysée's technical service pinned to her jacket. She seemed as surprised as I was by this encounter, here, on this side of the gates.

— Thanks to my articles on Cobot, I finally got accreditation for the official government photo and this first Cabinet meeting, I explained to her. And you? I didn't expect to find you here.

— Technical follow-up, she replied.

She indicated with a nod the discreet device attached to her belt.

— In the early days, I never let it go out alone.

She had spoken this sentence with the naturalness of a mother talking about her child. Hearing herself, she sketched a very slight smile, as if she was only just realizing her choice of words.

I had a hard time measuring my luck. I was standing on the steps of the Élysée, a few meters from the President of the Republic and this artificial intelligence that had occupied my notebooks, my articles, and part of my nights for months. I was going to be one of the first to see the government assembled. One of the first to photograph it before the rest of the country.

The official photograph was taken first, in that almost immutable arrangement that has been seen for decades in this type of shot: the light steps, the dark suits, the controlled smiles, power arranged like a family that has learned never to touch.

François Rousseau and Cobot stood at the center. Next to them, a woman I did not yet know kept her face closed, her chin high, without trying to smile more than necessary.

— Do you know the new Prime Minister? I asked Eva.

— Yes. Alexandra Ferrari. A graduate of the École Polytechnique, an engineer by training. She was a prefect, then headed a major public transport company. Her reputation is for rigor. Her detractors say coldness. Her supporters say reliability.

Appointed in the days following the inauguration, she had composed the government in barely forty-eight hours, which Rousseau and Cobot had approved almost without alteration. Around her, in protocol order, the ministers in charge of the most sensitive functions took their places first: Interior, Foreign Affairs, Defense, Justice. Then came the others, whose names Eva whispered to me as I photographed them.

I clearly saw the moment when Cobot tilted its head towards its central screen. A brief interface lit up there. Then its panocamera activated.

— Is it taking a selfie? I murmured.

Eva did not respond.

A few seconds later, the caption appeared on the control screens lined up at the back of the press area. Sober. Almost institutional.

First Cabinet meeting of the term.

Nothing spectacular. No provocative formula. No digital irony. Just this sentence, placed under an image that French political history had never yet produced: a government, for its first official photograph, with an artificial intelligence at its center.

It was not just a first. It was a shift.

To mark this change, Rousseau had even decided to exceptionally invite a few journalists to the first minutes of the Cabinet meeting, a closed session to which the press had never before had access. The cameras followed us to the room where the meeting was to be held. We were placed aside, along the back wall, while everyone took their place around the oval table.

The chairs scraped the parquet. The advisors removed files, adjusted microphones, checked name cards. A minister approached the President.

— So, Mr. President, ready for this first exercise?

Rousseau smiled. That somewhat stiff smile I had known since the press conference six months earlier. He replied something inaudible, drowned out by the noise of the chairs being set up.

No one, however, attempted the same approach with Cobot.

It remained there, silent, its central screen a turquoise blue, the color of envy. Not a hand on its shoulder. Not a joke. Not even that banal phrase one addresses to the newcomer to gauge their level of complicity.

With it, no one knew where to start.

Half of the table observed it with an almost childlike curiosity. The other half maintained that stiffness one has in front of something one has not chosen to accept. The Minister of Culture, recognizable by her silk scarf tied despite the heat, placed her hand for a moment on the back of the chair next to Cobot, as if to check that it was indeed real. Another minister, further away, moved his chair back a few centimeters before sitting down.

No one in this room had received instructions on how to share a table with an artificial intelligence.

And above all, no one had anything to gain by trying to charm it. Cobot did not laugh at jokes. It did not return glances. It did not soften in the face of marks of respect.

It had to be convinced.

Or give up.

Just before we were ushered out, François Rousseau spoke.

— I would like to introduce you to compa, a tool capable of identifying, all over the world, the public policies that achieve the best results, regardless of the countries or political orientations that implemented them.

He paused briefly.

— Our ambition is simple: to constantly learn from what works best.

At that precise moment, an usher signaled us to leave the room.

The door closed on the rest.

I reconstructed the rest of the Cabinet meeting thanks to the account of a minister who agreed to speak to me on condition of anonymity. He replayed the scene for me with almost theatrical precision, as if he was still trying to understand what he had just witnessed.

— At first, the President continued to present compa, he explained to me. He began by specifying that the system understood all the languages of the world. Thanks to this, it could constantly observe what worked best in education, health, transport, or justice systems around the planet. He was doing well. Really.

He paused.

— Then someone asked him a technical question. A question about the weighting of data from one country to another. And there, he had a blank. A real one.

He was no longer smiling.

— The President looked at his notes. Then at Cobot. The central screen lit up. A sentence appeared, like a subtitle. Rousseau read it almost word for word: "Each indicator is adjusted according to the national context before being compared." Then he nodded and continued as if nothing had happened.

— And no one reacted? I asked him.

— Not at the time. That's the strangest part. No one reacted.

He lowered his eyes to his cup, which he had barely touched.

— But it happened three or four times during the morning. Always on the technical passages. Each time, Cobot displayed a sentence. Each time, the President repeated it. After a while, I understood that it was not Rousseau who was piloting this presentation.

He looked at me.

— It was the opposite. The speech had been written by Cobot in its smallest details. The President was content to read it as it scrolled in front of him.

It was at this point in the Cabinet meeting that the phrase that would become famous in the following days was born. According to the minister, Rousseau pronounced it with an almost regained assurance:

— We must regulate in the face of evidence of significant drifts, and not by our fears.

The formula had something irrefutable. It started from the result, not the principle. No longer regulate by reflex. No longer legislate under the effect of anxiety. Not stifle progress before even letting it produce its effects.

Too much regulation kills regulation, Rousseau had summarized.

But it was necessary to regulate quickly, as soon as a real drift appeared.

— That's when it got tense, the minister resumed. The Minister of Labor and Solidarity asked if we were being told that we had over-legislated in the last twenty years.

He mimed the silence that had followed.

— The President began to respond. Then he stopped dead.

Several glances around the table then turned to Cobot.

— Its screen lit up again, the minister continued. And Rousseau read: "Not badly legislated. Over-legislated: too often by overreaction. In wanting to prevent isolated cases from recurring, we have generalized rules, which pile up and make everything complex. The formalities are burdensome, and create immobility. We must legislate in the face of real observed trends."

The Minister of Labor and Solidarity did not respond immediately. She simply closed her pen, slowly.

— She didn't seem convinced, but no one had a solid argument to oppose her. That's what annoyed her, I think. Not the sentence itself. The fact that it fell like a result. As if it no longer needed to be discussed.

He fell silent for a few seconds.

— What struck me was not only what was said. It's that no one around this table had come with this type of argument. We arrive with a conviction, a political line, sometimes an intuition. Then we try to defend it. He arrives with an already observed result.

He had a brief, joyless smile.

— In one morning, I felt like I had to relearn my job.

A second minister, more reserved, only gave me one sentence. But it struck me as the most accurate of the whole morning.

— You know what really worries me? Not that he's right. What worries me is that by constantly giving him reason, we end up not listening to anyone else.

According to the accounts I was able to cross-check, compa then reviewed several international comparisons, all built on the same principle: observe first, judge later.

On the regulation of financial markets, the tool showed that the level of complexity of French regulation contributed to diverting some capital to financial centers offering a simpler and more predictable framework. The paradox was not new. But no one around the table had ever seen it quantified with such coldness, without ideological precaution, without a camp to defend.

Then, at the very end of the meeting, a final comparison cast a different silence over the room.

Switzerland.

Cobot recalled that Swiss citizens were called to the polls several times a year to vote directly, by referendum, on a multitude of subjects. Where France entrusted, in the vast majority of cases, these decisions to its representatives.

This time, the discomfort no longer came from a technical detail. It touched the very source of power.

The Minister of the Interior finally asked the question that many seemed to hold back.

— Are we considering transposing this here?

Rousseau had answered no.

But before answering, he had looked at Cobot.

Almost nothing. An infinitesimal movement. A fraction of a second.

Enough for several ministers to notice.

— Afterwards, one of them confided to me, we all asked ourselves the same thing: who really answered?

Leaving the Élysée, I found two colleagues on the sidewalk, standing in front of the gates as if they were still hesitating to move away. They had been covering politics for much longer than I had. Adrien held his notebook open, but he was no longer writing.

— So? I asked him. What do you think?

— Nothing like what I've seen in twenty years of Cabinet meetings, he replied. Usually, even before the end of the meeting, we already know what will come out of it. This time, I'm leaving with more questions than answers.

He glanced towards the courtyard, behind the gates.

— And I don't even know if we just witnessed a real change of method, or only its first day.

— We're going to have to find a word for this, added his colleague.

— For what?

— For what we just saw. "Government," "Cabinet meeting"... it's no longer enough.

On the train back, the window intermittently reflected my image, between two tunnels. I saw Rousseau turning his eyes to Cobot before each delicate answer. That almost imperceptible movement. That way of yielding the floor without ever getting up.

If every decision now had to be born from a result rather than a conviction, who would choose the results to follow? Who would decide that one comparison was better than another? Who would draw the line between assistance and command?

That morning, no one had asked the question.

Perhaps that was the most worrying thing.