Young French people have a major gap on the internet — and learning to code is not going to help them, according to Mounir Mahjoubi

Mounir Mahjoubi knows that a part of the French population will never be comfortable with digital tools. Invited to speak at a CNIL conference this Friday, December 15, the Secretary of State for digital recalled that according to government figures, 15% “will never be autonomous” on the Internet.

But this does not mean that others know how to use the tools of the web better. In particular, he stressed how the level of understanding of young French people is overestimated:

“It is believed that youth is over-connected. But we didn’t create a generation of geeks, we have a generation of users.“

In short, being comfortable with digital tools does not mean understanding how the internet works or knowing the best practices to protect your privacy online.

In order to “overcome” this ignorance, he does not advocate for “forced learning of the code” at school, but for teaching the operation of new technologies:

“I dream that when I leave college, students will know how to put data in one place, retrieve it in another, understand where it goes to be displayed on a screen, understand how a server works,” he explained.

The Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés was organizing a conference entitled “how to allow man to keep his hand?” to present the results of a major public consultation on “the ethical issues of algorithms and artificial intelligence.”

She presented six recommendations, including “making algorithms understandable”, “building a national platform for auditing algorithms” via a national platform or “strengthening the ethical function within companies”.

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