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We argue that consumer sovereignty in an increasingly high tech world is more of a fiction than a fact. We show how the principle of consumer sovereignty that governs the societal impact of economic competition is no longer valid. The world of high tech is increasingly responsible for changes in the opportunity, ability, and motivation of business firms to compete. Furthermore, the world of high tech is increasingly responsible for changes in the opportunity, ability, and motivation of consumers to engage in rational decision making. We conclude that we cannot rely on consumer sovereignty to maintain a thriving economy. Instead, we need to develop performance standards designed to meet the demands of the various stakeholders of the organization.

De grandes entreprises et acteurs étatiques ont fait des neurotechnologies un champ d’action aussi stratégique que la conquête spatiale. Effectivement, l’accélération de la miniaturisation des technologies implantables et la puissance prédictive des outils d’intelligence artificielle convergent pour rendre prochainement possibles des développements proches de ceux prédits par les romans d’anticipation. Dans ce contexte, les développeurs de technologies médicales sont eux-mêmes dépassés par de nouveaux entrants pour qui le malade n’est plus qu’un « client » comme un autre aux côtés des soldats et des hommes pressés à la recherche d’augmentation de leurs performances. Faut-il suivre ce chemin techno-centré et tenter, avec des moyens financiers plus faibles, de copier l’approche des États-Unis et de la Chine ? Ou faut-il innover vraiment avec notre recherche en biologie et le dynamisme de nos jeunes entreprises innovantes, pour oser la voie différente, plus durable, du développement de neurotechnologies responsables ? Big-tech companies and state actors have made neurotechnologies a field of action as strategic as the space race. Indeed, accelerated miniaturization of implantable technologies and the predictive power of artificial intelligence tools are converging to create developments echoing mad sci-fi scenarios. In this context, developers of medical technologies are themselves overtaken by new players for whom the patient is now just another “customer” alongside soldiers and busy men craving for performance improvement. Should we follow this techno-centric path and try, with less resources, to mimick United States and China? Or should we really use our deeply rooted biology research and vivid start-up ecosystem to dare to take a different, more efficient path ‒ that of sustainable neurotechnologies?

A good place to start, I have found, is to read what the big beasts now in power in the US say about their fundamental beliefs. [...]one overlapping theme — you can see this in the New York Times profile of Alex Karp, chief executive of Palantir, for example — is the importance they give to class rather than the left’s strong focus on race and ethnicity. There are enough threads here to make a tapestry: an ability for technical disruption that is at the same time an iconoclastic desire to disrupt reigning ideas; a disdain for democratic procedures, bureaucracy and rules that impede a strong leader’s or great mind’s freedom of action; and finally a sort of heroic-epic view of life that prizes world-reshaping endeavours. There is a rich seam to mine; I hope Free Lunch readers will do their own reading and share their thoughts about the ideas that have so spectacularly come to power.