Philippe Buschini Posts

The silent decline

The silent decline

There was a time when people said: “Americans invent, the Chinese copy, Europeans regulate.” Today, the US dominates AI, China manufactures the most advanced products… and Europe watches the train go by while debating whether ChatGPT should use gender-neutral pronouns.

Europe is quietly losing the global race for artificial intelligence and innovation. The United States invents, funds, and dominates: over $100 billion invested in AI in 2024, compared to less than $10 billion for China and mere crumbs for Europe. China, meanwhile, no longer copies, it now controls global production of robots, batteries, and semiconductors.

During this time, the European Union perfects its regulatory arsenal, without an industrial strategy or common vision. France loves to imagine itself as a Gaulish village: Mistral AI shines, Paris attracts attention, but 56% of French capital flees to the United States, and talent follows.

The result: a continent that regulates what it no longer produces, dependent on American clouds and Asian supply chains. If we’re not careful, the risk is becoming permanently a digital colony, merely consuming technologies designed elsewhere.

Europe can still react by linking regulation with industrial strategy, by investing massively, by unifying its markets. But the innovation train won’t wait for those who remain on the platform debating the color of the cars.

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OPINION

INNOVATION PARADOX

Willingly embraced parasitism

Willingly embraced parasitism

344 times a day. That’s how often the average adult checks their phone, according to the BBC. Every four minutes. Even at night, even for no reason, even when there’s no notification.

In tropical rainforests, there’s an ant that climbs onto a leaf, locks itself in place, and dies. A fungus has taken control of its nervous system to better spread its spores. Biologists call it a parasitic infection. Poets might say: a dispossession of the living.

That fungus took millions of years to perfect its strategy. Our smartphones only needed a decade. The biological parasite forces its host. The digital parasite convinced its host it couldn’t live without it.

This parallel between biological parasitism and digital colonization isn’t just a metaphor. It’s an operating system. The same mechanisms, the same precision, the same result: a host working for its parasite while believing it’s acting freely.

So maybe the real question isn’t: are we addicted to our screens? But rather: at what point did we stop being the masters and become the host?

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OPINION

BIAISES ETHICS

What are we passing down to our children?

What are we passing down to our children?

Here is the third and final installment of my series on the privacy of our data. After exploring our own surrenders and the illusion of voluntary transparency, it’s time to ask the most unsettling question of all:

What are we leaving to our children? Not as a material inheritance, but as an inheritance of gaze.

For they are born into a world where the intimate fades before it has even existed, where surveillance dresses itself in the clothing of play, where freedom is confused with permanent connection. What was for us a loss is for them self-evident. Where we see an encroachment on privacy, they simply see life.

This article examines this silent shift: how do we pass down inner freedom to a generation that has never known secrecy? How do we teach depth to those we’ve accustomed to exposure? And above all, what will remain of freedom if we forget to teach it to them?

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OPINION

BIAISES ETHICS PARADOX

The jailers of ourselves

The jailers of ourselves

We believe we navigate freely, but we move through a strange bestiary of revisited myths. Like Narcissus, we lean over the digital mirror, fascinated by a reflection that ends up engulfing us. Like Sisyphus, we bear the burden of a memory without forgetting: each piece of data adds to the rock that crushes us without ever rolling back down. Like Prometheus, we offer our traces to a system that feasts on us endlessly. As in the Panopticon, we live under an invisible gaze, but worse still: we have learned to anticipate it, becoming our own jailers.

We are not only losing data; we are losing essential dimensions of the human: the interiority that allows thinking without witness, the forgetting that makes rebirth possible, the autonomy to be oneself, the heteronomy to be several.

Digital servitude needs no chains; it imposes itself through fluidity, seduction, habit. So the real question is no longer: “do I have something to hide?”, but: “how much longer will I remain capable of preserving what makes me a free being?”

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OPINION

AI ETHICS PRIVACY

Universal treatise on ministerial selection, the french way

Universal treatise on ministerial selection, the french way

📌 Friday opinion column, brought forward to Thursday due to current events 📌

Since 2022, France has managed to chew through five Prime Ministers. This suggests two things: first, that Matignon isn’t an office but a revolving door fitted with an ejector seat. Second, that running France is rather like reforming the railways during a strike: the timetable looks splendid on paper, but the train never leaves the station.

Some optimists still dream of a stable government. Statistically, however, it is far more likely to encounter a goldfish fluent in Moldovan than a French Prime Minister who survives long enough to unpack his boxes.

As a mathematician, I have taken the liberty of modelling this phenomenon with equations. The findings, of impeccable academic rigour, are detailed in the Universal Treatise on Ministerial Selection, the French Way.

Disclaimer: this is not a political analysis, but a piece of humor in the style of Pierre Dac and Francis Blanche.

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OPINION COLUMN

HUMOR