France’s AI Edge Is Cultural, Too

A note before we begin: This piece was originally written in French and I published this week in Le Figaro, France's oldest national newspapers. Le Figaro often invites thinkers and public figures to make the case for the ideas they believe most need making. Because most of you reading here don't read French, I wanted to bring it home. What follows is the English version, translated and lightly adapted for this Human Flourishing with AI. If you read French, the original lives here.

Since the digital revolution, we have feared that machines would replace human beings. Artificial intelligence now forces us to reformulate that fear. Faced with a technology capable of surpassing humans in almost every cognitive ability, access to human experience and human know-how risks becoming a luxury.

Tomorrow, each of us will be able to obtain, instantly, a text, an image, a preliminary diagnosis, legal advice, or a personalized lesson. Ordinary intelligence will become abundant, fast, inexpensive, and omnipresent. But as artificially generated products and services multiply, another scarcity will emerge: that of human judgment, presence, and responsibility.

France must, undeniably, guarantee its sovereignty over AI models, data centers, and technological research. But the true French question in the age of AI is much deeper: in a world saturated with artificial intelligence, will we know how to preserve universal access to human expertise?

France now wants to prove that it has not missed the AI turning point — and rightly so. A country that does not build its own tools will remain dependent on the infrastructures, interests, and imagination of others. But a purely technical sovereignty, without a civilizational vision, would be an abdication. If France merely tries to catch up with California or China, it will arrive late and lose what makes it original. Its real strength lies in its ability to propose another approach to AI: not against the machine, but with a demanding ambition for what the machine should serve.

That ambition can be expressed in one sentence: AI must automate convenience in order to strengthen the human where human presence is irreplaceable.

For centuries, our economy was built on the scarcity of expertise. We paid lawyers, doctors, or consultants for their unique knowledge. Today, that scarcity is shifting.

AI is making an immense amount of ordinary knowledge accessible, distributing intelligence in the same way electricity distributed energy. When production becomes easy, choosing becomes crucial. When execution becomes cheap, judgment becomes valuable. And when everything can be automated, society must urgently decide what it refuses to delegate.

This is where France’s comparative advantage lies. Unlike the United States, France has always protected its economy of culture and tradition against the imperative of capitalism. A French wine is precious because it tells the story of a region; a leather handbag because it embodies a unique savoir-faire. Terroir, an untranslatable French concept, represents more than a gastronomic idea: it is a true economic theory, one that affirms that a product ceases to be interchangeable when it is charged with human meaning.

AI can produce a thousand variations of a logo, a speech, or a piece of advice. But it cannot, on its own, confer the human legitimacy that transforms a correct output into a memorable experience. Real progress consists in preserving human presence where it remains irreplaceable.

This is particularly crucial in education. France must teach its students to judge, to develop their critical thinking. Producing an answer will become trivial; recognizing a good answer will remain precious. Discernment will be the key skill: knowing how to distinguish what is true, beautiful, fragile, or manipulative. We must continue to teach history, mathematics, and philosophy, because without culture, humans will no longer have any reference point from which to evaluate the machine.

If access to human expertise is reserved for the richest, inequalities will worsen, with the majority reduced to interacting with automated interfaces and standardized answers. Human contact will become a privilege reserved for an elite, while human dignity recedes for the many.

France must absolutely avoid this scenario, because the question of AI is, above all, a social one. The French tradition of mistrusting markets when they reduce society to a series of transactions must become a strength — provided it does not collapse into immobility. Some tasks should be automated because they are repetitive and exhausting; others must remain human because they embody the beauty of an authentic relationship.

France must invest in this renewed economy of human experience, which it has always defended. It must make human presence a true economic infrastructure. We have a choice between an AI that enriches human life and an AI that reduces it to a series of conveniences.

We must choose. Human presence cannot become a privilege.

In the age of artificial intelligence, true French sovereignty will consist in deciding, lucidly, what must never become automatic, so that progress genuinely enriches our experience of the world.

Disclaimer: This essay was originally published in French in Le Figaro on May 6, 2026. The version above has been translated and adapted for English-language readers.