In the future, more sensitive and more open humans

Résumé

The article discusses the conditions under which future technologies are produced, questioning whether they will follow a linear logic of innovation or give rise to technical and social bifurcations. It is based on an analysis of Vincent Bontems’s book Au nom de l’innovation, which critically examines the dominant conception of innovation as the direct and linear result of marketoriented fundamental research. The text highlights the decisive influence of Gilbert Simondon on Bontems’s thinking, in particular the idea that technical progress occurs through processes of transduction that articulate horizons of feasibility and creativity, until limits of saturation are reached. Innovation cannot be forced, since it depends on the stage reached by technical lineages. The article also emphasizes examples analyzed by Bontems, such as projects at NASA and CERN, in which technical creation results from collective, lengthy, and uncertain processes, yet produces significant scientific and technical outcomes, including advances in medical imaging, superconductivity, and tactile interfaces. CERN is presented as a singular institutional model, based on open access to data, proportional public funding, and the absence of direct financial return, thus constituting a “technosocialist utopia.”Finally, the article contrasts this model with contemporary industrial research, marked by imperatives of profitability and by forms of alienation associated with the subordination of technology to the logic of performance.