On Thursday, Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, gave a speech laying out a new national strategy for artificial intelligence in his country. The French government will spend €1.5 billion ($1.85 billion) over five years to support research in the field, encourage startups, and collect data that can be used, and shared, by engineers. The goal is to start catching up to the US and China and to make sure the smartest minds in AI—hello Yann LeCun—choose Paris over Palo Alto.

Directly after his talk, he gave an exclusive and extensive interview, entirely in English, to WIRED Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Thompson about the topic and why he has come to care so passionately about it.

Nicholas Thompson: First off, thank you for letting me speak with you. It was refreshing to see a national leader talk about an issue like this in such depth and complexity. To get started, let me ask you an easy one. You and your team spoke to hundreds of people while preparing for this. What was the example of how AI works that struck you the most and that made you think, ‘Ok, this is going to be really, really important’?

Emmanuel Macron: Probably in healthcare—where you have this personalized and preventive medicine and treatment. We had some innovations that I saw several times in medicine to predict, via better analysis, the diseases you may have in the future and prevent them or better treat you. A few years ago, I went to CES. I was very impressed by some of these companies. I had with me some French companies, but I discovered US, Israeli and other companies operating in the same field. Innovation that artificial intelligence brings into healthcare systems can totally change things: with new ways to treat people, to prevent various diseases, and a way—not to replace the doctors—but to reduce the potential risk.

The second field is probably mobility: we have some great French companies and also a lot of US companies performing in this sector. Autonomous driving impresses me a lot. I think these two sectors, I would say, healthcare and mobility, really struck me as promising. It’s impossible when you are looking at these companies, not to say, Wow, something is changing drastically and what you thought was for the next decade, is in fact now. There is a huge acceleration.

NT: It seems you’re doing this partly because it is clearly in France’s national interest to be strong in AI. But it also seemed in the speech that you feel like there are French or European values that can help shape the development of AI? Is that correct, and what are those values?

EM: I think artificial intelligence will disrupt all the different business models and it’s the next disruption to come. So I want to be part of it. Otherwise I will just be subjected to this disruption without creating jobs in this country. So that’s where we are. And there is a huge acceleration and as always the winner takes all in this field. So that’s why my first objective in terms of education, training, research, and the creation of startups is to streamline a lot of things, to have the adaptable systems, the adapted financing, the adapted regulations, in order to build champions here and to attract the existing champions.

Laura Stevens

But you’re right at the same time: AI will raise a lot of issues in ethics, in politics, it will question our democracy and our collective preferences. For instance, if you take healthcare: you can totally transform medical care making it much more predictive and personalized if you get access to a lot of data. We will open our data in France. I made this decision and announced it this afternoon. But the day you start dealing with privacy issues, the day you open this data and unveil personal information, you open a Pandora’s Box, with potential use cases that will not be increasing the common good and improving the way to treat you. In particular, it’s creating a potential for all the players to select you. This can be a very profitable business model: this data can be used to better treat people, it can be used to monitor patients, but it can also be sold to an insurer that will have intelligence on you and your medical risks, and could get a lot of money out of this information. The day we start to make such business out of this data is when a huge opportunity becomes a huge risk. It could totally dismantle our national cohesion and the way we live together. This leads me to the conclusion that this huge technological revolution is in fact a political revolution.