Si la nécessité de changer de modèle économique était unanimement partagée ("en finir avec la tyrannie des chiffres et des process", "tuer les algorithmes", "éradiquer le techno-capitalisme qui détruit les hommes et la planète", pour reprendre les mots d'ordre des principaux opposants au pouvoir en place), les solutions politiques pour y parvenir faisaient l'objet des plus grandes divergences. Quoi de commun entre le retour passéiste et autoritaire à la "naturalité" préconisé par les uns (souvent des religieux ou des survivalistes) et le "hacking redistributif" privilégié par les autres (qui n'avait de redistributif que le nom, au vu des quelques actes de piratage de comptes bancaires de particuliers et d'entreprises qui ne firent qu'engraisser d'autres intérêts privés, parfois concurrents) ? (p. 123)

— À ce sujet, intervins-je, moi aussi j'ai quelque chose à dire. J'ai eu une révélation que je dois maintenant partager avec vous, une révélation qui a des conséquences de grande portée pour toutes nos futures recherches. Il nous faut mettre un terme à notre quête du Savoir ! Quand nous avons commencé, nous croyions que c'était un effort louable, exigeant toute notre attention, mais il s'avère que ce n'est pas le cas. Nous devrions y renoncer tout de suite et, à sa place, établir un nouveau programme de recherche scientifique ! (p. 86)

[Alan Turing :] 'I pleaded guilty to avoid a trial, and refused the treatment. In retrospect, though it didn't seem like it at the time, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. For all but two months of my year in Wandsworth, I had a cell to myself. Being cut off from experimental work, wet-bench stuff and all the usual obligations, I turned back to mathematics. Because of the war, quantum mechanics was moribund from neglect. There were some curious contradictions that I wanted to explore. I was interested in Paul Dirac's work. Above all, I wanted to understand what quantum mechanics could teach computer science. Few interruptions, of course. Access to a few books. People from King's and Manchester and elsewhere came to visit. My friends never let me down. As for the intelligence work, they had me where they wanted me and they left me alone. I was free! I did my best year's work since we broke the Enigma code in '41. Or since the computer logic papers I wrote in the mid-thirties. I even made some headway with the P versus NP problem, though it wasn't formulated in those terms for another fifteen years. I was excited by Crick and Watson's paper on the structure of DNA. I began to work on the first sketches that led eventually to winner-take-all DNA neural networks (…).'

Turing’s institute drove forward AI and computational biology. He said he wasn’t interested in becoming richer than he already was. Hundreds of prominent scientists followed his example on open-source publication which would lead, in 1987, to the collapse of the journals ‘Nature’ and ‘Science’. He was much criticised for that. Others said that his work had created tens of thousands of jobs around the world in diverse fields – computer graphics, particle accelerators, protein folding, smart electricity distribution, defence, space exploration. No one could guess the end of such a list. (pp. 39-40)