Global Courant
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is essentially a scientific discipline that deals with creating computer programs that execute operations comparable to those performed by the human mind. That includes learning and logical reasoning. The concept – and its application – generates different interpretations in the academic field.
In the article “Who is afraid of ChatGPT?”, published in the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia and reproduced in Clarín, Daniel Innerarity, professor of Political Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV) stated: “Computational power is fast calculation and processing of more data, but not intelligence”. In another public intervention, referring to his book The Unknown Society, he considered that Artificial Intelligence, digitization and data “do not provide us with a radically new vision of things.”
Parallel to the debate on its global use, a question arose: What will be the impact of ChatGPT on democracy? In a column that appeared on the website of the NGO “Save Democracy”, José Alberto Aguilar Iñárritu, a member of the Permanent Conference of Political Parties of Latin America and the Caribbean (COPPPAL), reproduced the response that the AI prototype provides in this regard. : “Language technology can have an impact on the way information is accessed and shared, which in turn can have an impact on democratic decision-making.”
The Israeli philosopher and historian Yuval Noah Harari also expressed his opinion on the issue. In an interview given to the British outlet The Telegraph, he stated that Artificial Intelligence constitutes “a particularly serious threat to democracies, more than to authoritarian regimes, because democracies depend on public conversation.” At the same time, he remarked: “Democracy is basically conversation. People talking to each other. If AI takes over the conversation, democracy is over.”
In this framework some reflections arise. Factually, AI can create a discourse, but this does not imply intervening in the public discussion of ideas. Even less meditate on the moral or ideological components of the message. He manages to describe what a dictatorship consists of, but the review is not enough to measure its multiple objective consequences.
You can amalgamate statistics that allow you to measure the institutional quality of a country, but these figures do not serve to ponder the symbolic magnitude of the Republic as a space for coexistence and political balance. It manages to define poverty, but it does not expose the cultural weight of deficiencies.
Meanwhile, the considerations of Innerarity and Harari, as well as the aforementioned mechanical definition, seem to have a common axis: in some sense, they highlight the humanist component that can relate to certain technological advances -derived from ethical scientific knowledge- with politics. far-reaching democracy.
From this potential coincidence, whenever people produce or acquire new knowledge – Innerarity speaks for this of a necessary reflexivity -, and whenever they comply with their rights and duties as citizens, they are exercising critical thinking, thus moving away from dogmas and valuing plurality. These are obvious civility traits that, like many other things, machines, digital applications and algorithms cannot imitate.
Damián Toschi has a degree in Social Communication (UNLP)
