Now that there is so much talk about artificial intelligence, manifestos and public proclamations that call for the suspension of fundamental research in this area, the lack of political and administrative regulation in this matter and even threats to national security regarding 5G, we return to the subject of governance algorithmic and a less virtuous side of this governance that has to do with our digital footprint in the various technological devices.
And what if, because of our digital footprint, the poacher that is the sensor also awakens the malevolence of a censor spirit?
In the great information market, the so-called Big Data, abuses of dominant position by large operators and deficits in political regulation of algorithmic governance can lead us to an aggravated voluntary servitude, to a high level of conditionality and conformity in terms of public freedoms and individual rights of citizenship and privacy.
At the operational level, individuals are temporary aggregates of raw data, quantifiable and successively reconfigured on an industrial scale, if you like, a kind of objectification of individuals where the context, uniqueness and meaning of these data are of no interest.
When we talk about Big Data we are facing a kind of extractive model in which Internet users, users of networks and platforms, are producers and suppliers of a gigantic mass of personal information, much of it subliminal, which has both benignity and toxicity.
We are, therefore, temporary aggregates of raw data and it is here that digital addition converted into voluntary servitude is extremely dangerous, especially at a time when populist movements and illiberal regimes, together in the great brotherhood of social networks, are trying to condition our thoughts and behaviors.
That is, in the calculation procedures of any master-algorithm we are reduced to simple statistical correlations that express patterns of behavior, successively reconfigured by an immense mass of data permanently updated and collected by the army of poachers, the sensors.
The algorithmic society is, therefore, a society that announces itself as highly paradoxical with countless political and social conflicts within the new social stratification in formation. Algorithmic governance, in its mathematical exuberance, transforms algorithms into cognitive prostheses, which provoke not only the externalization of knowledge, but also the proletarianization of some/many professional and intellectual classes in the near future.
However, on a cognitive level, our algorithmic doubles can also be very useful if we know how to manipulate them to our advantage, for example, in the creation of artificial intelligence and intelligent assistants for tasks that free us from our most servile and inhuman condition.
In a more conservative register, that of bioethical and biopolitical limits, we find that political society has not been able to delimit the terms of the public debate where the discussion about the algorithmic society should take place.
On the one hand, it seems certain, we will have more platform economy, the return of common goods, the emergence of the collaborative economy and more personalized services of the so-called fourth sector. On the other hand, however, we are without an argument or script for this science-fiction trajectory where artificial intelligence, transhumanism and posthumanism take us.
In this trajectory, we are assailed by some systematic doubts:
– Are we going to continue to be the useful idiots of the great technological conglomerates, placing our digital footprint at their entire disposal?
– Are we going to be, more and more, a mere organic algorithm available to the inorganic service algorithms?
– Are we going to maintain the levels of digital addition and continue to believe that we have direct access to reality and the truth, without any kind of intermediation or political representation?
– Are we going to invent or produce our digital identity, convert it into a personal asset and put it to render in our real and material universe?
In addition, within the framework of the great digital transformation underway, there is an aspect that is very disturbing and that puts the governance of public affairs and the governance of the algorithmic society on a collision course.
In line with institutional disintermediation and a certain technological determinism, the emerging techno-digital discourse tells us that government is an inefficient industry, institutions in general are expensive and lazy, and democracy is increasingly clumsy in dealing with governance. algorithm of intelligent machines.
In this sequence, the algorithms can either be a praetorian guard of a candidate for dictator, a Big Brother, as the advanced guard of a global and predatory capitalism, as well as a distributed proximity network at the service of a more equal and democratic society.
Being all this, the algorithm and the intelligent machine reveal what we already knew, that is, their instrumental functionality at the service of multiple causes, but also of single parties and apparatus men, who, generally, despise the limits of politics and the public responsibilities that are inherent to it, as, incidentally, is public and notorious today.
This means that cultural and civilizational changes of great magnitude are underway that are just waiting for an opportunity to explode to the surface.
Here are some of these final questions that I leave here for reflection:
– What political democracy are we going to reopen beyond the algorithms, mathematical models and intelligent machines of the algorithmic society?
– What humanism are we going to reopen beyond the society of algorithms and what to do with our tiny island of consciousness in the transition to other universes of meaning and mental states, transhumanist and posthumanist?
– In the great market of information, Big Data and cloud computing, how do political thinking and action regulate, regulate and supervise the new corporations of algorithms, Big Data and intelligent machines?
– In surveillance capitalism, where we are moving quickly, the war of intelligences – natural, rational, emotional, artificial – will push us to the other shore, that is, to new varieties of the biochemical algorithm of the human species.
There is no longer any doubt, artificial intelligence and intelligent machines will take over the operating system of the human condition. We are getting closer and closer to the red line that separates organic and inorganic algorithms. Between the sensor and the censor, the human condition is increasingly threatened and on probation.
Author António Covas is a Retired Full Professor at the University of Algarve
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