If there is something that Professor Harari seems to take from Francis Fukuyama, it is his eloquent account of how the three ideas that sought to impose themselves in the industrial world had failed. World War II swept away the fascists and their vision. The fall of the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev, and the USSR swept away communist history, leaving the liberal legacy standing, with its democracy, human rights, and a free capitalist market. That said, Harari argues that the 2008 financial crisis killed the liberal story for a large number of people.
The Biden era began without the upheavals generated by his predecessor, who shortly after entering the Oval Office, Donald J. Trump, began renegotiating all international treaties involving his country. Trump took office with a speech based, among other axes, on the claim that Chinese and Mexican citizens were stealing jobs from Americans. It wasn’t the Chinese. It wasn’t the Mexicans. If anything, it was algorithms and robots, both domestically and abroad.
As long as this remains misunderstood by the political elite, more nationalist, protectionist, and anti-globalization movements and parties will emerge, taking advantage of the decline of a people unable to meet basic needs that neither the market nor governments can guarantee. I even suspect that some maverick will start an anti-robot, anti-AI political movement or party, or even one centered around data nationalism, advocating for the nationalization of data as if it were something that could be locked in a crystal box and its flow or circulation controlled.
The liberal story no longer serves. It was meant for ordinary people, in ordinary scenarios. The Artificial Intelligence revolution will be such that we will necessarily need a story and perspective of our own. A story that explains the current reality. A complex story. As Professor Harari rightly said, what good is freedom if it is not accompanied by a social safety net? What good is democracy if I can’t put bread on the table? After all, we cannot forget that after years of a nefarious, authoritarian, and dictatorial government like that of the Military Junta, when former Argentine president Raúl Alfonsín took office, he left that phrase in history that preached that with democracy, not only do we vote, but we also eat, educate, and heal. However, after almost 40 years of uninterrupted democracy in Argentina, our social indicators, whether measured by the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INDEC) or by the Argentine Catholic University (UCA), are worse today than during that memorable return to democracy. Democracy is not magical. Without effective institutions and political agreements aiming for a common horizon, it is not enough. Just as in the 20th century, the use of industrial technology allowed for the establishment of different societal models, such as liberal democracies, fascist regimes, and other authoritarian communist regimes, Artificial Intelligence will give rise to new societal models. Therefore, it is important that we all get involved in creating and shaping these before someone else imposes them on us.
Today, it is indisputable that capitalism is the system that has lifted the most people out of poverty and that the competition it preaches has unleashed unprecedented innovative forces. But to get here, we went through different social experiments, as already mentioned. Experiments that cost the lives of millions of human beings. For this very reason, it is important that everyone gets involved in the discussions to come when defining our new social contract. We are here because we are the descendants of previous generations who survived these economic and social experiments. Missing here are the descendants of the nearly 4 million people who died of starvation, only in Ukraine[167], due to the policies of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin between 1932 and 1933, also of the 30 million who died, again from famine, in China[168] between 1959 and 1961 under Mao Zedong, and of the 6 million Jews killed by the Holocaust[169] of the Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler between 1933 and 1945.
[167] The number of Holodomor-Genocide victims in Ukraine are often intentionally diminished – scientists. (2018). National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide. Viewed on June 23, 2022, at https://holodomormuseum.org.ua/en/news/the-number-of-holodomor-genocide-victims-in-ukraine-are-often-intentionally-diminished-scientists.
[168] Vaclav Smil. (1999). China’s great famine: 40 years later. 319(7225), 1619–1621. Viewed on June 23, 2022, at https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.319.7225.1619.
[169] Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution. (2020). United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Viewed on June 23, 2022, at https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution.