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  1. Artificial Intelligence For What?

Artificial Intelligence For What?

Any use of a technological tool is also an expression of political conceptions about the degree of agency, dignity and equality that people want to be recognized: technologies impact human groups in different ways, according to issues such as gender, color of their skin and their social class, and the way in which these characteristics place them socially. Therefore, within the framework of a democratic system, the adoption of technologies requires transparency for decision makers.

For this reason, the first question that a community should ask itself in front of announcements of “intelligent” systems implementation is about the objectives of this technological deployment. Thus, far from immersing ourselves in a technosolutionism of utopian optimism, dazzled by the capacity of this type of technology, the authorities are obliged to open a democratic debate with the community regarding the aims of the technical solutions. And although the range of options can be wide, they can usually be grouped into two main variants: solutions that seek to address problems of efficiency and effectiveness in the use of public resources, and those that can be used as components to ensure the exercise of rights and the construction of social justice.

The data collected in our countries is a faithful reflection of our political, economic, social and cultural systems. Starting the machine of automated decition making would imply conditioning the future on our past of discrimination and inequality.

The above objectives are not incompatible in any case, but they are different and are not always considered together in public decision-making on the adoption of technology. A critical approach to the implementation of AI solutions is essential to ensure that their capabilities to achieve the proposed objective can be questioned and, in turn, be able to compare it with other existing alternatives regarding their greater or lesser harm to the exercise of fundamental rights whose protection may not have been among the established objectives. Thus, it could be determined, for example, that technological development is more harmful than beneficial and should be replaced by other types of measures.3

In our region, the question should not be whether we get on the train of technological enthusiasm and its most recent innovation: AI. The questions that the authorities and the citizens should try to answer are for what, when and in what proportion these technological tools constitute a real contribution to development with social justice and when they simply make up or, worse, amplify the inequality in which they still live mired our societies.

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