The world is experiencing an unprecedented 2024 with a calendar of 64 key elections, like the one that happened in France and the one that will take place in the United States in November. This is a record scenario in which, to the strong role that social networks play in informing and influencing, is added the popularization of very powerful digital tools… Could Artificial Intelligence be a threat to democratic systems?
When this year ends, more than two billion people will have expressed their will by voting. Along with human rights and the rule of law, democracy is one of the central elements of Western regimes and, like so many other areas of our daily lives, it is being transformed by technology and it is not clear that this is a positive thing. .
“Artificial Intelligence in combination with social networks play an increasingly important role in the manipulation of elections and the spread of misinformation,” warns Belgian philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh in his latest book, Why Artificial Intelligence undermines democracy.
In the view of this specialist, this technology is usually used to deepen the polarization of political visionincrease the epistemic bubbles that prevent us from knowing opinions different from ours and even install a climate in which people who do not think like us are seen as enemies.
Democracy is very vulnerable. If we leave things as they are, totalitarianism can emerge at any time.
Much power, few hands
This thinker is not the only one who wonders about these scenarios. in his book The era of surveillance capitalismthe American sociologist Shoshana Zuboff affirms that we are seeing the birth of a new type of political agora, in which these technological developments make power is concentrated in a few hands and takes sovereignty away from the people.
The truth is that in the last decade large corporations have been taking over more and more digital spaces and tools. Today, most of our time in front of a screen is spent in spaces owned by one of the “giants,” as the American writer Amy Webb calls them, including Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, IBM and Apple.
And although these technologies have the potential to allow us all to have a stronger voice and to reach new spaces, currently Digital environments not only do not encourage deliberation or exchangebut rather increased disinformation and surveillance, undermining basic democratic principles such as justice and freedom.
“We urgently need more binding agreements at national and global levels to address these issues in order to safeguard and develop our republics. Democracy is very vulnerable and can be easily eroded. If we leave things as they are and do not act quickly, totalitarianism can emerge at any moment,” Coeckelbergh explained in an article published by the United Nations.