Carme Artigas (Spanish Government) at the Esade Technological Humanism Forum: “Artificial intelligence must be a source of social value and quality jobs”
On the occasion of the presentation of the Spanish Government's National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence, the Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence, Carme Artigas, stated that the government seeks to provide our society with “a strategy in which artificial intelligence can become a source of social and economic value creation, progress, and quality jobs”. To this end, she explained: “it is necessary that technological development is carried out under ethical principles and with guaranteed social rights”. These are some of the main ideas that emerged from her participation in the opening of the online ‘Conversations’ organised by the Esade Technological Humanism Forum, and which, for three consecutive days, brought together experts and academics to discuss the ethical future of the digital revolution and how to design a cyber-democracy based on digital rights.
The director of the Esade Technological Humanism Forum, José María Lassalle, pointed to the importance of “debating how artificial intelligence can make us more human, instead of automating our lives and depriving us of our humanness”. He also pointed to the crucial role played by technological humanism as a “field of critical reflection that contributes to the design of public policies applied to the digital revolution and that places human dignity at the centre”. The online ‘Conversations’ dealt with such fundamental aspects as: the political polarisation of democracy and its destabilisation by cyber-populisms; the growth of the platform economy based on data and algorithms and the challenges it poses for social and labour rights; and artificial intelligence and automation and the great challenges they pose for education and culture in our societies.
Challenges of the Spanish digital economy
Antonio Garamendi, president of the Spanish Confederation of Employers and Industries (CEOE), remarked that digitalisation “can bring us closer to equality, to a more balanced world, providing we put people at the centre and do not renounce our right to privacy. These are the foundations of freedom, and offer the only approach that will make a better future possible for everyone and help build a sustainable and supportive economy”. He added: “it would be a mistake, and a failure, from a European point of view, to think that data is a matter for companies or the state”. Similarly, Laia Bonet, from Barcelona City Council, stressed the importance of questioning “which model of public space we want”. She said that “between deregulation and iron control there is a third space; technologies have a transformative potential and must serve to make people’s lives better without diminishing their rights and freedoms”.
For Jordi Vaquer, director of global foresight and analysis at Open Society Foundations: “technology is a space given to optimism, where the limits are unclear; and where scientific vision reaches the boundaries of human ingenuity” and so “technological humanism must negotiate those limits with ecological, ethical, political and philosophical criteria”. Jorge Moruno, a representative of Más Madrid in the Madrid regional assembly, pointed out that “the essence of technology is not technological, but cultural, because it always contains a social perspective. Therefore, democratising technology is more than just facilitating access to it for the greatest number of people; its social perspective must also be democratised”, he added.
Being human, beyond natural and artificial
In the relationship between art and science, remarked Monica Bello, director of Arts at CERN: “there is a common search, which also results in artificial intelligence: the question is how do we approach nature? We must maintain a critical attitude, in the face of the fragility of an altered reality that we must learn to regulate”. According to Jorge Barreto Xavier, director general of Education, Social Development and Culture for the municipality of Oeiras in Portugal: “when a technology exceeds our capacities in various domains, we must reflect on what it means to be human”.
Victoria Camps, emeritus professor of moral and political philosophy at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, proposed a reflection on: “how the accumulation of data affects the exercise of freedom”. However, this question first requires defining the concept of freedom: “which can be understood as individual autonomy, not the absence of rules, but the capacity to self-regulate with awareness and responsibility for one's own interests and the common good”. This, she argues, should lead us to consider: “to what extent we want algorithms to understand us”, because “as humans, we cannot renounce understanding ourselves”.
Humanistic perspectives on the digital revolution
Facundo Ponce de León, director of the Humanities Department at the Universidad Católica del Uruguay, said that “the humanities have the capacity to put things into a time perspective, as compared to the 'never before' that underpins discussion of the technological revolution”. Judit Carrera, director of the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), shares the view that: “the level of technological acceleration is not exceptional, because for many years the frontiers between the human and the technological have been blurred”, and this emphasises “the urgency of bringing the debate on scientific and technological progress into the public arena, so we can have a robust public sphere and a civil society capable of thinking critically and responding to abuses of power”.
The three days of online conversations also included the participation of Esade's director general, Koldo Echebarria, as well as: John Hoffman (GSMA-MWC); Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, (Universidad de Bolonia); Daniel Innerarity; (EHU/UPV; EUI); Mar Cabra, (OdiseIA); Luz Rodríguez (UCLM); Natalia Olson-Urtecho (RadicalxChange); Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí (Ideogram); Glen Weyl (Microsoft); Cristina Caffara (CRA); Jeff Hoffman (Global Entrepreneurship Network); Pipo Serrano (broadcaster); Carmen Pagés (IDB); Elva López Mourelo (ILO); Anna Ginès (Esade); Marc Torrens (Esade); Íñigo Navarro (ICADE); and José Andrés Ordóñez (UNAM), among other leading figures in the fields of politics, social and workers’ rights, technological innovation, business, culture, and the humanities.
