CILAC interviewed Senator Guido Girardi, president of the Future Challenges Commission and the Future Congress of Chile. With a critical stance, he referred to the change of civilization and the digital era that, necessarily, must renew the political system, to integrate technology in the key to human rights. He also spoke about this in the colloquiums of Science in Motion promoted by UNESCO in the CILAC Forum
In 2011, the then president of the Chilean Senate, Guido Girardi, promoted the creation of a permanent commission on science, technology and innovation, with the main distinction of being made up not only of politicians. Since then, the highest academic authorities of the universities and the members of the National Academy of Sciences of Chile would sit at the same table as the parliamentarians. Any of them can present bills and attend any other legislative committee. An alliance between the State and science unique in the world.
“We did it because we understand that we cannot continue designing public policies based on the capabilities that parliamentarians have. We are relatively illiterate for many of the problems. If you make fundamental decisions without the opinion of experts (although that opinion is not the only one to consider) you end up designing policies that are not comprehensive," the Chilean senator, who also participated in August first CILAC 2021 colloquium, Science in Motion, aimed at addressing the link between science and politics.
Also ten years ago, Chile took over the covers of newspapers when it launched the first edition of the Congress of the Future. At the initiative of Senator Girardi, since that year, every January, for a week, renowned intellectuals from all over the world land in Chile, who together with national scientists and academics debate the issues of the future. Nearly 3,000,000 people have attended these annual meetings trying to formulate questions that have not yet been asked to face the future. An altruistic meeting, where none of the more than 30 Nobel Prize winners who have participated, charged for their presentations.
10 years ago Chile was still recovering from a harsh and cruel earthquake. Dilma Russeff became president of Brazil, Obama fought for re-election in the United States and the Arab Spring took place. What led you that year to design tomorrow and create the Commission and Congress of the Future in Chile? Something unprecedented in the world.
My personal story. I studied in a French institute and that already gives you a certain profile. I also come from an environmentalist position. I am leftist, but I have a different matrix. I had a great teacher: Edgar Morin. I was trained with him and with complex thinking. When I became president of the Senate, it was clear to me that we were entering a new era of civilization. And that our institutions (all: education, health, politics, companies) were based on an industrial design scheme that had to do with the second Industrial Revolution, very centralized from the top down. Very hierarchical. Verticalist. It was the answer that civilization had designed for an analog model. I realized that this model no longer served the complex world that was emerging ten years ago. In 2011 I saw the first symptoms of the obsolescence of institutions.
Was democracy obsolete in the 21st century?
I noticed a certain progressive irrelevance that democracy was beginning to have. The greatest objective of democracy should be to generate collaborative intelligence to respond to people's problems. That intelligence, which in the 20th century was generated by hierarchical institutions, in the 21st century begins to stop working that way. Furthermore, in the 19th and 20th centuries the intellectual and scientific world was within the State and the political parties, it belonged to the bureaucracy. On the other hand, in the 21st century, intellectuals, along with the most relevant actors in society, escaped from politics. They escaped from the State. Today they are outside. And therefore the State and its institutions were emptied of intelligence. Now they are found in universities, in civil society, but not within the State.
Therefore, if today you want to build complex collaborative intelligence, it is not enough with the State alone, you must expand your capacity to collect that intelligence that is distributed in society. So, our idea was born to build this framework for the future with the scientific, academic and political world, with the intellectual world organized in civil society. The idea of uniting what was divided was born.
What did the congress generate in this first decade of its history?
We always say that the Congress of the Future is a laboratory of social innovation. It is a space to explore. To be curious. To break the border. We are not affiliated herewith. Conventional politics is immediate and presentist. Most of us are also wired for everything to be here and now, and that behavior is without reflection. The State then does not make strategic reflection either. It is a hostage to immediacy. First of all, this congress gave us reflection.
Also we have tried to transform the future into a political subject. Take charge of the future and that the future is not a kind of garbage dump for the present, without any representation, because, anyway, the future does not vote. It has been a wonderful experience.
You were talking about a change in civilization that leaves the analogue model behind. What is expected from this digital age?
The digital age is shaking everything up. It breaks analogue institutions because the latter do not have the capacity to respond to the needs of the new era. When I talk to you in an analog conversation, the electrical impulses of my neurons go at 120 meters per second. But when we do it through an electronic device, the impulses go at 300 million meters per second. We went from a world where our borders were our brains (and therefore we lived regulated by the laws of biology) to a world where the borders are the laws of physics. It is a total irruption.
In addition, there is a gigantic acceleration process. Never registered. Never before has technology evolved so quickly. Before, the neuronal plasticity of our brain adapted to changes. Fire, the wheel, the printing press, steam engine, telegraph, electricity, telephone, television... Relatively slow changes. They were susceptible to being metabolized by the brain. But now it's different. Never before in such a short period has there been such an exponential technological revolution, which our brain has no capacity to process. I'm talking about artificial intelligence. Since 1992 with the arrival of the Internet, or 2007 with the iPhone... in these last nine years there have been the most profound changes that humanity has experienced and our brain has not been able to adapt. It is not capable of processing the world to come, nor the immensity of data that surrounds us, nor the potential of artificial intelligence.
How does this gap between technological advance and social adaptation impact?
More gaps appear, and it is part of what we discuss today: borders. Not only democracy and liberal humanism - which has to do with the meaning of life: choosing a partner, candidate, work, ideology, etc. - are at issue. We are entering a phase where we increasingly attribute more power to machines. We are no longer the ones who make decisions about, for example, who to vote for: the clearest example was that of Cambridge Analytica, with Brexit and the American elections.
Today algorithms tell you what to buy. More and more they determine our lives. And we began to transfer our decisions to algorithms. We use WAZE, GPS, and even the most intimate sphere of life, we end up using Tinder, and we transform love into a mathematical use. You hand over the most intimate part of your life to a machine without any resistance.
Where and when does all this end?
We are living in a phase of transformation where not only the model of society and civilization, the ideological vision, but also the continuity of homosapiens is in question. Today technology makes our history, which until now had been the result of natural evolution, change. The engine is the human being, because he can modify his hardware, he can modify his body. Therefore, we are going to experience human evolution on a technological scale. Which has another speed. This implies the need to adapt and update your entire chassis, your entire institutional system of democracy and education, which are made for the 20th century, not the 21st.
As you describe the panorama, it is clear that politics needs to integrate science. But what does science gain - or lose - by integrating with politics?
Science by itself is very dangerous. A science without conscience, without ethics, can destroy us. You may have the science that developed nuclear energy, but man dropped the atomic bombs. There politics becomes fundamental. It is the way to provide science with an ethical dimension. It has to articulate the pro-life dimension. Pro rights. Pro equity. Pro respect for the health of the planet.
And is the political system up to the task?
I believe that politics, which has become rarefied and has lost relevance and also meaning, must be restored. Because when a problem appears, for example, Climate Change, we face a political problem, not a technological one. When you have three countries, like China, the US and India, that generate half of the polluting emissions, it is a political problem, not a technical one. If the rest of the citizens of the planet do not unite against the power of this trident that does not intend to reduce its emissions, in fact they continue to increase them, we are doomed. Condemned to a catastrophe that is avoidable. With individual efforts, we are not going to get anywhere. Then politics must take its pulse again.
What happens if the global political system does not measure up?
A world without democracy is a very dangerous world. Because that's when populism emerges. If politics is not renewed, if it is obsolete, if it is anachronistic, if it is not capable of providing answers, if democracy does not adapt to this new society, if politics does not become more horizontal, if politics does not regain legitimacy and credibility, we are in serious trouble.
Human beings require certainties. They require certainty and that is where populism arises. Left or right. There are already examples in the world. They are visions that do not generate responses, but rather capture people's emotions temporarily. And they degrade politics even more. So what we have to consider is the challenge of democratizing the future. How to confront populism, how to confront the irrelevance of politics, we have to replace politics.
What result has been given to Chile by launching the commission and Congress?
We have promoted a constitutional reform to recognize a new human right, which are neural rights. It will be published at the end of September in the official journal. We brought together the 25 most important scientists on the planet in neuroscience and created a group to establish the bases of this right, and from that, we presented the bases for a constitutional reform. Neurorights are a first approach to legislate the future. The idea is that no authority can harm the integrity of citizens without due consent.
The brain is the new battlefield. War in the 21st century is not a hot war like in the 19th or mid-20th century. It is not a cold war either. It is a silent war. A war for data. And the power will be held by whoever manages that data. We are also working on a law that regulates, in this sense, the operation of digital platforms such as Facebook.
The thing is that the points where power is disputed are no longer the oil wells, but the brains of the people. Data is extracted from your brain, your attention is disputed. Now they fight for your attention to capture data, and then be able to modify your behaviors.
Do platforms concentrate current power?
In the 20th century, whoever controlled the oil controlled the power. But the geopolitical factor of the 21st century is no longer that. Neither are traditional combustion engine forces. Today we enter an era where the oil of the 21st century is data. And the engines of the 21st century are algorithms. But there is a difference. Before, every time you used the fuel, the fuel decreased. And the engines of the 20th century were static. Now, however, the algorithm engines are dynamic and are evolving at a gigantic speed.
It had never happened that fuel was exponential. There is going to be a gigantic tsunami of data which is going to push the development of artificial intelligence exponentially. And at the same time, algorithms (which reproduce the functioning of the cerebral cortex) are also evolving at an alarming speed. That makes artificial intelligence progress 100 times from one year to the next. Memory capacity doubles every 18 months. In 10 more years, with quantum computing, memory capacity will double every second and artificial intelligence will be a million times more powerful than the previous year.
In 2045, artificial intelligence will be a billion times more powerful than all human beings combined and there will be an artificial memory capacity of another planet. While the memory of human beings does not evolve, it is the same since homosapiens. So we are going to have gigantic gaps between the intelligence of humans and artificial intelligence. With the increasingly powerful capacity that artificial neural systems are going to have. And that has to be part of an urgent discussion.
Although Chile has taken a great first step, how do you assess the state of the situation in the rest of Latin America when combining politics, science and human rights?
These three elements are not currently articulated anywhere on the planet, it is not a problem in Latin America. They are not in France, they are not in Europe, not in the US. What happens is that in the US there is a supra power: a new empire. Platforms are a new empire, capable of replacing entire cities. It is enough to see that, today, it is no longer NASA that travels to Mars; Private platforms are the ones that reach Mars. Universities no longer create the best advances in nanotechnology, to cite another example, private companies do. It is these platforms: they are Google, they are Facebook, the ones that win all the Nobel Prizes, because they have the resources to pay for them.
Are you optimistic that our region will advance by integrating these new challenges?
I am a pessimist, and that is why I believe we have to fight. If we do nothing, if we candidly hand over power to the platforms, we will hardly be able to change the future that is projected today. That is why I propose and work for a progressive world that discusses the future. Let him discuss science and technology, but with values of democracy, equity, and equality. Science and technology can be very dangerous if you leave it in the hands of business interests, if it is controlled by Silicon Valley, an interest that wants to be immortal and surpass humans. They are going to work for that. It will be a very difficult dispute.