In memory of my daughter María Cecilia, technology journalist...
The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology reported by all the media, including social networks, reminded me of the reason why I originally opened this small space on the web, which was none other than to translate in simple terms how information technology, formerly called informatics, would radically change the way in which people would be productive in society, not to mention the changes in the way they interact socially.
Thirty-five years ago, my concern was focused on which of these things we could use as peoples who were not generators of technologies, formulating at that time a concept that I called Necessary Informatics and whose bases I published in a Venezuelan magazine of world affairs and foreign policy. I had the honor of sharing the cover with illustrious protagonists of the time such as Simón Alberto Consalvi and former President Carlos Andrés Pérez. (see in Spanish Política Internacional Oct-Dic 1988, Luis Manuel Aguana, Informática y Política Internacional, in https://www.academia.edu/104733908/Inform%C3%A1tica_y_Pol%C3%ADtica_Internacional_Luis_Manuel_Aguana).
When the global phenomenon of the Internet had not yet exploded, there were already signs on the horizon that the world was moving towards a concentration of knowledge as the new formula for social value. But this could not materialize at that time because the technological tools to make it possible did not exist. We knew that it would change the world, but we did not know how it would do so.
But the world continued to turn and in the evidence of these signals, which could only be seen at that time by people close to the world of technology, I tried to express this concern for Venezuelans in the same magazine in 1995, through another article that unfortunately was not published and that was my first approach to this problem, and that now is no different from the concerns that we have today with the advent of AI (see in Spanish Economía Mundial de la Información, 1995, Luis Manuel Aguana, en https://www.academia.edu/44241942/Econom%C3%ADa_Mundial_de_la_Informaci%C3%B3n). We must also remember that if there had been a tool such as this blog in 1995, it would have been possible to communicate these concerns to those of us who wrote, who previously depended on whether or not an editor thought it appropriate to publish something that came into his hands, or if we had the resources to publish it.
However, in both cases, by that time the concerns did not go beyond whether or not an information technology was localized in our countries, or whether its massive use would take jobs away from workers, either in massive information handling jobs, or through the automation of goods factories or service production. Or back to the old concern of whether machines will replace humans, as is now being resurrected with the Artificial Intelligence phenomenon. And that, in my view, is not the place where we should be paying our greatest attention.
While it is true that these concerns are valid, history has shown that machines not only did not replace employees in offices or factories, but served as a complement to an army of young people with a new vision of the world, applying these new technologies for the welfare of people, and the whole system was rearranged to a new, more efficient and productive situation for all.
But there is one thing that did change to the detriment of humanity: the ability to use these new technologies to do harm. And just as the explosion of knowledge and the availability of tools for its use and processing were and continue to be a blessing for everyone, they are the tools par excellence for totalitarianisms and tyrannies, and anyone who decides, with sufficient means at hand, to control society in order to reach and remain in power.
But what the new technologies did was to collect in an incredibly more efficient way what historically those in power had already done before: people's data. Let's look at a very striking historical case:
“In the Netherlands, the effort at establishing a comprehensive population registration system for administrative and statistical purposes was completed even before the Nazi-occupation (Methorst, 1936; Thomas, 1937). In 1938 H. W. Methorst, who was then the director-general of the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics and formerly also head of the Dutch office of population registration, reported on the rapid progress being made in the Netherlands in implementing a new comprehensive system of population registration that would follow each person "from cradle to grave" and open "wide perspectives for simplification of municipal administration and at the same time social research" (1938: 713-714). By early 1941 Methorst's successor as head of the population registration office, J. L. Lentz, had quickly adapted this general "cradle to grave" system to create special registration systems covering the Jewish and Gypsy populations of the Netherlands”.
“These registration systems and the related identity cards played an important role in the apprehension of Dutch Jews and Gypsies prior to their eventual deportation to the death camps. Dutch jews had the highest death rate (73 percent) of jews residing in any occupied western European country-far higher than the death rate among the Jewish population of Belgium (40 percent) and France (25 percent) , for example. At the same time, Jewish refugees from Germany and other countries living in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation experienced an overall death rate lower than that of DutchJews. The best explanation for this unusual phenomenon was that these refugees, unlike most Dutch Jews, avoided registration” (resaltado nuestro) (ver Seltzer, William y Anderson, Margo (2001). The Dark Side of Numbers: The Role of Population Data Systems in Human Rights Abuse. Social Research, Vol. 68, No.2 (Summer 2001), en https://tinyurl.com/y9fzdpcr).
Another, historically more recent case is the Ministry for State Security (MfS) of the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), known as the Stasi: "The thesis is that an effective surveillance regime makes the use of overt violence less urgent because the population is pushed to self-discipline"... "The MfS developed one of the most pervasive surveillance apparatuses in the history of mankind. In 1981, Erich Mielke, head of the Stasi from 1957 to 1989, declared: In its constant effort to clarify "who is who," the MfS - with its Chekist forces, means and methods - has to identify people's real political attitudes, their ways of thinking and behaving . . clarify the means . . give an answer to who is an enemy; who is adopting a hostile and negative attitude; who is under the influence of hostile, negative and other forces and may become an enemy who may succumb to enemy influences and allow himself to be exploited by the enemy; who has adopted a vacillating position; and on whom the party and the state may depend and receive reliable support." (see in Spanish Andrea Togni, Cómo la Stasi de Alemania Oriental perfeccionó la vigilancia masiva, in https://mises.org/es/wire/como-la-stasi-de-alemania-oriental-perfecciono-la-vigilancia-masiva).
At the present time, people's massive data are still a desirable target in all orders. Just imagining that the Nazis of World War II or the communists of the GDR's STASI, which disappeared in 1989, would have had available the computational tools that are now freely available on the Internet or machines available in any electronics store, to get their hands on people's data, shows that the world would not be anywhere near what we are seeing today. We would be an enslaved humanity. But there are still people, organizations and entire countries that think like them, so any negative fantasy they can come up with is possible. That's the worst threat to humanity, not actually that someone will lose their job because an AI-based program gives faster and more accurate answers to a company's customers.
The violation of Human Rights by criminals such as those who still rule Venezuela can deepen if we -without realizing it- make available to them data and information that will lead them to further deepen the surveillance they already have over us, and that they have only activated a very low percentage of the damage they can do. And until the rule of law and freedoms return in Venezuela, we will not be able to take the first steps to adequately protect Venezuelans from this potential technological danger...
Caracas, August 1st, 2023
Blog:
TIC’s & Derechos Humanos, https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/
Email: luismanuel.aguana@gmail.com
Twitter:@laguana
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