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The director of our Digital Citizenship Training Program, an academic from the School of Communications and Journalism at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, and an associated researcher of GobLab, Luis Enrique Santana, was part of the Virtual Panel titled “Artificial Intelligence: What is its Role in Today’s Democracy?” held on July 5th and organized by Red Innovación.
In this panel, the academic addressed concerns about the impact of artificial intelligence on society, specifically in democracy, stating, “If artificial intelligence is only assumed by those who have the capacity to handle data, the powerful ones, and they use it to increase segregation and violation of rights, then we have a serious problem. So it is true that artificial intelligence will set the tone for democracy, but we are, I believe, still in time to establish what the limits are and how we want it to be integrated”.
At the same time, the academic and director of our program emphasized that “different forms of artificial intelligence do not replace humans; they are a tool. This set of technologies are tools that will only be useful to the extent that they are integrated into the system that benefits society.”
Other panelists in this event included Alejandro Moreno, a lawyer with a focus on human rights and social justice and a researcher at the organization Linterna Verde, Marta Cantero, a professor of computer law at the University of Tartu and a researcher at the School of Transnational Governance (EUI), and Ana María Castillo Hinojosa, a journalist and social communication licentiate, and co-director of the Nucleus of Artificial Intelligence, Society, Information, and Communication. They reflected on the role of artificial intelligence in democracy and its interaction in digital participation, and analyzed the role of artificial intelligence in current democracy in the social and political context, and its consequences on the disconnect rates between citizens and their representatives in Latin America, which according to data from LAPOP, is less than a third of the population.
At the end of the event, Santana acknowledged the value of these interdisciplinary instances, stating that “fortunately, for some time now, various fields have begun to work together, and I like this idea of ‘by design,’ that we will ensure people’s rights, the values we want to promote as a society from the very design of new technologies. So, as we have more of these meetings and these mixed panels that allow us to understand the field as something that influences different aspects of society, it will enable the formation of new generations of developers who have these democratic values, human rights, children’s rights incorporated by design into the design of new technology.”