T
he bill still awaits Congress approval but President Javier Milei has proposed granting legal status to companies peopled (or “non-peopled”) by creations of Artificial Intelligence. In just three weeks time the United States which Milei so venerates will be celebrating in the throes of the World Cup now underway the 250th anniversary of a Declaration of Independence founded on the principle of “No taxation without representation” (a jamboree which the President plans to join) – since these future robot companies will presumably be paying taxes, does this mean that any number of avatars could be given the right to vote?
Without looking any further ahead, the robot solution could be applied to some of this week’s news ítems. Cabinet Chief Manuel Adorni has shown so much natural stupidity in fumbling the sworn statement of assets finally presented in midweek that some might feel that his replacement by Artificial Intelligence would be an improvement. Adorni’s main line of defence has been to use the recent “fiscal innocence” legislation to cover up his tracks retroactively – that law has formed part of a slide in revenues which has led to the cherished fiscal surplus becoming increasingly precarious with false savings and floating debt soaring (also belittled by ex-president Mauricio Macri as “bad quality” by ignoring the importance of infrastructure for capital investments). Milei has just increased the pressure on that surplus by giving ground to the universities over academic pay with the erosion of his popularity (for which Adorni is only one of the causes) becoming politically unsustainable. But then why have universities at all if not even necessary to be human to be a company executive, never mind the university degrees flaunted by most (although not all) CEOs?
Yet capitulation to robots is always going to be a hard sell. Already a critic of the totalitarian potential of AI, the influential intellectual Yuval Noah Harari (from Israel, a country which the libertarian lion reveres at least as much as the United States) has specifically taken issue with Milei’s proposal of non-human companies, as published in the Financial Times (which also ran Harari’s reaction). Harari pointed out that the absence of any penal responsibility opens the door for these non-human executives to be also inhuman – they could run companies into the ground and fire employees unjustly without any consequences because there are no prisons for them. The present crop of human tech moguls increasingly running the planet (the likes of Peter Tiel now on these shores) are fiendishly ingenious as it is in finding loopholes to evade state control – how much more will algorithms with zero criminal responsibility and ethical limits be able to bypass the law in its entirety? While Milei’s FT article cited the pioneering example of the Dutch East India Company founded in 1602 (ignoring that England’s East India Company was created a couple of years previously, chartered on the last day of 1600), Harari contested Milei’s implied claim that Buenos Aires could become a New Amsterdam (the original name of New York) by saying that it was more likely to become a Java.
Euphoric talk about the vast potential created by AI is a dime a dozen but a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, which is current humanity and its capacity to accept and adapt. The situation is broadly similar on a much smaller scale to the political problem facing the government – massive investments on the way and a potential explosion of exports all leading to a greater prosperity but is it reaching the ordinary Argentine? The debate places its focus very much on the non-human corporations but there are much direr consequences for employment from Milei’s idea (shared with or perhaps even taken from Deregulation & State Transformation Minister Federico Sturzenegger) of a digital platform to take care of all administration.
The corresponding bill will presumably go before Congress at some point, even if legislation is moving at an inordinately sluggish pace at present despite Milei’s promise of 90 structural reforms with the submission of 10 bills monthly when opening ordinary sessions last March, but a chamber full of libertarian and Kirchnerite deputies all too often selected for their blind adherence rather than their acute intelligence does not seem up to the dimensions of this debate. Multidisciplinary panels of experts carefully making comparisons with international models (for example, the European Union which already has a rich experience here) are needed but ultimately this debate should include us all because it affects us all.
Comments