The start of the political course should project the gaze beyond an obsolete polarized agenda because the line of conflict about how we relate to power is no longer ideological (right-left) but existential (human-machine). The power to operate in the world is no longer managed territorially and sovereignly by the State because technology has replaced it. It exerts over humanity a virtual, depoliticized, and privatized power through the infosphere. Something that makes the French Revolution as obsolete as the consequences its product unleashed: the industrial revolution. It is urgent to think about the priorities of politics from the ontology associated with the defense of a human condition questioned by the impact that artificial intelligence (AI) designed to modify it according to the utilitarian priorities hidden behind the algorithms that monitor it projects on it.
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The greatest challenge politics faces today is to get right how it can, first, preserve the authenticity of the human essence in the face of the impact that radicalized and accelerated digitalization by AI has on everyone and, second, redefine its purpose to make that authenticity increase and evolve in freedom and within an ecosystem of global justice accessible to all humanity.
An existential challenge that demands a type of politics focused on the dilemmas that compromise the human condition, as Hannah Arendt defined it when she associated it with the dimensions of what she called the vita activa. Which is what is glimpsed with the help of an AI turned into the main protagonist of our time. Among other things because it destabilizes the axis on which professional training that enables the use of intelligence applied to the development of the world of work has gravitated: the university.
If the steam engine was the engine of industrial capitalism that made the nineteenth-century university specialize in training professionals who granted humanity intellectual hegemony over the work born from human-machine collaboration, today, AI, being the engine of the new cognitive capitalism, demands a radical paradigm shift from the university. At least if it wants the human being to contribute value and personal meaning to the interaction with it.
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AI takes from the professional who works with it the hegemony of the use of intelligence
That is why the university is so important at this moment and its reform the most politically transcendental battlefield if we want to preserve the human being as the measure of all things within the digital revolution. Above all, because AI takes from the professional who works with it the hegemony of the use of intelligence. First, because it takes away their technological surplus value. And second, because it alienates them within a process of reification that progressively marginalizes them while AI scales in its subjectivation. A complex phenomenon of reduction of human cognitive, wage, and existential capacity that leads universities to deeply rethink their role based on the humanist foundation that drove their birth. Something, by the way, that they will probably have to do on their own and at their own risk. Without counting on politics or the State due to the obsolescence of the former to understand what we are talking about and the lack of real sovereignty of the latter when managing its capacities, including educational ones, in the 21st century.
Combating barbarism and transmitting culture were the axes of the mission Ortega envisioned for the university when the rebellion of the masses shook Europe in the 1930s. Almost a hundred years later, that mission of the university is still necessary if we want to neutralize the massive impact of AI. That, or turn it into a museum. For the first time since its medieval birth, the university faces a dilemma related to the risk of its practical cancellation. Whether it continues offering, as it has until now, specialized knowledge associated with employability that will become increasingly precarious due to the accelerated advance of AI power, or change the paradigm and train professionals to critically imagine the future.
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