T<\/p>\n
he bill still awaits Congress approval but President Javier Milei has proposed granting legal status to companies peopled (or \u201cnon-peopled\u201d) 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 \u201cNo taxation without representation\u201d (a jamboree which the President plans to join) \u2013 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?<\/p>\n
Without looking any further ahead, the robot solution could be applied to some of this week\u2019s news \u00edtems. 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\u2019s main line of defence has been to use the recent \u201cfiscal innocence\u201d legislation to cover up his tracks retroactively \u2013 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 \u201cbad quality\u201d 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?<\/p>\n
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\u2019s proposal of non-human companies, as published in the Financial<\/em> Times<\/em> (which also ran Harari\u2019s reaction). Harari pointed out that the absence of any penal responsibility opens the door for these non-human executives to be also inhuman \u2013 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\u00a0 on these shores) are fiendishly ingenious as it is in finding loopholes to evade state control \u2013 how much more will algorithms with zero criminal responsibility and ethical limits be able to bypass the law in its entirety? While Milei\u2019s FT<\/em> article cited the pioneering example of the Dutch East India Company founded in 1602 (ignoring that England\u2019s East India Company was created a couple of years previously, chartered on the last day of 1600), Harari contested Milei\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 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\u2019s idea (shared with or perhaps even taken from Deregulation & State Transformation Minister Federico Sturzenegger) of a digital platform to take care of all administration.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n