AI seeks to imitate the human brain through an artificial one. Something that we know is making rapid progress in the realm of logical rationality and the definition of conjectural common sense, but which encounters serious obstacles in territories of human decision that have to do with intuition and consciousness. In the latter, the aspects mentioned cause in human analyzes a creative miscegenation that is very difficult to imitate by the machine. Especially since there are no standardizable patterns of human unpredictability.
Anticipating how human intuition and consciousness work requires internalizing what fallibility is and what transcendence is, for example. Essential biases if you want to get into the yolk of the human egg and the decisions that have to do with this area. We are therefore talking about complex biases that are difficult to transfer to strong or general AI designs.
Among other reasons why AI does not harbor a cognitive alchemy that transforms any basic information into common, replicable formulas of practical knowledge, since the human brain does not operate in the same way when writing this article, interpreting a CT scan of a cancer, manage the mobility of Barcelona or remotely direct an autonomous lethal weapon among the ruins of the Ukrainian front of Bakhmut.
AI's goal of replicating the human brain in another artificial one harbors the difficulty of not being able to reproduce the biases that make us weaker in terms of efficiency, but stronger in terms of managing the unpredictable and surprising. Something that is particularly relevant in politics, where the management of associated macro data does not offer an artificial knowledge that competes with the knowledge of human beings when exercising the centrality of the decisions that preside over politics.
There is no doubt that AI will help politics develop layers of applied information management. And, even, it will produce knowledge about it, but it will never be able to replace the politician who decides from above or the citizen who votes from below. At least within a democracy worthy of the name. I say this because, even if the complexity of democratic societies is exacerbated and we feel that it can lead to their collapse, it will be difficult for AI to save us from this risk by offering us political judgments that are better than humans.
No matter how much autonomy you may have, it will be very difficult to displace the human being in the task of finding equity that neutralizes the tension between the different interests present, therefore, to know what is fair or unfair you must expose yourself to the risk of making a mistake and bearing the consequences.
However, the temptation to think that a political AI can do better is obvious. In China, the temptation materializes with a platform state, but, clearly, it is not a democracy. Also at the heart of our open societies there is a technophile drive that leads us to think, as the determinists of the past did, that the behavior of human beings can be algorithmically calculated when they are forced to make political decisions.
This leads me to suggest the recovery of readings such as Isaiah Berlin's El juicio político before those who feel the temptation to contribute to the apotheosis of AI that we are incurring. Written in the sixties of the last century, it is part of a work whose title could not be more current: The sense of reality. Its pages condense a praise to the creative superiority of human judgment based on the exaltation of fallibility and transcendence to which I referred earlier. A qualitative superiority that helps support the apparent inevitability of AI as a support for artificial knowledge in struggle with human knowledge.
Among other things because it explains, for example, what leads a Prime Minister to call a general election against all odds after losing a municipal one. A decision that Berlin explains from political judgment and that is based on a sensitivity that we analyze through metaphors that highlight corporeity and that show politicians as beings with "antennae that communicate to them the contours and specific textures of a political or social situation particular".
That is why we say of them that they have "a good political eye, smell or ear". Or that they have a hidden sense where love, ambition or hatred come into play and activate a capacity "that crisis and danger sharpen (or weaken)" as a special gift "that is not entirely different from that of creative artists or writers”. An area where human centrality remains irreplaceable. As Berlin acknowledges, the politician is the only one capable of "integrating an enormous amalgam of data in perpetual change" that are too "intermingled to be caught, stuck with a needle and labeled as if they were butterflies".
A generalist ability that groups data into a singular unrepeatable scheme in which the risk of failure and assuming the consequences of human fallibility releases an empathy towards the unwanted that gives human knowledge its superiority over the machine . A human knowledge that adopts the skin of "a direct, almost sensory contact", which is not "simply recognizing its general characteristics" and classifying them "or reasoning about them, or analyzing them, or drawing conclusions and formulating theories ". In short, a fallible knowledge that exposes us to error, but which, for this very reason, makes us superior based on our fragility. If we delve deeper into it, we could be taking the steps to restore the tradition of wisdom.
