Development of a Sustainable Infosphere

Artificial dreams embody our unstoppable quest for non-biological intelligence. It is a quest that does not privilege the natural. It treats all forms of existence and mannerisms as authentic. Including ICT-mediated interactions with biological agents, and artificial, synthetic, hybrid, and engineered artefacts. In Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), we must take seriously the new e-nvironments and digital architectures which future generations will inhabit.

Through the interplay of agency and socio-political structure, agents will develop a habitus typical of their position in the infosphere. New forms of cultural capital will provide the means for non-economic forms of domination and hierarchy, as classes distinguish themselves through hybrid and synthetic life. These artificial e-nvironments will require us to change our self-perceptions and roles concerning reality and how we navigate our natural and synthetic interactions.

The shift from material to symbolic forms of capital will further obscure the persistent causes of inherited inequality and intergenerational immobility. Social and institutional arenas will become digital fields where people will express and reproduce their cognitive, faith-based, educational, and cultural dispositions, and compete to distribute different kinds of capital.

Until recently, our artificial dreams were stranded in a thick fog.  Now it is becoming clearer how to go forward. A vanishing human-machine divide now characterises the frontier of cyberspace. The very fabric of reality is changing in our quest for artificial intelligence (AI). We now accept the virtual as partially real, and the real as incomplete without the virtual. We are the first information migrants in the infosphere who are not digital natives.

As information organisms or “inforgs” we flourish by experiencing reality as “onlife” – (online and offline, analogue and digital). But this experience is presently defined by six ethical concerns: traceability, unfair outcomes, unintended consequences, misguided evidence, inconclusive evidence, and inscrutable evidence. Many patterns identified by algorithms are inherent properties of the modelled data. Opacity can be intrinsic due to data set design decisions. The gold standard can only be justice as algorithmic fairness.

The information societies and digital architectures we are now building are neo-manufacturing societies. In information societies raw materials, commodities, and old energy have been superseded by Digital Gold as the real source of added value. Where does this put LAC? The horizon is a knot of imbalances and inequalities. What is the human project we intend to pursue? Previous revolutions that undergirded the wealth of nations including the agricultural and the industrial, led to macroscopic transformation of political and trade structures without changing social structures.

The Industrial Revolution created opulence in those societies that manufactured and exported larger quantities of new products to satisfy new aspirations. Throughout history, humans have experienced technological upheavals, but only rarely has technology fundamentally transformed the socio-political structures of a society. The familiar social frameworks assimilate and absorb new technologies and tools, without disrupting the familiar categories in society.

During the Enlightenment, Descartes’s dictum, “Cogito Ergo Sum” (I think, therefore I am), enshrined reasoned agency as humanity’s defining capability and claim to historical centrality. Four centuries later a query looms over us: If AI approximates thinking, then who are we? AI is reconfiguring human thinking, epistemology, perception, and how we relate to reality.

AI transformation is building the infosphere in which future generations will dwell. The things that once held us together have fallen apart. The digital has dissolved charters everywhere. Longstanding institutions are leaning under the load of endless weightless code, interoperability, and digital citizen-facing social services. Old foundations are rusting. Everything is shifting. Information creation, design, and management are key to building a future of algorithmic fairness in which we nurture the development of a sustainable infosphere.

We must find a believable narrative to help us make sense of our predicament. Critiques of old narratives like Neo-liberalism and Fukuyama’s “end of history” were also narratives. But every appraisal is part of the problem that it tries to solve. Understanding the old narratives and their justification and what better narratives can replace them is less immature than trying to set aside grand narratives. History after all is not an Act of God. History is a human demanding the abandonment of dead ends, and the writing of new plans through Acts of Political Choice.

Our deep-rooted ideas of AI provoke critical reflection on the foundations of AI. On some fronts, success is uncritically applauded. In other circles, it is disingenuously condemned. But we do not want our fears to be misplaced. Is it Dr. Frankenstein whom we should all be afraid of, or is it his creation? As Yoda advised in Star Wars: “Fear is the path to the dark side… fear leads to anger… anger leads to hate… hate leads to suffering.”

We are gradually moving into the infosphere. This requires a new metanarrative. The old revolutions unfolded without foresight and with durable implications. The information revolution will be no less dramatic. A central consideration is whether the infosphere revolution is understood within the frame of wealth creation or how we reconceptualize ourselves. We must create societies in LAC that can care for humanity and the earth during the AI and green transitions.