AI and Power: A Crucial Political Debate Still Ignored

AI: A Silent but Profound Revolution

In the tumult of contemporary debates, some transformations are unfolding in the background, almost unnoticed. Current public discussions are often dominated by societal issues such as gender equality, inclusion, and diversity. While these topics are undeniably important, another revolution, more discreet yet potentially more transformative, is underway: the gradual integration of artificial intelligence into our daily lives.

This technological evolution, although less visible, could have far deeper consequences than the current debates. History shows us that the most significant changes are not always those that capture immediate attention. They often advance on the margins of political discussions until their impacts become irreversible.

AI: An Anthropological Transformation

Artificial intelligence is not just a technical advancement among others. It represents a major upheaval, as it begins to replicate capabilities once thought to be exclusive to the human mind. Analyzing complex situations, establishing correlations, producing texts and images, formulating reasoning, anticipating situations: these are all faculties that were once the sole domain of humans.

This change is of considerable magnitude. For centuries, the uniqueness of humanity rested on its cognitive abilities: understanding the world, interpreting situations, expressing ideas, making decisions, and judging. Today, these skills are increasingly shared with technical systems. This raises a crucial question: to what extent are we willing to delegate our decisions to machines?

Delegation Already Underway

In many sectors, this delegation is already a reality. Algorithms play a role in credit allocation, educational guidance, candidate sorting, information prioritization, and public policy optimization. They also assist in medical diagnostics, guide financial investments, and are beginning to intervene in certain administrative or judicial processes.

Despite this transformation, the political debate remains fragmented. Artificial intelligence is indeed mentioned in programs and speeches, but often in a partial manner. For some, it is primarily a matter of technological sovereignty in global competition. For others, it is linked to military power or national security. Still others see it as a lever for economic productivity, while some are concerned about its environmental impact or the biases and discrimination it may generate.

The Risk of Atrophying Human Capacities

Delegating our decisions to machines raises another question, less visible but equally essential: what happens to our ability to think, express, and decide when we gradually stop exercising these faculties?

Every technology modifies the capabilities of those who use it. Writing, for example, has raised fears about a weakening of human memory. Similarly, digital technologies have transformed the way we read, write, and concentrate. Artificial intelligence could lead to an even greater transformation.

If we entrust machines with writing texts, synthesizing information, analyzing complex situations, or formulating arguments, it is legitimate to wonder whether these faculties will continue to develop in individuals, or if they risk atrophying.

The Role of Emotions in Decision-Making

Another question arises: what place do we want to continue to give to human emotions in our collective decisions? Artificial intelligence systems often promise more rational, efficient, and less biased decisions. However, political and social life has never relied solely on rationality.

Compassion can guide a judicial decision, empathy can inspire social policy, indignation can provoke reform, and doubt, caution, or intuition can temper the cold logic of efficiency. Emotions are not merely imperfections that technology would correct. They also contribute to our capacity for judgment.

A Shift in Power

Thus, the question of artificial intelligence is not merely a technological issue. It is deeply philosophical and political. The entire history of human societies can be read as an inquiry into the location of power: in a monarch, in an elite, in a sovereign people. Artificial intelligence introduces a new possibility: that of power mediated by technical systems whose logics often remain invisible to those who use them.

Major technological transformations have always reshaped power structures. The printing press revolutionized the dissemination of knowledge. Electricity transformed economic structures. The internet profoundly changed the flow of information. Artificial intelligence could transform even more deeply the way decisions are produced.

The True Democratic Debate

In this context, the way our public debates are structured sometimes appears strikingly out of sync. While we divide over identity or symbolic issues, a silent transformation is redefining the very conditions of human action.

The essential question may no longer be solely about how to distribute places more equitably in the world as it exists. It becomes: what world do we want to build in the age of artificial intelligences?

For AI can be a formidable instrument of emancipation: accelerating scientific research, improving medicine, optimizing resource use, broadening access to knowledge. But it can also become an instrument of power concentration, widespread surveillance, or massive automation of collective decisions.

Everything will depend on the principles we choose to embed at the heart of its development. The stakes are therefore not only technological. They are profoundly democratic. If we want the future of our societies not to be determined solely by the strategies of a few technological actors or by the mere logic of efficiency, then it becomes necessary to open a genuine public debate.

A debate that does not merely question the uses of artificial intelligence but poses the central question: the place we want to give it in the organization of our societies. For behind the question of artificial intelligence lies perhaps the most decisive inquiry of our time: how much of our decisions, our judgment, and our humanity are we willing to delegate to machines?