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New technologies always carry a degree of uncertainty. If a centralized regulatory body must first approve a technology’s safety and use, autonomy and creativity become increasingly irrelevant.
The global discussion on artificial intelligence has ceased to be a technical debate and has become a first-rate political conflict. In 2024, the European Union enforced the EU AI Act, the world’s most comprehensive AI regulatory framework, placing strict compliance requirements on developers and companies before their products reach the market. In the United States, executive orders have directed federal agencies to evaluate AI risks across sectors ranging from healthcare to national security. At the United Nations, calls for an international AI governance body grow louder with each passing summit. As this technology becomes the cognitive infrastructure of contemporary economies, the pressure for centralized control is accelerating at a pace that deserves serious scrutiny.
The expansion of artificial intelligence has not only ushered in a global technological revolution. It has also rapidly triggered a profound institutional transformation that alters the relationship between the State, the market, and civil society. As this technology becomes the cognitive infrastructure of contemporary life, that is, as it becomes the foundation for the development of markets, the tendency grows for its configuration to be defined by centralized power structures: the State.
This movement points to something broader and more structural than conventional regulation. It reflects a technocratic logic of power, a model in which decisions affecting economic and social life are delegated to experts who present themselves as holders of superior knowledge and, therefore, authorized to define what is risk, what is acceptable, and what should be limited. This phenomenon intensifies precisely around AI, because the technology produces effects that escape common social understanding, creating opportunities for technical authorities to claim jurisdiction over nearly the entire sphere of innovation. The result is that the citizen is excluded not by force but by complexity.
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