Upon which pillars will we build the society of the future on? What institutions will we need to navigate a world in dynamic disruption?
These are broad questions, which could be answered in various ways. The analogy between the processes triggered by the invention of the printing press and by the digital revolution, frequently invoked, will serve as a framework for my response.
The emergence of the modern printing press (15th century) multiplied the production of religious, scientific, and technical texts, extending literacy from the clergy and nobility to the urban bourgeoisie and giving rise to the birth of a public sphere.
These events, combined with the fragmentation of European political power and the expansion of trade and maritime routes, led to a process that transformed a theocentric, hierarchical, and oral society into one increasingly secular, scientific, and literate. Its manifestation began with the Renaissance.
Erasmus of Rotterdam and Thomas More promoted a secular and rational vision of the world. Da Vinci and Michelangelo revolutionized the visual arts through experimentation and observation. Galileo and Newton spearheaded a scientific revolution that gave birth to modern thought, based on observation, measurement, and the systematization of data.
This was not a linear or peaceful process: it included religious wars, persecutions, and profound reconfigurations of power. Yet, in the long run, it laid the foundations for Rationalism and the Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries), which exalted the use of reason, science, education, and criticism of traditional authority.
Rousseau and Montesquieu challenged the absolutist order by proposing a new pact between the individual and the State. Adam Smith and other Enlightenment economists postulated a new economic order governed by the market, competition, and private property.
Between 1750 and 1850 the Industrial Revolution emerged and consolidated, developing new forms of work, production, and commerce. Almost simultaneously, the American Revolution (1776) and the French Revolution (1789) gave birth to a new political system.
The chain of changes from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment gave us capitalism and representative democracy. Will the digital age also bring forth a new form of economic organization and a new political system?
The evolution of computing, the Web, search engines, and social networks exponentially replicated the effect of the printing press: they diffuse knowledge, decentralize authority, and give rise to a new public sphere, this time digital.
These processes, amplified by Artificial Intelligence, form part of a systemic combination of global events that mark a change of era, such as the rise of Emerging Economies (led by China) to the forefront of the international economy, the emergence of a New Global Middle Class, and the growing impact of climate change.
New forms of organization—based on algorithms, data, and networks—are transforming and reconfiguring the place of old hierarchies. Just as modern reason expanded the field of knowledge in opposition to the primacy of theological authority, today artificial intelligence and predictive logic play a similar role: they reinforce and, in certain domains, arguably rival traditional deductive reasoning.
These similarities between the invention of the printing press and the rise of computers, however, should not obscure two key differences.
The first is the temporal dimension. Between the invention of the printing press (and the related processes mentioned) and the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, centuries passed. In the case of computing, changes take place within the span of, at most, a single generation.
Secondly, while the printing press was a tool at the service of humans to enhance their capacity to disseminate information and knowledge, computing is a technology. It processes and recombines information and generated artificial intelligence, a new and powerful technological version that challenges our capacity to control it.
These two differences may explain part of the “institutional fatigue” that the institutions of the industrial era experience in the face of technological change, limiting our capacity to manage it appropriately.
In 2013, in Argentina 4.0: The Citizens Revolution (Prometeo), I attempted to explain the emergence of a “new economy” (driven by new consumption patterns and modes of production shaped by technological change in a context of accelerated globalization) and the rise of “Digital Democracy” (driven by citizen empowerment and the redesign of political governance), advocating and predicting the emergence of new institutions for the digital age.
I was not alone in doing so. Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake warned of the rise of an “Intangible Economy,” linking international dissatisfaction with globalization to the lack of adequate institutions to regulate it (Capitalism without Capital, Princeton University Press, 2017; and Restarting the Future, Princeton University Press, 2022).
Jamie Susskind, for his part, argues that digital technology is generating a new form of political power and stresses the need to create institutions that democratize technological development and limit the power of large platforms (Future Politics, Oxford University Press, 2018; and The Digital Republic, Pegasus Books, 2022).
Other authors, such as Shoshana Zuboff, Mustafa Suleyman, and Yuval Harari, have raised awareness of the institutional dilemma posed by new technologies. The promised (and largely achieved) decentralization of power and individual empowerment that marked the early years of technological development is rapidly shifting toward surveillance, influence, and control of human behavior.
It seems that there is broad agreement on the need to modernize existing institutions and to develop new ones in order to limit, once again in human history, the concentration of power in the hands of a few—those who control new technologies. An intangible economy and digital democratic practices will test our determination to provide practical solutions to the very concrete challenges posed by the dominance of new technologies.
The need for independent institutions of technological oversight and for digital literacy among citizens, which establish normative principles for algorithmic design, seem to be the most obvious and immediate steps in a process of institutional design that will demand our imagination, dedication, and knowledge.
It is an enormous undertaking, which some may call utopian, but one that will be difficult to avoid. We will likely have to go through a tumultuous period of chaotic transformations, as occurred at other moments in history.
If we do not attempt it, however, we will risk undermining the progress made in providing justice, securing freedom, and protecting the dignity of human beings.
