Adolfo Mesquita Nunes, a well-known lawyer and politician, presented his new book ALGORITHMOCRACY at Livraria Lello, in Porto, in which he addresses how AI is transforming our democracies and changing the contract of trust that citizens have in governments and different institutions.
For the author, this is a central theme for the future of our society and there are more and more signs reaching us, at various levels, that algorithms are conditioning democracy in its organization and in its future. Before an interested audience, Adolfo Mesquita Nunes expressed a strong sense of concern about this issue and the inability of civil society to respond to this trend – an agenda of mobilizing communities is required, with particular emphasis on elites and younger generations, in order to make technology a means and not an end to evolution and progress.
This agenda will have to be based on a clear investment in the area of education, according to Sogrape manager Raquel Seabra and will have to pass, in the words of Lello manager and host Pedro Pinto, for regaining the importance of relationships between people and building bonds with meaning and impact on society. Ideas corroborated by Adolfo Mesquita Nunes, who in this article highlighted the role of the media and social networks as intermediation agents that have not been able to avoid this excessive virtualization that our life in society has experienced in recent years.
The quality of institutions will be a central pillar in this process of rebuilding the foundations of our sense of community, according to businesswoman Estela Barbot, and this is a collective commitment in which individual contributions will make a difference. During his visit to Porto, a city that is an example and a reference in the liberal order and in the capacity for civic participation, Adolfo Mesquita Nunes ended up leaving a sign of hope that we can as a society invest in a strong collective intelligence that allows us to make the best use of technology in creating more value for the future that has already begun.
We live in uncertain and complex times that require new answers to the new problems we face. Democracy, as the anchor system of our life in society, faces new challenges that AI has accelerated in ways that are difficult to control. The message that Adolfo Mesquita Nunes left us on a rainy night in Lello should force us to reflect and above all to act so that it is possible to build a new agenda in which we all believe and can participate.