Human rights: Food for a delusional thought ‘HR, truth and the public opinion’
HRR 761
[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about how the information in the digital sphere deceivingly influences an ill-defined ‘public opinion’ and about why we need safeguards against AI. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
1. There are three of my iron laws here I want to share with you:
- Public opinion is in reality nothing more than the journalistic opinion disseminated by the reactionary press and media. (G. D. H. Cole, English historian, Fabian Society, 1889-1959)
- Advertisers (now using the digital sphere) work hard on the unconscious and psychological reactions to the messages they disseminate to influence public opinion. (Bernard Maris, French economist, 1946-2015, murdered at Charlie Hebdo incident)
- It is not passion that characterizes modern man, but worrisome passivity. He is more attached to his laptop, his cell phone and his TV than to the gaze of others. (B. Maris) [So, what is really making-up the public opinion? …and is it, then, really of any significance?].
The first, almost philosophical, message we have to keep in mind is that information (that reaches and makes the ‘public opinion’)is not truth (Yuval N. Harari)
–Most information is fiction, fantasy and delusion.
2. The truth is costly; you need to do research, you need to gather evidence; you need to invest time, effort, money in producing the truth. And the truth is often painful, so the truth is a very small subset of the information you and me are exposed-to. Human societies are based on trust; trust is based on information, on communication, and the major current changes in communication technology destabilize trust between people. The result is a social and political earthquake with human rights (HR) not in the Richter Scale. To understand, we actually have to look at the truth question and at the desire question. What are the facts, and what do we want?
- When it comes to the desire question, the best system we have come-up with is democracy, where you ask people what they want. And the desires of somebody with a PhD in economics or a Nobel Prize are no more important than the desires of somebody who did not finish high school. (Q: Who expresses their desire for HR?) The aim of the democratic system is to give equal weight to everyone’s desires.
- Then you have the question of truth: what are the facts? Democracy is not an ideal system for deciding that. If you want, for instance, to know whether the earth’s climate really is heating up, and whether this is a consequence of human action or of some natural cycle of the sun or whatever, this should not be a question for democratic elections. This is a question of truth, not a question of desire.
3. One thing we have learned about humans over thousands of years is that people often desire the truth to be different from what it is –for personal reasons, for religious reasons, for ideological reasons. If you want to know the facts, you need to build institutions of experts who know how to analyze the evidence, but they should not dictate our desires or tell us what to do. We have experts telling us, yes, climate change is real, these are the causes –then the ball moves to the democratic realm. …And? (all the above from Y. N. Harari)
Our digital sphere has experienced a serious democratic erosion
4. The increasingly important digital platforms that billions of us around the world are using to work, play, and communicate are, with a few small exceptions, run as autocratic and unaccountable corporate fiefdoms, with little ability for ordinary users to shape how they work and how they are run. The issue is, not just about governance structures, but about how these platforms undermine everyday democratic practices both online and off. This corporate capture of the digital public sphere mirrors the broader decline in democratic engagement. The defeat of unions has dealt a huge blow to meaningful workplace democracy. Political party membership has massively declined in Europe and beyond. The same trend plays out online. There has long been a participation problem online. How do online spaces seeking to collaboratively moderate do so democratically at scale, if many users do not wish to offer up their labor and instead just hang about and free-ride? It can be difficult to imagine the real viability of deepening the practices of democracy online in a world that feels more divided than ever (the HR discourse particularly affected). It is even harder when one considers the multiple ways in which the current Big Tech model has become systemically important for the ongoing viability of the global economy. (Nathan Schneider, Robert Gorwa)
So this brings us to, what else? –AI
For AI, nothing less than safety, transparency, accountability and inclusivity are and will be a must
–With the rise of AI, for the first time, we see that the stories that sustain human societies are generated by a nonhuman intelligence.
5. AI is fundamentally different from printing presses, from atomic bombs –from everything we have invented so far. It is the first technology in history that can make decisions and create new ideas by itself. An atomic bomb can not decide who to bomb; AI can. AI can make financial decisions and invent new financial devices by itself, and the AI that we are familiar-with today, in 2025, is just the very primitive first step in the AI revolution. We have not seen anything yet.
6. A very small number of countries are leading the AI revolution. Most countries are very far behind and, if we are not careful, this will be a repeat of the Industrial Revolution –on steroids. Within a few decades the entire world was either directly conquered or indirectly dominated by those few industrial powers. And now we have this tsunami of AI. Think of what the steam engine and the telegraph did to equality in the world, then multiply it by 10, by 100, by 1,000. Then you start to understand the consequences of just a few countries monopolizing the enormous power of AI and all the others left behind to be exploited and dominated in ways we have no precedent in history-for. (the above also from Y. N. Harari)
7. There is the issue of data bias. AI models are only as good as the data they are trained on, and if that data is skewed or incomplete, the AI’s predictions will be inaccurate or, worse, discriminatory. In the context of HR, such errors could have devastating consequences. In the wrong hands, AI can be used to monitor and suppress dissent, leading to further HR violations. A second concern involves transparency. AI algorithms, especially those based on machine learning, often operate as ‘black boxes’, meaning it can be difficult to understand exactly how its algorithms arrive at their conclusions. Furthermore, there is a risk that AI will fail to capture the nuances of political, social and economic situations or, worse, reinforce existing biases in the data. (Sam Bowman)
Bottom line here
8. AI companies must be held accountable for the human and environmental impacts of their technology and supply chains, from mineral extraction to the exploitative labor conditions for data labeling. Corporations that profit from AI must be required to adopt sustainable and ethical practices that prioritize the well-being of workers and the protection of the environment. Peacebuilders and HR activists must become actively involved in strengthening social movements and workers’ power through unions and other local forms of organizing that strengthen workers’ positions vis-à-vis these corporations. (Heather Ashby)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
Postscript/Marginalia
You thought only AI was dangerous?
–Statistics are a construct manufactured to suit the client. The dwarfs who have governed and govern us manipulate figures and statistics as part of their job and do so in the exercise of their functions because they understand that fabricating constructs is part of the job. This led Winston Churchill (1874 –1965) to famously say: “I believe in statistics only when I falsify them myself”.
–The facts are stubborn. It is easier to make do with statistics. (Mark Twain, 1835-1910)
–Now, nothing is done or said without numbers: from there the judgments sprout; some figures, some graphs, parallel columns headed by the % and history marches on defying the contradictor. (Alone, Chilean critic at El Mercurio, 1891-1984), and
–Beware: Random is nothing but the impossibility of controlling all variables. (Albino Gomez)