Argentina’s security forces have announced plans to use artificial intelligence to “predict future crimes” in a move experts have warned could threaten citizens’ rights.
The country’s far-right president Javier Milei this week created the Artificial Intelligence Applied to Security Unit, which the legislation says will use “machine-learning algorithms to analyse historical crime data to predict future crimes”. It is also expected to deploy facial recognition software to identify “wanted persons”, patrol social media, and analyse real-time security camera footage to detect suspicious activities.
While the ministry of security has said the new unit will help to “detect potential threats, identify movements of criminal groups or anticipate disturbances”, the Minority Report-esque resolution has sent alarm bells ringing among human rights organisations.
And that’s about as detailed as the plans ever get. How exactly are the non-hierarchical democratic councils laid out, and how are they any different from normal representative government/state? At best anarchists describe representative democracy with generous recall rules, at worst I actually have heard “all rules are repressive, there will be no rules, no further explanation will be provided”. And that’s not even getting into the economic questions, if this is going to be a non-market system.
I’ve seen pretty much the same argument from ancaps about their self-contained Gordian knot of contracts that never collapses. It’s true, weird ideas that sound impractical work sometimes, so I can’t prove it wouldn’t, but I’m not holding my breath.
As for those couple examples, I suspect they work in a very different way from the theory, although again I can’t prove it. Republican Spain never really approached the Anarchist ideal, at least, and that’s the one there’s good information on.
The fact that I am not an expert in the exact structures a hypothetical anarchist society could take doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Furthermore, as you allude to, their implementation in the real world would likely differ from any theoretical structure based on the experience and practical needs of the people involved. There are people building such organizations as we speak, and hopefully, as they gain experience, we can collectively learn which structures work and which ones do not.
In general I see anarchism as more of an aspirational process. The goals are to achieve human liberation to the maximum extent possible. Maybe it’s not possible to achieve complete global liberation (and I agree not to the extent that some individualist anarchists believe, i.e. the no rules people) but there’s good reason to believe it can be achieved to a much greater extent than current societies. I think that’s worth working towards, and even if we did achieve a more liberated society like Republican Spain, that process wouldn’t end there. We would keep iterating and tinkering to find the best and most free society we can reasonably attain.
I can certainly agree with all of that, even if we disagree on whether present liberal democracies are kinda far, or totally far from the ideal.