Democracy is not abolished: it is conditioned

Innerarity, Daniel (2025). Una teoría crítica de la inteligencia artificial. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg. ISBN 978-84-19738-37-0.

There are by now so many books about artificial intelligence that the bibliography itself has acquired something of a training corpus: one reads them with the growing suspicion of facing ever more fluent recombinations of prior material that nobody bothers to question, distributed across two shelves that cordially ignore one another, the shelf of prophecy (where humanity ends up as the pet of its evolutionary successors) and the shelf of ethical guidelines (where seven interchangeable principles, drafted in that consensus prose which offends nobody because it says nothing, guarantee a technology that is trustworthy, human-centred and respectful of dignity). Innerarity’s book, awarded the III Eugenio Trías Prize and finished, as its author tells it, in what was Adorno’s office at the Institut für Sozialforschung, belongs to neither, and its first merit consists precisely in explaining why neither of them could have worked.

The introduction dispatches the alternatives with an economy worth underlining. The 2023 moratorium is dismantled not for being authoritarian or naïve but for being incoherent: whoever describes an existential threat and then proposes to neutralise it with a six-month pause, that curiously administrative deadline which seems calculated on the length of an academic semester, is not describing the world but performing a rhetorical act, valuable perhaps for drawing attention but useless as a diagnosis. Ethics receives a finer and more important objection, because it does not consist in repeating the by now routine denunciation of ethics washing, which the author expressly disavows, but in pointing to a categorial insufficiency: the good/evil axis does not exhaust the ways of analysing what is real, and a transparent, non-discriminatory search engine would be ethically irreproachable while leaving outside the examination the politically decisive fact that a private company controls the public accessibility of information. What remains, then, is critique, defined without any exhortative concession: not an invitation to do it well but an inquiry into the structural conditions that permit or prevent doing it well, and it can only be exercised if it understands and respects the complexity of what it criticises, a methodological demand by which the book asks, at some risk, to be judged.

The three parts move from epistemology to politics. The first asks what kind of intelligence, creativity, data and prediction are really at issue here; the second, what kind of thing a technology, an automation, a machine and an opacity are; the third, what happens to democracy when those things are installed at the centre of its procedures. The first chapter, the longest, holds up the rest architecturally by way of an inventory of the specificities of human knowledge (common sense as a grasp of context, reflexivity as knowing that one knows, implicit knowledge and embodiment, versatility, the productive management of error, and a remarkable energetic and epistemic economy), so that whoever challenges that inventory challenges rather more than a chapter.

The contributions are several and uneven, and at least five deserve to circulate on their own. The first is conceptual: against techno-neutralism, which treats technology as a tool awaiting virtuous use, and against techno- determinism, which treats it as destiny, Innerarity proposes the category of conditioning, which opens corridors without prescribing routes, and incites and discourages without causing, in a felicitous formulation: artificial intelligence conditions far more than the neutralists believe and determines far less than the determinists believe, so that insisting on determinism is not the recording of a fact but the performative execution of a surrender. The second is a frontal inversion of the surveillance capitalism thesis: the problem is not that the systems know us too much, but too little, because they register routines and not longings, and above all because, busy conditioning our present decisions, they take no interest in our future ones; hence the formula that will probably outlive the book, namely, that democracy does not consist in doing what we want but in being able to change what we want. The third moves privacy from the proprietary paradigm to the collective one by way of a codependency argument that is hard to refute: whoever hands over their data is not only letting themselves be classified, they are also helping to configure the models by which those who handed over nothing will be classified, so that individual consent, past a certain critical mass, becomes a ceremony; true self-determination would not be owning one’s own data but the right not to be reduced to it. The fourth reorients the transparency debate towards justifiability and contestability, after adopting Burrell’s (2016) typology of opacities and warning that revealing a platform’s rating algorithm empowers the disciplinary system and not the driver. The fifth, in the ninth chapter, builds a dialectic in three moments, delegation of control, control of the delegation and delegation as control, whose analogy with European integration, an exchange of sovereignty for power, allows populism to be defined with unexpected precision: overvaluation of direct control, undervaluation of indirect control.

The fourteenth chapter contains the most ambitious thesis and also the most fragile. Innerarity deliberately declines to defend democracy by normative means and opts for the epistemological route: there are things artificial intelligence cannot do because it is not able to, not because it should not, given that politics operates in ambiguity and contingency while algorithms demand clarity and do not tolerate the blurred. Hence a residual definition of the political that is worth half a book: political is that decision which has to be taken when everything that could be known is already known, every expert has been consulted and the available datafication techniques have been exhausted, and it is still not clear what ought to be done. The objection is obvious and the author does not face it: the reasons adduced (extrapolation from past patterns, absence of common sense, incapacity for reflexivity) are properties of a particular architecture at a particular moment, not conceptual truths about computation, so that an argument presented in the strong register rests on evidence that only supports the weak one. A book that devotes fourteen chapters to showing that technology conditions without determining ends up granting the 2024 state of the art an authority its own theory denied it, and the part of the text that will age first is, with some irony, the part that looked best armoured. The robust version of the argument is at hand and the author brushes against it without adopting it: what resists automation is not a deficiency of machines but a property of those decisions whose legitimacy depends on their authorship and not on their correctness.

Two further limits. A book that claims the Frankfurt lineage devotes surprisingly little space to the ownership of infrastructures, the concentration of compute, annotation labour and energy costs, so that the shift from the question of who owns to the question of what knows, consistent with the diagnosis that the challenge is conceptual before it is normative, comes at the price of leaving uninvestigated a set of structural conditions that are, in good measure, conditions of ownership. And the ending is more demand than proposal: parliamentarising digitalisation, the parliament of algorithms, the digital demos and the call for a Gettysburg address for the algorithmic age are powerful metaphors issued as institutional IOUs, with no audits, trusts or contestability mechanisms behind them.

All in all, this is the most rigorous contribution available in Spanish on the democratic implications of decisional automation, and one of the few, in any language, that an engineer can read without feeling caricatured and a philosopher without feeling entertained. For the field of science and technology studies its usefulness is twofold: it offers a category, conditioning, exportable to other technical objects, and it offers an infrequent example of how one vocabulary is replaced by another without pretending that an essence has been discovered, when it proposes that we stop talking about impact and start talking about coevolution. That its central thesis is deliberately sober, that is, that democracy in the age of artificial intelligence will neither be surpassed nor abolished but conditioned, should not be mistaken for lukewarmness: it is what remains once the two symmetrical hysterias are withdrawn, and it turns out to be rather more than it seemed.