The Automation of Acceleration: AI and the Future of Society
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The Acceleration Thesis studies the phenomenon of social acceleration in its different aspects, something that has been occurring since the beginnings of civilization, and is one of the topics of debate in contemporary Critical Theory. In the same way that critical theory is a way of analyzing the past and the present in order to contest the status quo, futurology can be used as a form of criticism of the present. Similar to cyberpunk culture, futurology promotes a critical analysis of the present by extrapolating the future in a form of a negative utopia. Recently this approach has been much explored in the literature linked to machine ethics. Presently, in the middle of the 4th Industrial Revolution, with the massive use of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), our cognitive capacitie are being continuously surpassed by intelligent autonomous agents. In this article, we present a review of several points, mainly the benefits and risks of social modernisation through AI, and how human society has been preparing to deal with such changes. Finally, we show how the ethical debate on such technologies is taking place in a way totally dominated by European and North American societies. We believe it is necessary to make the debate about the technologies that will shape the future of global society more democratic and inclusive, so that our preferences are more homogeneous and less biased.
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