José María Lassalle: “Meloni is a fascist and Italy is the Spanish laboratory” | Spain

José María Lassalle (Santander, 57 years old), PP deputy for nine years and Secretary of State for Culture and Digital Agenda in the Governments of Mariano Rajoy, publishes artificial civilization (Arpa), a book where he analyzes, with the oldest tool, philosophy, the challenges posed by the most modern, Artificial Intelligence (AI), as well as its impact on data capitalism governed by large platforms, the manipulation of fear, the rise of populism and misinformation. An excessively “technological” approach, she warns, prevents detecting and preventing all risks, including the most dystopian: “That it turns against us. That we come to live trapped in the role assigned to us by machines.”

Ask. “We can still correct the future,” he says in the book. What questions must be answered by 2050, when it is estimated that artificial intelligence can have almost conscious functions, that “something becomes someone”?

Answer. We are generating a titanic power that can attribute to us a divine condition. The main question is why we want this, and not from a material point of view, but from a responsibility point of view.

Q. “For a few hours, the stability of the world’s leading power depended on the control that the platforms exercised over social networks. They aborted the coup for brand reputation reasons,” he says, referring to the assault on the Capitol in 2021. Donald Trump wants X owner Elon Musk as a presidential advisor if he wins. What do you think both characters have in common and what do you think he could get out of that alliance?

R. He already tried it in his first Administration, when he hired Peter Thiel, founder of Pay Pal, a technological fascist that Milei adores. The second most read book in the US after the Bible is Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, where innovators blow up a democratic government because they are not willing to pay taxes for their creativity. To develop this model that denies political freedoms based on economic freedoms that take us to the jungle, you need to be guaranteed social control. That is in the speech of Milei, of Musk, of Thiel and in one way or another, in that of the large technological corporations.

Q. It describes a battle for hegemony in the control of artificial intelligence between the US and China similar to the space race between the US and Russia. What consequences do you think would have if one country or another were the first to achieve this autonomous AI?

R. If China wins, we would have a major problem because China is a systemic enemy to democracy. It would be confronting us with the first model of a State-platform, with a capacity for absolute control over its people and over all the tools that would guarantee its technological sovereignty: raw materials, data markets, water… The United States and its tendency to consider that The only possible freedom is economic would pose another problem, but democratic societies have developed antibodies for that, while the Chinese case overwhelms us.

Q. Can Europe become the arbiter, setting the ethical and moral limits of the use of artificial intelligence? Populism, the extreme right, have also nested here…

R. Yes, because unlike the interwar period, we have tools to combat them, unless the European elections are a cataclysm and the extreme right becomes a decisive voice, but I hope that will not be the case.

Q. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the party in which he was a member, says that Giorgia Meloni is not comparable to other far-right parties. Is he?

R. Meloni is a fascist. She may want to convince us that she has achieved a reasonable economic eclecticism. It may have convinced us that it is an ally against Russia and China, but it fights freedom of the press, treats migrants who arrive on its shores in a xenophobic manner and is in a process of social moralization contrary to the ethical pluralism that should characterize a democratic society.

Q. In other words, it’s better to be away from Meloni.

R. The Spanish right should realize that being close to Meloni has made Forza Italia and the residue of Christian Democrat centrism disappear. The party that was residual five years ago has eaten up Salvini, Christian democracy and Berlusconi’s legacy.

Q. Do you think that could happen in Spain: that the extreme right eats the right?

R. Yes. Italy is Spain’s laboratory. They are two very similar countries. There are factors, among others, the fear of the middle class. And many aspects of the emergence of the extreme right may be due to what we have done wrong when we governed or were in the opposition, but fighting it cannot be a strictly PP issue. The Portuguese, much more politically mature, have seen it: this can only be resolved if once and for all there is a Vergara hug between the PP and the PSOE.

Q. Is that a cordon sanitaire, an agreement to renew the General Council of the Judiciary…?

R. All. In a context of exceptionality such as the one caused by the presence of the extreme right, the sensible party that has the most votes has to govern and the other, make it possible. Sánchez’s Government has all the legitimacy, and I believe that Feijóo did not create the conditions for him to be able to do that: let the one who had the most votes govern. But in Italy what made collaboration between the systemic parties viable was broken and through that fracture first Salvini and then Meloni slipped in. Salvini lacked subtlety, political intelligence. And perhaps that gives us confidence regarding Abascal, who is like Salvini in Spain, but a more subtle intelligence may appear capable of bringing together the anger, a prelude to the fascist majority that now governs Italy.

Q. Explains the war potential of artificial intelligence. Is it an advance that war can do without man or is it an incentive for there to be more?

R. It is an incentive for there to be more victims. Lethal autonomous weapons are the most dangerous and disturbing frontier of artificial intelligence. The war in Gaza and Israel’s brutal response is part of a hacking to that artificial intelligence. The management of Israel’s wall was in his hands. Israel boasted that it had won the world’s first war fought with artificial intelligence and a year later that artificial intelligence was defeated. That can only happen if someone opens technological corridors for that attack. If not, it is impossible that with a military imbalance as enormous as the one between Israel and Hamas, in a territory that is less than Gipuzkoa and after so many months, Israel does not have direct control over the territory.

Q. That means someone helped Hamas open that corridor.

R. Very complex actors enter the region, like Iran, which has been an empire, which invented chess…

Q. He warns of the techno-optimists, those who idealize a society governed by machines, and points out that the added value of the human being in the face of artificial intelligence is, precisely, his fallibility, his doubt. How is that?

R. The superior potential of human intelligence, despite the fact that it is quantitatively overwhelmed by what artificial intelligence represents, is that it is not a predictable mind, despite the effort to make it predictable through manipulation. Human thinking is characterized because its propensity for error makes it learn and that stimulates the creative imagination. That’s what we have to take advantage of.

_