The Fatal Arrogance of the Algorithm

Artificial intelligence revives an old temptation: believing that calculation, control and planning can replace the spontaneous order of freedom.

The Fatal Arrogance in the Age of the Algorithm
The atavism of centralized planning against spontaneous order
By Dr. Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano

It is imperative to begin these lines by recalling that human progress is not the result of deliberate design by a superior mind —or by a committee of bureaucrats— but the blessed fruit of evolutionary processes and spontaneous order.
Alberto Benegas Lynch (h) has rightly insisted that knowledge is dispersed in the minds of millions of individuals. And that there are no final words in human knowledge: everything is revisable, improvable, never static.
To pretend that a state planning office can coordinate the actions of society is, as Hayek rightly said, a “fatal arrogance.”
Today, beneath the fascinating veil of Artificial Intelligence and robotics, the ghost of socialism resurges with renewed force.
The new social engineers, wrapped in technocratic rhetoric, suggest that today’s data-processing capacity would finally make it possible to solve the problem of economic calculation that Mises proved to be unsolvable.
Nothing could be further from reality. The information required by the market, understood as the set of consumers, is subjective, tacit and changing in nature. It is not merely cold “data,” but human valuations that only manifest themselves through the price system in an environment of freedom and private property.
AI as a tool, not as sovereign
Artificial intelligence is, in essence, an extension of human analytical capacity, a means of enhancing productivity.
However, in the hands of governments with totalitarian instincts, it becomes the “digital panopticon.”
The risk does not lie in the machine, but in the monopoly of force that seeks to use algorithms to predict and direct human conduct.
When we speak of 3D manufacturing of goods, we are facing a frontier of unprecedented freedom.
The possibility that individuals may produce housing solutions or medical tools in their own homes dismantles the power of corporatist lobbies and suffocating regulations.
But beware: socialism, always hungry for control, will attempt to regulate the “bit” in order to tax the “atom.”
They will say it is for consumer safety or for “distributive justice,” when in reality it is driven by the terror they feel at losing control over the supply chain.
The fallacy of the end of work and state assistance
We are often told that robotics will eliminate the need for human effort and that, therefore, the State must become the great universal provider.
This is a static and impoverishing vision.
The human being is, by definition, a creator. History shows that every technological leap displaces painful tasks in order to give rise to functions of greater added value, provided that the labor market is not sclerotic due to nineteenth-century union laws or a rigid education system designed by politicians and bureaucrats.
The proposal of permanent economic assistance during periods of labor “retraining” must be viewed with extreme caution.
If such assistance comes from the expropriation of the fruit of other people’s labor through progressive taxes, it is not only ethically reprehensible, but also destroys incentives for investment and, therefore, the multiplication of employment opportunities.
The true solution lies in capitalization and freedom of education, allowing the individual to adapt at the speed of technological light, free from official state education programs that merely train pieces for a machine that no longer exists.
The challenge of longevity and the ethics of responsibility
We will live longer thanks to science, but for what purpose?
If the prolongation of life simply means an extension of dependence on the State through bankrupt and collectivized pension systems, we will have exchanged biology for servitude.
The challenge of this change of era is to revalue autonomy.
The ethic of unrestricted respect for the life project of others must be our guiding principle.
We cannot allow technology to become the excuse for a new “scientific” socialism.
The future belongs to decentralization, to blockchain as an immutable record of property, and to AI as an ally of individual genius.
Everything that departs from this and strengthens the state leviathan, however modern it may appear, is nothing more than a return to the caverns of collectivism.
Let us continue, then, with the second essay in this series, keeping the focus on the inviability of statism in the face of technological sophistication and on the defense of individual freedom as the only engine of progress.

Technology revives central planning.
AI cannot replace dispersed knowledge.
Freedom remains the engine of progress.

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