In the last couple of centuries humanity is very busy building a lot of new mechanisms that shapes or impacts our ways of co-existence. Everyday, non stopping we create new devices and systems to “unlock” humans potential through technology.

The digital era, the internet era, the AI era, the big data era, are all dimensions of the same phenomena: 21st century society. We can call it society 5.0 in a making if we are comfortable enough with Japan government vision for our next years. This society is the pinnacle of all this mechanism creation culture that’s been rolling for some centuries now.

AI Politics is a sub-phenomena of the macro one — 21st century society. Which is even more important right now, as we are in the process of making important advancements on the type of AI technology that are getting to public use nowadays.

Generative AI impact is not even starting to really kick in yet. We have a lot to discover about its true impact on society in the years to come. Since it is a dynamic process that changes everyday. With the creation of new ways of use and the rise of new public perceptions/opinions which impacts AI public trust in a whole.

Briefly defining AI politics one may see it as the collective process of creating AI with both its social and technical dimension. Which isn’t separate actually with politics (interests and power) shaping technology and vice-versa — its just the way it has been throughout society historically, I can write an article specifically about the intersection between power/politics and technology development in the modern society era but it would take a whole new article, so lets just let this for another opportunity.

Why does AI politics matter? and why it is more important than you think? Because AI fosters economic growth for sure, however, it does not guarantee human development. On the contrary, we already have lots of concerns about it’s may be quite the opposite. How to not let it take this not desirable road?!

Having a healthy AI politics ecosystem that is able to fosters the development of responsible and ethical AI technology in the best interest of society may help a lot. However, such a deliberative system, or whatever democratic global arrangement we could achieve is not an easy task to anyone.

Luckly, we already have some evidence that there is a positive nexus between AI investment, governance and human well-being improvement in the G-7 countries (article). Which leads us to the final answer of this article: AI politics is more important than you may think because the way we shape AI today is a big proxy for the way our society will look like in the near future and beyond. This process happens in a macro-level sociotechnical process we should call AI Politics. The process of collectivelly shape the AI technology. It is not without conflict it happens nonetheless. As we can see in recent events in this history.