Machines will displace the work we have made replaceable.
AI will replace white-collar jobs through automation of calculation-based work, not industrial labor, requiring societal rehumanization of work and potential universal income solutions. Tech billionaires like Musk and Thiel wield unprecedented power by merging capitalism with transhumanist ideology, influencing governments and enabling mass surveillance through companies like Palantir.
- OpenAI valued at over $800 billion despite generating no profit
- Tech billionaires like Musk and Thiel merge capitalism with transhumanist ideology
- European democratic consensus weakened since postwar period; authoritarians exploit crises
- Peter Thiel declared in 2009 that democracy and freedom are incompatible
- Recent electoral defeats of Orbán and Meloni show citizens still value rule of law
French philosopher Michaël Foessel warns that AI and tech oligarchs pose existential risks to democracy through surveillance, job displacement, and weakened rule of law, comparing current dynamics to 1930s authoritarianism.
Michaël Foessel, a 51-year-old French philosopher who teaches at École Polytechnique and writes regularly for Libération, has spent his career studying the fragility of democratic life. He arrives in Buenos Aires this week as one of three keynote speakers for the tenth edition of the Noche de las Ideas, a cultural forum sponsored by France's foreign ministry and its cultural institute in Argentina. His message, delivered in conversation, is urgent: artificial intelligence and the tech billionaires who control it are reshaping power in ways that threaten the democratic order itself.
Foessel does not believe AI will replace human nature or human intelligence—we still don't understand what intelligence truly is, he argues, and creativity remains beyond algorithmic reach. But he is clear about what will happen: machines will displace the work we have made replaceable. This time, the jobs at risk are not factory floors but offices. Accountants, analysts, translators of technical documents—anyone whose labor consists primarily of calculation will find themselves competing with systems that perform those tasks infinitely faster. The scale will be considerable. His concern is not apocalyptic but practical: societies will need to either provide a universal income to absorb the shock, or attempt something harder—rehumanizing work itself, making it less automatic, so that people choose human interaction over machines.
What troubles Foessel more than automation is the ideology behind it. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and others like them are not simply capitalists; they are capitalists who have married their power to what he calls "technophile utopias," often transhumanist in character and sometimes frankly reactionary. Thiel, one of Palantir's founders, declared in 2009 that democracy and freedom are incompatible—a statement that reveals the gap between the freedom he values (individual, entrepreneurial) and the freedom democracy requires (collective, rights-based). Palantir itself specializes in processing sensitive data through artificial intelligence for intelligence agencies and private corporations. It is not ideologically neutral. It aims to influence governments, to impose itself over states. And it works. The U.S. economy is now substantially driven by AI investment, which makes it fragile. OpenAI alone is valued at more than 800 billion dollars despite having generated no profit. The bubble could burst. But the deeper risk is the one Foessel emphasizes: the automation and virtualization of the world, with all that entails in terms of generalized surveillance and the loss of lived experience.
Can governments regulate these companies? The European Union has made some attempts. But Foessel is skeptical that regulation will come from states alone. Many governments are themselves eager participants in mass surveillance, justified by security concerns. He places his hope instead in collective awareness and civil society resistance—a bottom-up pushback against what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze called "societies of control," where individuals are made complicit in their own monitoring, voluntarily surrendering data about their movements, purchases, desires.
The political moment compounds the technological one. In Europe, the postwar consensus around democracy—the agreement that emerged from the defeat of fascism—is visibly closing. Faith in democratic institutions has weakened. Social inequality has grown, undermining promises of democratic justice. The link between democracy and peace has frayed under the weight of multiplying conflicts, including war in Ukraine. Into this vacuum step leaders like Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni, and Javier Milei. They share a pattern: they were elected through regular elections, yet they govern in ways designed to weaken the rule of law. Trump's indifference to court rulings against his immigration policies is revealing. The concentration of executive power at the expense of legislatures and courts is happening across democracies. The argument is ancient—Plato made it—that democracy is too weak to manage crises, that centralized, authoritarian power works better. History has repeatedly proven this false. Putin and Trump's military decisions, made arbitrarily without collective deliberation, have only demonstrated their lack of preparation and plunged the world into endless crisis.
Foessel resists the idea that history is entirely new. The economic crises, the authoritarian responses, the role of new technologies—none of this is unprecedented. In a recent book, he traced echoes between France today and the late 1930s. Not because history repeats, but because certain logics persist in modern history from which we have not escaped: the abandonment of faith in democracy, the rejection of foreigners, the explosion of inequality, the multiplication of military dangers. These produce escalations toward extremes that can be compared across eras. Yet he does not counsel despair. Recent electoral defeats of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and the rejection by Italian voters of Meloni's attempt to seize control of the judiciary suggest that citizens still possess a real attachment to the rule of law. The future is not written. The question is whether that attachment will hold.
Citas Notables
The growth of the U.S. economy is substantially driven by AI, which also makes it fragile.— Michaël Foessel
In Europe, the consensus around democracy that emerged from the defeat of fascism is visibly closing.— Michaël Foessel
La Conversación del Hearth Otra perspectiva de la historia
You say AI will replace white-collar work but not human intelligence itself. Where's the line?
The line is between what we've made routine and what remains irreducibly human. A machine can translate a technical manual perfectly. It cannot translate poetry, because poetry requires knowing a language in your bones, feeling its weight. Calculation is replaceable. Imagination is not—at least not yet, and maybe not ever.
But if Musk and Thiel are just doing what capitalists have always done—accumulating power—why does their ideology matter so much?
Because they're not hiding behind the market anymore. They're openly saying democracy is incompatible with freedom, that technology should remake human nature itself. They're using their wealth to shape governments, not just influence them. That's a different order of power.
You mention Palantir processing data for governments. Isn't that just intelligence work, which every state does?
Yes, but the scale and the logic are new. They're not just collecting information about threats. They're building systems to predict behavior, to know what people will do before they do it. And they're selling that capability to whoever pays. That's not intelligence—that's control.
You seem to suggest governments can't regulate tech companies. So what can?
Civil society. People becoming aware of what's being done to them, refusing to participate, demanding different choices. It's slower and messier than regulation, but it's the only force that doesn't depend on the state being willing to limit its own power.
When you compare now to the 1930s, are you saying fascism is coming back?
Not the same way. But the conditions that produced it—loss of faith in democracy, scapegoating of outsiders, growing inequality, military danger—those are present again. The form will be different. That's why the analogy matters: it shows us what to watch for without telling us the ending is fixed.
What gives you hope?
That people still vote against authoritarians when given the chance. Orbán lost. Meloni's power grab failed. That's not nothing. It means the attachment to rule of law is still real, still worth fighting for.