Latin America. In the midst of the acceleration of artificial intelligence and the debate on how to regulate it, research by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) focuses on a key question: who sets the rules and with what infrastructures.
The article, published in open access in the international journal AI & Society (Nature group), is signed by UOC doctoral researcher Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves, from the CNSC research group, and Laura Forlano, from Northeastern University, Boston, in the United States.
The paper analyzes how some technology projects not only offer services, but also promote governance models based on private digital identity systems and biometric data.
As a case study, the research examines World (formerly Worldcoin), the project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, which proposes to verify that a person is human by scanning their iris, in exchange for a digital identity certificate.
The study analyzes how these types of initiatives connect narratives about future risks (bots, fraud, impersonation) with promises of security and inclusion, and how this can facilitate speculative scenarios to end up becoming real infrastructure.
As Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves puts it, "the debate on AI is not only technological, it is a debate about what futures these technologies produce and who will govern them. Projects like World not only offer a tool, but propose a governance model that erodes the legitimacy of democratic institutions while presenting a private alternative."
The article proposes the concept of "sociotechnical fictions" to describe these stories of the future that, presented as inevitable, can influence design decisions and technological deployment with political consequences.
The CNSC researcher, attached to the UOC-TRÀNSIC research centre, explains that "when future scenarios are presented as unavoidable, technical decisions that have effects on policies can be legitimised". Belsunces stresses: "What we analyse is how these stories contribute to a project that began in the eighties, which rejects democracy, is fundamentalist of individualism and considers that engineering and the free market can replace politics in the resolution of social problems. Ironically, these same actors have developed their technologies with millions of public money."
According to research, these stories can gain traction when:
- They present future scenarios as inevitable and urgent.
- They make technology attractive through design.
- They activate emotions such as fear and hope to generate social adhesion, creating the illusion that their technologies are inescapable.
- Normalize identity and governance functions to rely on private systems.
The study does not assess the empirical impact of the project on users, but rather offers tools to understand how certain imaginaries of the future may end up shaping digital infrastructure and the public debate on identity, biometrics and AI governance.
