By Javier Surasky
Greece has become the first country to propose incorporating artificial intelligence into its Constitution. Beyond its symbolic value, the proposal opens a deeper debate for democratic digital governance: if AI already shapes rights, public services, information, and democracy, should it also be part of the constitutional framework? We may be witnessing the birth of a new form of “digital constitutionalism,” one that is becoming increasingly relevant for thinking about how to limit algorithmic power and protect rights in digital societies.
If adopted, the Greek proposal would add a clause to the
Constitution stating that AI must serve people’s freedom and the prosperity of
society, while mitigating its risks.
It is a general formula, but its importance lies in the
ground it opens by placing at the center of the discussion the effects of AI on public policy, fundamental rights, human rights, and the very conditions of
democracy. In doing so, it highlights a political dimension that the technical
debate often displaces or leaves in the background.
The Greek initiative is a reminder that, in a democracy,
collective purposes must be debated publicly, limited by human rights,
legitimized by institutions, and, above all, embraced by people exercising
their citizenship.
Digital constitutionalism
The Greek case allows us to think about the emergence of a
new “digital constitutionalism,” whose core would lie in the defense of
democracy, the recognition of rights specific to the algorithmic age, and the
reinterpretation of civil, political, economic, social, cultural, and
environmental rights in contexts shaped by digital infrastructures.
If AI is increasingly linked to the circulation of
information, the organization of services, public and private decision-making,
the allocation of resources, the production of knowledge, and the concrete ways
in which people exercise their rights, then its constitutional treatment opens
a discussion that is as timely as it is necessary.
Digital regulation and digital constitutionalism would
operate on different planes, as has happened before with social or
environmental constitutionalism: laws on personal data, platforms, or
algorithmic transparency are valuable, but they remain at the level of ordinary
regulation, subordinated to the constitutional level, while digital
constitutionalism points directly to the space in which a political community
defines its fundamental principles, organizes power, protects rights, and
establishes the conditions of legitimacy for life in common.
For that reason, speaking of digital constitutionalism means
recognizing that digitalization has a decisive impact on dimensions that belong
to the core of the constitutional pact, such as freedom, equality, political
participation, and access to rights, affecting the effective distribution of
power.
The major step this new model of constitutionalism would
take is to separate the administration of technologies from the democratic
discussion about the conditions of a digitized society.
Democracy, citizenship, and algorithmic power
Digital constitutionalism would begin where the digital
ceases to be a purely regulatory matter and becomes part of the basic
architecture of democracy, citizenship, and rights.
Digital infrastructures already organize forms of interaction, classify people, rank information, mediate access to goods and
services, influence public visibility, and affect the conditions of democratic
decision-making. Yet all of this takes place outside constitutional principles
specific to social relations mediated by the rise of digital technologies, even
though these technologies influence the formation of public opinion, the
quality of democratic deliberation, the integrity of electoral processes, and
the possibility of building, and controlling, new forms of power.
Artificial intelligence intensifies preexisting challenges
because it produces, organizes, predicts, and distributes information on a
scale never known before. This makes it necessary to reposition traditional
rights, among which we place the entire set of social rights as potentially the
most affected: freedom of expression changes when it is mediated by platforms
and recommendation systems; equality is strained when automated decisions can
reproduce prior inequalities; access to health care, education, work,
information, or public benefits is reorganized when a digital model structures
them within digital interfaces whose results are not always explainable.
For this reason, constitutionalism must connect AI with human rights, democracy, and the rule of law as a fundamental first step in the
construction and “recalibration” of new and traditional rights that have been
granted constitutional status.
From this perspective, the question of what citizenship
means returns with renewed force: in societies shaped by digital
infrastructures, participating, staying informed, filing claims, accessing
services, exercising rights, or interacting with the State increasingly depends
on technical systems, platforms, data, and interfaces that people are unable to
understand.
A democratic digital citizenship requires that people have
the material and digital conditions that guarantee their autonomy, equal
treatment, effective access to rights, and institutional control over the
conditions in which those rights are exercised; or, at the very least, it must
include that purpose, a purpose that properly belongs in the constitutional
sphere.
Rights in the digital age
Based on what has been said, digital constitutionalism would
be defined by the incorporation of the digital dimension into the core of the
constitutional pact, and its objective would be to constitutionally order the
conditions of democracy, rights, and citizenship in societies structured by
digital infrastructures.
Now, this also means recognizing that in the digital age new spaces have emerged in which new rights associated with the digital nature of social relations are being contested: digital identity, profile inferences,
automated manipulation, and algorithmic justice are only a few examples, and
they reflect new forms of exposure, vulnerability, and power that require
constitutional-level responses.
The Greek proposal may be incipient, general, and likely to
produce debate, especially because it brings the nation-state back to the
center of a territory dominated by private actors and one that, by its very
transnational nature, needs to be governed globally.
The constitutional discussion on AI brings fresh air to a
debate on democracy that already seemed to belong to a world gone by, and it
can become a driver for strengthening the democratic order and the value of
institutions. It calls on us to publicly discuss what place we want to give
these technologies in our social order and which rights we must protect in a
society that is already digitized.
If modern constitutionalism sought to limit political power, social constitutionalism to confront material inequalities, and environmental constitutionalism to incorporate the protection of nature, digital constitutionalism would have to develop an equivalent and extremely valuable function: subjecting new forms of algorithmic power to the fundamental principles of democratic life.