The Automation of Acceleration: AI and the Future of Society

The Acceleration Thesis studies the phenomenon of social acceleration in its different aspects, something that has been occurring since the beginnings of civilization, and is one of the topics of debate in contemporary Critical Theory. When we find ourselves in a society immersed in a capitalist model, where the means of production are pressured to produce more and more to supply a market characterized by consumerism, acceleration induces an increase in the speed of production that exceeds the physical and cognitive capacities of human beings. An obvious solution to such demand is automation. The automation of the means of production occurred in several stages, as in the industrial revolutions, previously we can say that it was our physical capacities that were surpassed. However, in the middle of the 4th Industrial Revolution, with the massive use of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) is our cognitive capacitie that is being continuously surpassed. Thus, new questions about the benefits and risks of the use of such technologies are being debated, mainly in the area of machine ethics, which will be the focus of our study. In this article we present a review of several points, the risks and benefits of social modernization through AI, how human society has been preparing to deal with such changes, and finally, how the debate on such technologies is taking place in a way totally dominated by European and North American societies. We believe it is necessary to make the debate about the technologies that will shape the future of global society more democratic and inclusive, so that our preferences are more homogeneous and less biased.