What We Should Have Learned From Cybersyn

Abstract

Currently, a major topic is what changes will digitalization and the fourth industrial revolution bring to our society. It is clear that digital transformation of society and the introduction of new technologies will make many jobs obsolete. This process logically leads to the idea of a universal basic income (UBI). In this respect, the socialist project, Cybersyn, is of great interest because it constituted a prototype of a data- and people-related idea to solve this problem. The aim was to increase the country's production, while counteracting rising unemployment through a socialist paradigm, which is obviously pertinent to the development of Industry 4.0. Although Cybersyn can be considered as an early prototype and catalyst, today's exponentially greater computational power has made such systems real, and humans are often excluded from them. Human beings are also positively affected by digital transformation. Herein, the current work contributes to the ethical debate concerning the digital transformation of society.