What we were waiting to read, we’ve already read:

“As of today (February 2, 2025) the European Union can use technologies based on artificial intelligence to follow citizens in public spaces, carry out real-time surveillance of refugees in border areas and facial recognition tools on suspicious people.” From the newspapers.
It’s always like that. TNT would be a good thing. It turned into the destructive machine we know. Nuclear power would be great. It led to the atomic bomb with the known results, which are still minimal compared to today’s potential, of the launches in Japan at the end of World War II. And the list would be endless. But there’s no need to add to it. Readers have already understood the spirit.
We know from fiction books what these wonderful new worlds might be like, lurking on horizons that are ever closer to our daily lives. The European Union now allows amazing things: “Tracking citizens in public spaces” and using “facial recognition tools on suspicious people.” When everyone laughed at the application of programs like this in China, we wet our beards. That’s Big Brother installed in our societies and in our lives. And if anyone thinks this phenomenon will occur in a controlled environment, they are sorely mistaken. We only know how these things start. We never know how they evolve, let alone how they end. But they always end badly, as history teaches us.
And then there are the delights of the extreme right. Nothing more and nothing less than “carrying out real-time surveillance of refugees in border areas.” Doing so with artificial intelligence will obviously be linked to facial recognition programs and the like. Only the devil knows what awaits the refugees when subjected to all these instruments.
We know from history that these processes begin and then project beyond imagination, which means it would be better to avoid the beginning, but that’s no longer possible. What remains is to try to delay the ethical decay that is always associated with the practices in question. At a certain level, we will be in the realm of the unbearable. Then we’ll be confronted with justificatory plots, always within the framework of the old “It’s better for you” crock. There will be no shortage of theorists to develop the most incredible theories. There’s no shortage of theorists to justify many isms: Nazism, fascism, communism… It’s a mob that reproduces more easily than rabbits.
We hope we’re not right. That would be great.

From the editorial board of the newspaper Diário Insular-Terceira, Azores.

NOVIDADES will feature occasional opinion pieces from various leading thinkers, writers, and editorial boards from the Azores to give the diaspora and those interested in the current Azores a sense of the significant opinions on some of the archipelago’s issues.

Translated to English as a community outreach program from the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI) and the Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Department (MCLL).