Freedom Is Not a User Setting

The Legacy of 1956 in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and the Emerging Techno-Aristocracy

Seventy years after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, humanity finds itself on the brink of a technological and social transformation that could fundamentally challenge our understanding of freedom, work and self-determination. The rise of artificial intelligence and robotics promises far more than another economic revolution. It also carries the possibility of a new social hierarchy in which power is no longer necessarily concentrated in political institutions, but increasingly in the hands of those who control technological infrastructure. In this emerging world, the legacy of 1956 feels surprisingly relevant. Just not necessarily for the reasons we tend to hear about in commemorative speeches.

Author: Szilárd Szélpál

Over the past seventy years, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 has managed to suffer the fate that sooner or later threatens almost every revolution: it has become an officially celebrated occasion. A historical event turned into a symbol, the symbol into a political reference point, and the reference point into a carefully packaged moral lesson. Naturally, every year calls for a few suitably elevated remarks about the love of freedom, national unity and heroic resistance. Preferably the sort that nobody can disagree with, and from which no particularly uncomfortable conclusions about the present might accidentally emerge. One would struggle to find a more effective way of neutralising an event whose defining characteristic was precisely that people had decided they no longer wished to live according to scripts written by somebody else.

Yet the political and social-philosophical significance of 1956 extends far beyond the demands for national independence and political liberty. The workers’ councils, local committees and self-organising communities that emerged during the revolution did not represent a single, coherent programme for transforming society. They did something rather more interesting: they attempted to reclaim a say in how their own lives and communities were governed. Hannah Arendt recognised something exceptional in precisely this aspect of the Hungarian Revolution. In the spontaneous emergence of political organisation aimed not simply at replacing an existing authority, but at creating new spaces for political action. Freedom, in this understanding, is not merely a legal condition. It is the capacity to act. The possibility of being not simply a passive subject of history, but an active participant in shaping the future of one’s own community.

Seventy years later, it might be worth asking an uncomfortable question: has technological progress actually increased our capacity to do so?

Modern Freedom: You May Choose, Just Don’t Question the Terms

Modern societies have struck a rather peculiar bargain with freedom. Institutions protecting individual rights, democratic participation and consumer choice offer opportunities on a scale that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. At the same time, however, the economic and technological processes shaping our lives have become increasingly complex and difficult to scrutinise. We can choose between political programmes, services, digital platforms and consumer habits, yet exercise considerably less influence over who determines the available options and according to what principles. We have the right to manage our personal data, at least until we reach the twenty-seventh privacy policy, which, naturally, we have read and fully understood. We enjoy unprecedented access to information, while much of that information is ranked and filtered by algorithms over which we have virtually no meaningful control. Modern individuals may therefore find themselves in the curious position of enjoying an almost unlimited freedom to choose within a world whose fundamental operating conditions have already been decided by others.

This phenomenon is hardly unique to technology companies. Modern economies, public administration, financial systems and the world of work have been developing along similar lines for decades. In the name of efficiency, expertise and operational effectiveness, an increasing number of decisions are transferred to institutional structures in which public participation is necessarily indirect. Much of this is, of course, indispensable to the functioning of a complex society. The problem begins when the relationship between means and ends is reversed: society no longer determines what kind of development it considers desirable; instead, the internal logic of its systems increasingly defines what forms of social behaviour count as rational. Economic growth, productivity and optimisation acquire an almost independent moral authority, as though producing something faster and more cheaply somehow settled the question of whether it ought to be produced in the first place. Yet efficiency is not a social objective. It is an instrument. Modern economic policymaking occasionally seems to forget this, particularly once a sufficiently impressive percentage has been inserted into an Excel spreadsheet where a meaningful measure of social well-being ought to have been.

One of the central contradictions of modern freedom, then, may lie not so much in the absence of formal rights as in the limitations of our actual capacity to shape society. Consumers can choose, employees can adapt, and citizens can vote from time to time. But does any of this necessarily mean that people genuinely exercise control over the processes that determine the possibilities of their lives?

The Birth of a Techno-Aristocracy: Power Without the Inconvenience of Elections

Artificial intelligence and robotics may push this old contradiction into an entirely new dimension. Technological progress does not merely produce new tools. It also creates new relationships of power. According to Stanford University’s 2026 AI Index Report, more than 90 per cent of notable frontier AI models developed in 2025 originated in industry. This does not, in itself, prove the existence of monopolies, nor does it mean that technological innovation has become the exclusive preserve of a handful of companies. It does, however, illustrate the extraordinary concentration of capital, computing capacity and infrastructure required to develop the most advanced systems. The position of the emerging technological elite may therefore rest not simply on financial wealth, but on control over infrastructure that is becoming increasingly indispensable to the functioning of society.

What makes this emerging techno-aristocracy particularly interesting is that its power does not necessarily operate through traditional political institutions. It does not need a parliamentary majority to influence the flow of information, the operation of labour markets, the conditions of economic competition or the infrastructure of public communication. The owners of major technological platforms can make decisions that shape the everyday opportunities of hundreds of millions of people, while the legitimacy of those decisions remains primarily a matter of property rights and market relations. Of course, corporations are subject to legal and regulatory constraints, and users often have alternatives. Yet economic dependence, network effects and technological complexity can easily hollow out the practical meaning of choice. On paper, we are perfectly free to abandon a digital ecosystem whenever we please. Much as we are, in principle, perfectly free to stop using electricity. The option exists. It is merely the practical consequences that present a few minor difficulties.

The real danger, however, is not necessarily the emergence of some unified, all-powerful technological elite. The term techno-aristocracy is better understood as a possible structure of power in which economic ownership, technological expertise and control over information infrastructure reinforce one another. The role of governments complicates matters further: major powers increasingly treat artificial intelligence as both a national security asset and a geopolitical resource. Relations between technology corporations and political authorities may therefore be competitive, mutually dependent and cooperative, often at the same time. From the perspective of democratic accountability, this creates a rather interesting situation in which decisions affecting the public interest can disappear into corporate strategies, trade secrets and national security considerations. Citizens, naturally, retain the right to express their opinions. It is simply becoming somewhat harder to establish to whom those opinions ought to be addressed.

If Society No Longer Needs Our Labour, What Will We Need From One Another?

The advance of artificial intelligence and robotics may transform not only the distribution of power, but also our traditional understanding of social justice. According to figures published by the International Federation of Robotics in September 2026, more than five million industrial robots were operating worldwide at the end of 2025. A 2025 analysis by the International Labour Organization found that approximately one quarter of global employment was in occupations exposed, to varying degrees, to generative AI. This does not translate into automatic job losses: most occupations are more likely to be transformed than eliminated. Nevertheless, the longer-term social implications could be profound. Modern society has built much of its understanding of economic participation, social recognition and material security around paid employment. One of the industrial age’s implicit social contracts was that work provided us not only with income, but also with social standing and identity. What happens, then, if an increasing share of economic value creation gradually becomes independent of human labour?

The question is hardly new. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, societies have repeatedly confronted the issue of whether productivity gains generated by machines translate into greater freedom for workers or primarily into additional income for the owners of capital. History offers examples of both outcomes. Automation and economic growth have contributed to shorter working hours, higher living standards and the creation of entirely new occupations. But these achievements did not materialise spontaneously. They required institutional reforms, social conflict, organised labour and political decisions. In the age of AI, therefore, the most important question may not be how many jobs machines will eliminate, but what kind of social relations will emerge from the resulting productivity gains. If the same economic value can be produced with less human labour, the result could be more leisure, greater prosperity and increased individual autonomy. Equally, it could produce persistent income polarisation, economic dependency and declining social mobility. Technology guarantees neither outcome. Naturally, corporate presentations to shareholders tend to feature the first scenario, usually illustrated by a smiling person gazing confidently towards the horizon.

For future generations, all of this raises a much deeper question: what will give human beings social significance if their economic usefulness can no longer be treated as the principal measure of their value? Modern societies are rather fond of declaring human dignity unconditional in principle, while their everyday institutions remain remarkably consistent in rewarding performance, competitiveness and market value. Artificial intelligence will not resolve this contradiction. It may simply make it so conspicuous that ignoring it becomes increasingly difficult. If the economic system needs certain human capabilities less and less, the people possessing those capabilities do not thereby become less valuable. Translating that principle into social reality, however, will require a fundamental reconsideration of education, ownership, income distribution and public participation. Alternatively, we can continue to uphold the somewhat bizarre assumption that one of the highest purposes of human existence is to remain relevant to the labour market in a world increasingly devoted to eliminating the need for certain forms of human labour.

National Sovereignty, Hosted on Someone Else’s Servers

Against this background, the traditional concept of national self-determination also deserves reconsideration, particularly in countries whose economic and technological resources give them limited influence over the direction of global development. For Hungary, this is not an abstract philosophical problem, but an eminently practical one. Naturally, we can engage in endless debates about political sovereignty, invoke national interests, adopt declarations and solemnly announce that we alone shall decide our future. The trouble is that technological sovereignty cannot be proclaimed into existence. It depends on the quality of education, research and innovation capacity, economic structures, digital infrastructure and the extent to which a society can understand, apply, scrutinise or develop the systems upon which it increasingly depends. A country does not become technologically independent simply because it uses someone else’s algorithms beneath its own national flag. Admittedly, this is considerably easier to arrange than building a genuinely competitive research ecosystem.

The problem, however, is neither exclusively Hungarian nor European. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s 2025 report, 118 countries had not participated in any of the major international AI governance initiatives examined in 2024. In other words, the social and economic consequences of artificial intelligence are global, while the political, financial and technological capacities needed to shape its development remain profoundly unequal. Many societies across the Global South are participating in a technological transformation whose infrastructure, standards and economic conditions are largely determined elsewhere. These emerging relationships of dependency do not necessarily follow traditional geopolitical boundaries. Control over capital, data, computing capacity and energy may produce new economic hierarchies in which the formal political equality of states bears increasingly little resemblance to their actual room for manoeuvre.

Nor are the developed world’s societies immune to this problem. The United States possesses enormous technological development capacity, China has become a major force in robotics and several fields of artificial intelligence, while Europe is attempting to construct its own regulatory and industrial policy model. Yet geopolitical technological competitiveness does not automatically translate into greater social autonomy for the citizens of the countries concerned. Technological leadership and democratic accountability are not the same thing. A state can be extraordinarily advanced technologically while giving its citizens very little meaningful influence over how those technologies are deployed. Equally, reducing technological dependency does not necessarily require bringing every innovation under national control. The more meaningful question is how to establish conditions for public oversight, competition, knowledge-sharing and international cooperation in an economy where no country can realistically function as a technologically self-sufficient island.

The Next Generations: Thinking Citizens or Highly Trained Users?

Perhaps the deepest challenge of the age of artificial intelligence is ultimately not economic, but anthropological. What does it mean to be human in a world where machines can imitate, and in certain tasks surpass, capabilities we once considered distinctly human? In education, this question is already becoming tangible. Future generations will grow up in a technological environment where information retrieval, writing, problem-solving and substantial parts of decision preparation can be delegated to artificial intelligence. This presents enormous opportunities, but it is far from obvious that the intellectual capacity thereby freed up will actually be devoted to more independent thought. Thinking, after all, is not merely the production of correct answers. It also involves the ability to formulate questions, tolerate uncertainty, weigh competing interpretations and recognise our own errors. A system may be exceptionally good at providing answers while its users become progressively less capable of deciding which questions are worth asking in the first place.

One possible dead end for education would therefore be to confuse technological adaptability with intellectual autonomy. Of course, future generations will need AI literacy, programming skills, digital competence and an understanding of changing labour market demands. But if education’s principal objective becomes simply preparing young people to use technological systems efficiently, we may end up neglecting precisely the capacity they need most: the ability to question those systems’ objectives, social consequences and legitimacy. It is perfectly possible to be an excellent AI user without being an independent thinker. Just as it is possible to be a highly skilled employee with very little influence over one’s working conditions. Modernising education cannot therefore amount merely to replacing textbooks with interactive applications and supplementing homework assignments with carefully crafted prompts. Although, admittedly, the latter tends to look considerably more impressive in a conference presentation about educational reform.

Preserving the social autonomy of future generations will consequently require more than democratising access to technology. It will also require making technological power democratically accountable. That could involve strengthening competition policy, establishing public-interest oversight of critical digital infrastructure, involving workers in decisions about automation, supporting publicly auditable technological solutions and reconsidering how the economic gains from automation are distributed. None of these measures offers a complete solution, and each raises further conflicts concerning property rights, regulation, innovation and individual liberty. But at least they address the right question: what kind of society should technological progress serve, rather than merely how to squeeze another few percentage points of efficiency out of it.

1956 and the Future: The Freedom We Cannot Outsource

This is where it is worth returning to 1956. It would be historically absurd to equate Soviet military intervention with the business decisions of a technology company, or to describe today’s digital economy as some new form of dictatorship. The historical circumstances, the nature of coercion and the political institutions involved are fundamentally different. Nor does the value of the comparison lie in suggesting otherwise. Rather, the Hungarian Revolution made visible a social aspiration that remains relevant across political systems and ideological eras: people are not necessarily satisfied simply because a system functions efficiently. They also want to know whose interests it serves, who determines its objectives and what opportunities they have to influence its operation. The historical significance of the workers’ councils and revolutionary communities lies precisely in their attempt to connect political freedom with the practical possibility of social self-determination.

This idea acquires particular relevance in an era when the promises of technological progress appear almost unlimited, while meaningful public debate about its social consequences remains surprisingly constrained. Much of political discourse continues to revolve around the familiar concepts of growth, employment and competitiveness, as though the most important task ahead were simply to make the existing economic system operate even more efficiently. Yet artificial intelligence and robotics raise far more fundamental questions. What happens to social solidarity if participation in the labour market no longer guarantees a livelihood for everyone? What political legitimacy can decisions claim when citizens cannot understand or scrutinise them? Who will control the wealth generated by an increasingly automated economy? And how can human judgement retain its significance in a society increasingly inclined to seek technological solutions to every problem?

The revolution of 1956 offers no ready-made answers to these questions. Nor would it be particularly sensible to manufacture a contemporary AI regulatory programme out of a historical event that took place seventy years ago. Political memory already provides more than enough examples of attempts to persuade historical figures, retrospectively, to endorse our remarkably precise present-day political preferences. The Hungarian Revolution deserves better. Its relevance lies not in some prepackaged institutional solution, but in the persistent question of social autonomy.

For future generations, this may be its most important legacy. Not the notion that every form of authority must be resisted, but the recognition that political authority, economic ownership and technological expertise cannot automatically substitute for social legitimacy. Artificial intelligence may help us make better decisions, robotics may free human beings from many compulsory tasks, and automation could even establish the material foundations of a freer and more equitable society. But these are possibilities, not guarantees. Technological development follows no inherent moral destiny, and economic rationality does not constitute a democratic mandate.

One of the defining conflicts of the future is therefore unlikely to unfold between humanity and machines. It is far more likely to emerge between those who can shape the objectives and functioning of new technological systems and those who are left with little choice but to adapt to them. Its outcome is not predetermined. It will depend on a succession of institutional, economic and social choices.

Seventy years after 1956, perhaps it is time to put aside, if only briefly, the routinely repeated commemorative declarations made in the name of freedom, and examine how much genuine self-determination we are prepared to surrender in exchange for efficiency, convenience and the promise of technological progress.

Because in the future, the loss of freedom may not require its spectacular abolition. It may be enough for us to gradually grow accustomed to a world in which the most important conditions of our lives are determined by systems we no longer understand, whose decisions we cannot challenge, and over which we exercise no meaningful control.

Freedom, however, is not a user setting. It is not a premium service included in the appropriate subscription package, nor a reassuring promise tucked away in the next quarterly report on technological progress.

And self-determination can hardly be reduced to accepting the terms and conditions.

Freedom begins where we are no longer limited to choosing between the options presented to us, but possess both the right and the capacity to shape the conditions under which those options exist.

And no artificial intelligence is going to exercise that right on our behalf. At least not if we still intend to call it our own.

Cover photo: AI-generated illustration by Central European Affairs (CEA), 2026.

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