The writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez expressed deep concern about the impact that social networks and the algorithms that support them are having on public conversation, coexistence and, ultimately, on democracy. “In the last 10 or 15 years, social networks have gone from being a promise of democratic space, where those who had never had one had a voice, to the greatest mechanism of collective manipulation that human beings have ever known,” he warned. “They poison conversations, citizen behavior, the way we vote… Negotiation, which is the principle of democracy, becomes impossible because algorithms enclose us in bubbles, in almost invulnerable units of thought and convictions that prevent us from seeing the reality of the other.” Vásquez stressed that these dynamics offer us an individual version of the world—constructed from our history of consumption, age or place of connection—a particular truth that breaks with the notion of objective truth and threatens catastrophic consequences for democratic life. Against this, he contrasted the power of the novel, which he defined as one of the great tools to look at the world from the place of the other and thus recover the empathy and understanding that social networks tend to erode. The Colombian author warns that artificial intelligence may end up replacing literary translation, which, in his opinion, will mean «a great loss», and even generate novels or scripts, but only from existing models, because AI «is incapable of facing chance, accident, invention or error», those unpredictable traits that «constitute the essence of humanity.»