DORTMUND, GERMANY - Chile’s government set to work to draft the first Chilean artificial intelligence (AI) policy in 2019 against the backdrop of seething popular discount against the perceived corrupt rule under President Sebastián Pinera and widespread social and economic inequality.

Chilean high school students protesting a rise in subway fares on October 18 that year took over the metro system of the capital Santiago and shut it down in violent unrest and vandalism of public works that spread throughout the country and forced the Pinera administration to declare a referendum to write a new constitution to redress these inequities.

That disorder also the sounded the death knell of an effective, but unfair economic system. Chile is one of the most developed countries in Latin America. Its neoliberal system reduced poverty to 7.4 percent in 2017 from 34.7 percent in 1990.¹ Inequality remains rife, however. The incomes of the nation’s 10 percent richest are 26 times higher than those of the 10 percent poorest, per the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.²

The country is now drafting its new constitution. This is a huge step in responding to social needs and an opportunity for the country to avail itself of the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution,’ in which AI will be the driving force. 

Chile has passed a key AI milestone. NotCo, a Chilean food-tech company invested in by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos that produces plant-based alternatives to animal-based food, this year became one of Chile’s first unicorns with a US$1.5 billion market value, it announced in July. It developed Giuseppe, an algorithm that ‘learns the infinite combinations of plants on a daily basis that can replicate animal products and make them even richer.’ This process has created one of their most famous products: NotMayo, marketed as NotMilk in the United States. 

This technological boom i