2024-01-03 12:37:50
by MAURIZIO FERRARIS
We and the machines, the issues addressed on the basis of a great writer in «Il viscount cybernetico» (Luiss University Press) by Andrea Prencipe and Massimo Sideri, who investigate the future of AI
Il viscount cybernetico (Luiss University Press) by Andrea Prencipe and Massimo Sideri – respectively rector of Luiss and editorialist of the «Corriere della Sera» with particular interest in the field of technological innovation -, with an illuminating preface by Maria Chiara Carrozza, president of the Cnr , requires careful reading, not only for the prestige of the signatures and the cruciality of the topics addressed. Because the fundamental theme of these pages, not many in number but extremely rich in content, concerns our future. As well as the Calvinian reference, which is not limited to the halved Viscount but extends to the entire work of Italo Calvino, with particular regard to the American Lessons, those which he was never able to deliver at Harvard University because his death interrupted their drafting. Calvino’s lessons date back to 1984, that is, at the time of writing, they are exactly forty years old. Yet Prencipe and Sideri manage, by digging into the text and opening it to the future, to demonstrate that, essentially, all the problems that beset our present were already anticipated in an era in which we began to talk about artificial intelligence even outside the fields of specialized and in a very different sense from what it has for us today.
Sensitive to antitheses and halvings, eager to reunite what nature or culture have separated, Calvino in the American Lessons sought a synthesis between humanistic culture and technological culture, in which the form suited to the new world of what was announced would be found. like the mark of a new millennium, which we have now passed almost a quarter of a century ago. Forty years later Calvino, Prencipe and Sideri have the advantage of seeing in detail what Calvino could only intuit. Theirs, in other words, is both a balance of what has happened and a program on what to do.
As for the budget, our culture seems to remain halved, like Calvin’s hero, having apparently not yet managed to find a synthesis between the natural and the artificial, as well as between humanism and technology. Now, the great merit of Prencipe and Sideri’s book consists in indicating, happily, this passage to the North-West. Humanism and technology are destined to unite beyond separations that appear obsolete. We certainly have reason to worry about what technique left to itself can produce, but the problem – this is the fundamental point of the reasoning developed in this book – is that technique cannot remain left to itself because it is an exquisitely human product. Therefore, instead of fearing the invasion of something that threatens us coming from outside, we must understand that the digital sphere in which the cybernetic viscount moves is eminently the sphere of the human, since artificial intelligence is nothing other than the great collection and codification of the human life form.
Thus, at a time when the cultural panorama is dominated by an apocalyptic tone, by predictions that we would be slaves to technology, Prencipe and Sideri’s book brings not a breath of optimism (it is not a question of being optimistic or pessimistic), but of rationality. Yes, because what breathes from these pages is not only the optimism of the will, but also that of reason. There is no doubt that artificial intelligence (whatever is meant by this ubiquitous term to the point of having almost no meaning) can lead to negative consequences, but it remains that artificial intelligence is precisely what our future. Through these pages, therefore, Prencipe and Sideri outline a work program that can be shared by anyone who cares about the fate of natural intelligence in the age of artificial intelligence. With a great abundance of references, the authors show us how in the new technology that comes forward, very ancient things emerge, and first of all writing, which invades an immense space, with a production of data that has no equivalent in history. But, precisely, what emerges is an ancient technique, older than humanism itself, and constitutive of the human being in his ability to pass on the past and promote the future. In other words, we must not look at the future with fear, but be aware that it has an ancient history, and that only with this awareness will we be able to respond to the worries of the present.
To this end, it is a question, first and foremost, of overcoming the dictatorship of responses. We are rightly impressed by the answers that ChatGPT can provide us, but we must not forget that we formulate the questions, and that in the absence of humans there would be nothing of what ChatGPT tells us about, just as there would not be the tool itself , or oracle – computer, mobile phone… -, to which we address our questions. In other words, there is nothing in ChatGPT that had not been before in the form of human life and in the discourses with which it manifests itself. Secondly, it is necessary to look to the future by overcoming the pharisaism of absolute good or evil. We have no recipes for a happy future, but we are equipped with rational tools robust enough to prevent catastrophes, as long as we are committed in this direction. We must therefore free ourselves from the obsession that machines think more or better than us: what is thought is precisely the human form of life, and therefore the risk is not that the machine takes over, but rather that the human gives way to the machine out of laziness or resignation, just as, in other words, it happened in the relationship between a lazy reason and the tradition to which it is so convenient to indulge, abandoning the effort of critical reason.
In short (and the reference to Immanuel Kant present in the Cybernetic Viscount is neither accidental nor ornamental), critical thinking must be kept alive, and this book has the merit of briefly and at the same time re-proposing something new, more than two centuries later, and in a profoundly changed context, the three fundamental principles of the Enlightenment according to Kant: thinking with one’s own head; being able to think by putting yourself in the heads of others, and last but not least, thinking in agreement with yourself, that is, in a coherent way. And it is on this point that, personally, I would like to add a note, or at least a supplementary question, to those posed by Prencipe and Sideri. In the literature linked to digital transformation, the specter of the Singularity, of artificial intelligence that takes power by disempowering humans, often haunts the literature. I believe, with Prencipe and Sideri, this eventuality is highly unlikely. The most concrete spectrum, in my opinion, is that of the multitude, the enormous quantity of artificial intelligence users, which makes a malicious use of this new force very concrete (out of a mass of billions of users). It is in this direction, I believe, and not in a generic phobia towards technology, that our attention and concerns must be directed first and foremost.
January 3, 2024 (modified January 3, 2024 | 11:36)
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