In this article we will discuss some key elements and concepts of Artificial Intelligence (AI). We will try to outline a brief history in order to highlight how its plot is woven from technical, social and cultural aspects that justify the claims – by the human communities in which these technologies are built and applied – to criticize and generally control its developments. This claim, moreover, is useful to counterbalance both the narratives aimed at exaggerating the expectations that are generated around AI, and the accusations according to which these criticisms …
The Society of Resentment
It is time that we witness almost disarmed the crisis of traditional democratic models seeing them unable to effectively address and recompose the economic and social problems in which people struggle, a condition that has the power to fuel a vicious cycle in which individual frustrations become a useful resource for others to achieve their own political ends. In this, communication, even in its new forms, seems to have become a central weapon in organizing and directing resentment. In particular, according to some analysts: populism would be a discursive strategy, …
On the Suicidal Teen and the Chatbot – Artificial Intelligence as a socio-technical issue
In the previous article we opened a reflection on the condition of life we currently find ourselves hybridized as we are with the functional and psychic extensions offered by digital environments. In it we stated that a fruitful way to consider the evolution of the social developments thus generated is to analyze them in a dynamic in which our natural tendency to establish machinic partnerships should critically confront with the set of processes and factors that allow us to move in this direction and build interactions. Such a set should be understood in terms of …
Digital life between machinic partnerships and algorithmic institutionalism*
Being a citizen of the 21st century involves having an increasing intimacy of use – and even bodily hybridization – with technologies of all kinds ( bio, info, nano and neuro), as well as with algorithmic organizations/entities that have become, as matter of fact, cultural and social global institutions. We exist and operate in the world as composite and interacting assemblages of materials deriving from what we call nature, culture or technology, and in doing so we move within certain normative and value frames. Processes of hybridization have distinguished human beings …
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For the social sustainability of an algorithmic culture
Ted Striphas' book Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet has been translated in Italian language and is forthcoming from the publisher Mimesis in the “philosophy of digital” series. This is the English translation of my Italian preface. La cultura algoritmica prima di Internet is about the development and emergence of a human and social life’s new condition due to the growing intertwining between computing and culture. The argument is an enormously and relevant issue thinking about how systematically such an encounter marks us as “onlife” beings (Floridi, …
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