Technosophy, humanism meets science

In 1972 Adriano Celentano sang “A tree of 30 floors”. The number is a compromise between metrics and urban planning. In the singer’s sights was the 33-story Pirelli skyscraper now the headquarters of the Lombardy Region but 33 did not get along with the rhythm of the ballad. That song was the pop manifesto of the “happy degrowth” then theorized by Serge Latouche at the Université de Paris Sud. It was the dawn of the ecological movement: on December 24, 1968 humanity – at the time 3.5 billion people, less halfway through today – for the first time he had seen the Earth as a fragile blue ball framed by the Apollo 8 astronauts who circumnavigated the Moon.

A conceptual minotaur

Maurizio Ferraris, professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Turin, was born in 1956, the year before the New 500 Fiat, symbol of the Italian economic miracle, and the first artificial satellite – Sputnik, launched by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957. With Ferraris, Turinese philosophy definitively settled the accounts with the anti-scientism of Martin Heidegger and his followers. Guido Saracco, chemical engineer, current rector of the Turin Polytechnic, was born in 1965 – the Pirellone had stood in front of the central station of Milan for five years – and lived for the first 33 years of his life in a 9-storey building facing the Officine Grandi Riparazioni (OGR) which now hosts art exhibitions, startups and a restaurant. These data are useful for placing in the right coordinates the book that Ferraris and Saracco wrote together, giving it a title that sounds like a conceptual minotaur: “Tecnosofia” (Laterza, 185 pages, 20 euros).

Climb nine floors

The 9-story building is an observation point on the increasingly rapid changes of our time; climbing it becomes the metaphor of the social, cognitive, ethical and political challenges that await us. Tecnosofia summarizes the program of a “new science” that Ferraris and Saracco elaborate by bringing together science and humanism in a friendly and enlightened minotaur, while realizing how many obstacles the prejudices and current clichés place in their operation of intellectual engineering.

Promethean capitalism

Three axioms guide the climb: 1) progress is an inherent value in our nature as cultural animals; 2) consequently “technology is a drug”: the only one, there is no return to Arcadia; 3) “Capital is the most powerful tool” we have at our disposal.

Translated into a system, capital becomes “capitalism”, a term at the origin of ambiguity and violent conflicts, to the point that in a very recent essay published with the Mill, Alberto Mingardi, professor of the history of political doctrines, suggests replacing it with “innovation”, neologism whose failure, moreover, is easy to predict. However, as you continue reading, you will understand that the two climbers do indeed understand capital as an economic accumulation to be invested, but they recover its “Faustian and Promethean character” which did not escape Marx. In this sense, the most important capital is represented by knowledge, human resources and values ​​without which capital remains sterile and is called finance.

The broken lift

There is an elevator on the ground level of the nine-story building. In the metaphor it is a social elevator, and today it is broken. Fixing it is the first thing to do. There is no progress, indeed, there is no justice or democracy, if the social elevator doesn’t work. The “economic miracle” of the 1950s and 1960s was essentially due to mechanisms of mobility between the classes of workers (from farmer to worker, from worker to employee, from employee to freelancer, etc.). Equally important were the mechanisms for distributing the wealth produced. These are two fundamental factors that are missing today.

For too long, Italy has not kept pace with the more advanced countries. One should not resign oneself to decline, recovering it in a consolatory way as a “happy decrease”, say Ferraris and Saracco. One would easily discover that degrowth cannot be happy and that nature is nature, in itself neither good nor bad but certainly stepmother if man fulfills his role as Homo sapiens. We cannot live without ever better medicines, ever more efficient transport, ever cleaner energy, ever more productive agriculture. Science + technology + humanism is the formula that emerges from the technosophy of Ferraris and Saracco.

Climb to the terrace with a view

It would be interesting but too long to analytically trace the nine levels of the building built on the terrain of “nature”. Philosopher and technologist discuss web and tracking on the first floor (a cornerstone for Ferraris), human capital and infosphere on the second floor (in ontological contrast with the vision of Luciano Floridi, philosopher of information at Oxford), discuss the docusphere (other workhorse of Ferraris) on the third floor. On the fourth floor, that of the anthroposphere, we meet human capital; at the fifth the biosphere, that is the ecological capital; sixth is the noosphere, i.e. the capital of knowledge; in the seventh the values ​​(axiosphere) identified with the “heritage of humanity”; to the eighth the specific individual capacities which require the just recognition of the merit of each and all; on the ninth floor the theme of the equitable distribution of goods (°to each according to his needs”).

Once at the top, you come out on the terrace with a view. View of the future, essentially, with its promises and ghosts of him. Promising intelligent machines that could become ghostly if placed in the hands of fools or crooks. The philosopher exorcizes them: “the absolute machine, i.e. artificial intelligence, consists exclusively in the registration and processing of human life forms, i.e. it feeds exclusively on human blood but, unlike vampires, has no urgency, need or drive”. Don’t worry, “computers aren’t interested in taking power any more than a lion is interested in playing catch-up”.

Condorcet’s lifebuoy

Yes, but power is interested in human models from which AI learns; it is well known how programmers, consciously or not, transfer prejudices, values ​​and disvalues ​​into their algorithms. On those algorithms and on the data (mostly ours) that it collects in the cloud, the intelligent machine will be able to develop meta-algorithms gradually further away from the starting assumptions, uncontrollably amplifying errors, divergences or simply the incompleteness of the data to which he drew. Not even the specialists who design know what happens between the input and output of their neural networks.

Thus we slip onto controversial ground and a long discussion would begin, which we will not touch upon here. It is better to grasp the lifesaver launched in the last lines by Condorcet – “No limit has been placed on the improvement of human faculties” – and by the climbers themselves: “the nine floors we have climbed” are all susceptible to improvement, “but all better than the abyss from which humanity in the state of nature comes”.

Cautious navigation in the archipelago

Side note. Certain themes are in the air. The work of Ferraris and Saracco is a generous attempt to bring order to the complexity of our world. Theoretical physicist Ignazio Licata attempts the same feat with “Arcipelago” (Nutrimenti, 246 pages, 17 euros), in bookstores since last month. The goal is always to arrive at a systemic vision of the world, in Licata’s case by drawing, with the theories of complexity and computation, a map where the mechanisms of the human mind, culture, work, communication and technology find their place , Artificial Intelligence included. Licata too is looking for an optimistic way out: “to re-appropriate virtuality as a political instrument of liberation”. But, compared to the confident assertiveness of Ferraris and Saracco, he moves with hesitant caution: “The epistemology of complexity shows how it had never happened before in science that the observer is someone who bets on the emergence of a cloud of possible events” .