Artificial Intelligence in the time of the Coronavirus

(by Mauro Covino, Formez Employee, Scholar and Communication Professor at the University of Rome "La Sapienza", Luiss "Guido Carli", Lumsa and Bari. Member of the Governing Council of Ferpi Lazio and Head of the Observatory on the Italian Digital Performance of the 'AIDR) Yuval Harari says in his publication "Homo Deus" that science is converging towards an all-inclusive dogma, which claims that organisms are algorithms and life is a process of data processing. Intelligence is breaking free from awareness. Unconscious and unaware but highly intelligent algorithms will soon know us better than we know ourselves.

These are issues that emerged even more strongly during this pandemic that we are experiencing, but often the use of numbers and forecasts made, in the face of a technological power of great power, has not always produced the expected results in managing the emergency or in the map the constantly changing territory.

The experience of Coronavirus itself has clearly shown us how important is our ability to perceive weak signals, to connect events that are apparently very distant, but very close, in the events that involve us, to react promptly to an emergency, our ability organizational, our ability to adapt, to develop new skills quickly, our ability to collaborate. Especially using intelligently the New Technologies related to Artificial Intelligence.

As Riccardo Luna has indicated to us in his article of 2 May 2020 on "La Repubblica" perhaps with a clever combination of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence "who knows how the Covid 19 epidemic would have gone in Italy if from the first day we had used the data? The data of the family and professional relationships of those infected, in order to be able to immediately make targeted swabs; the data of the precise location of the infected in order to identify an outbreak in a home, an office, or a residence for the elderly, before a massacre ".

Artificial Intelligence itself will modify our daily actions, affecting our choices, our behaviors, even coming to predict them and distinguish our emotions, with artificial reality increasingly invasive, both in personal and professional fields, such as when AI is called in dispute to decide which people to hire, bringing into play the possible and progressive erosion of the faculty of judgment and action and of the same characteristics that make us fully human.

On the other hand, AI also means risk of disinformation as demonstrated for example by the recent experiment by Max Weiss, a Harvard researcher, who created a thousand comments in response to an appeal by the Federa-la USA Government concerning the Health Program. Medicaid. Each of these comments was different from the other and seemed the result of real people defending a specific political position. They thus deceived the administrators of the Medi-caid.gov site, who considered them real concerns of human beings in flesh and blood.

But perhaps with Digital Humanism as they say in the book of the same name Julian Nida Rumelin and Nathalie Weidenfeld we try to recover the centrality of man with respect to machines and technology to start a rebirth of culture, relationships and morality.

Because as the Renaissance of the mid-fourteenth century signals the discovery of a new way of conceiving the world, which places man with his needs, his drives and his sufferings at the center, so the renaissance of the digital era could be inspired by the need to define a new relationship between Man and Machine, in which technology increases human capabilities, and becomes a fundamental tool for writing a new social contract, oriented towards sustainable development.

Without forgetting a right critical approach because as Eric Sadin tells us in his publication “Criticism of artificial reason. A defense of humanity ”AI highlights the dark and worrying spaces that open up in speeches on indiscriminate support for technological development.

Artificial Intelligence in the time of the Coronavirus