Not the Intellectual, but the Master could be the true opponent of AI

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Carlo Galli was a full professor of History of Political Doctrines at the University of Bologna and is, among other things, the most important Italian scholar of Carl Schmitt. Given the centrality of the concepts of decision, freedom and will, and therefore of politics, in the reflection on artificial intelligence, it seemed inevitable to us to question him. Professor Galli, let's begin these small philosophical conversations around artificial intelligence starting from a fundamental question: is it possible to establish a distinction between intelligence, understood as a calculating ratio, and thought, understood as the creative act par excellence and originating in human activity? “It is not only possible, but necessary. Our own experience tells us that the element of calculation and formulaic-mnemonic repetition, of statistical assembly, is only a part of our intellectual activity. Specifically, that element, although important, lacks the beginning and the end, which are present in human thought: the beginning is interest, curiosity, the desire to proceed in one direction rather than another; the end is to 'go beyond' the immense collection of data and syntactic rules that artificial intelligence can access . That is, to criticize, not accept, go back to the origin of the data, understand how they were formed, understand that those 'data' are not actually 'objective' but that they have a history, a genealogy, that they are the product of political, economic, social relationships, decisions and contradictions. Thought is this understanding, aimed at a re-interpretation of the world, a re-orientation of experience. Talking about machines (and AI is one) as if they were capable of thinking means to assume a positivist, incomplete vision of thought; it means not understanding that physics (without having to resort to transcendence) cannot explain all human intellectual processes. And it means that someone thinks that men reason like machines, or that he wishes it. And since the machine is an instrument, it means that someone wishes – or, in any case, bets – that human beings have only instrumental thought, incapable of criticism”.

Culture is not neutral. Every cultural perspective is precisely a taking of a position . Artificial intelligence instead generates the illusion of neutrality, of incontrovertible data, while everything always depends on the way of asking the question – AI answers our questions, this is the creative principle of “training” the machine. In this context, what role can the figure of the intellectual, which today seems so obsolete, still play, if it still can? “AI generates the illusion of objectivity in users who are not inclined to critical thinking. The same illusion perhaps also belongs to programmers and those responsible for the implementation of AI in every social sphere; nevertheless, the result of the application of (general) AI is the 'single thought', the technocratic dream of a society governed not by men but by machines (in reality, by those who are behind them). The opposition between (artificial) Intelligence and the Intellectual in practice does not come true, given the disproportion of forces between the two. The Intellectual is the bearer of critical thought, relatively slow, which re-thinks what has already been thought; and is the bearer of the need to publicly exercise his reason. The daily press is especially congenial to him (reading which was for Hegel the morning prayer of the modern secular man); precisely the means of mass communication whose use and authority are nose-diving today, to the full advantage of very short electronic communications . AI dominates an era in which there is no longer a reflective public opinion, because society is broken down into myriads of single individuals, governed by emotional impulses mediatically amplified and manipulated – also through the 'creation' of virtual worlds, of structural 'fake news'. The Intellectual has almost only an ornamental role, as an extra in a media show that has the purpose of creating interest, consensus, entertainment. The true opponent of AI could rather be the Professor, the Master who patiently educates in the freedom of the spirit. And who in perspective favors the revitalization of politics”.

You have worked a lot on the thought of Carl Schmitt who, to put it very briefly, placed the substance of politics in the decision. Today, and even more so tomorrow, what can be the “primacy of politics” at a time when the decision could be subordinated to the optimal procedure suggested by the machine? Is there still room for the decision, or is there room only for the application of given procedures? “A decision taken by machines, however sophisticated, is not a decision but a calculation, according to a procedure. The decision instead implies a break, a caesura, between rational logical procedure and action; that is, it sees the root of the action not in reason – neither in positivistic nor dialectical reason – but in oriented will, and places the action in contingency, in irreconcilable disorder: according to Schmitt, in the friend-enemy relationship. Decisionism is based on the idea of ​​the a-rationality of reality, or on the idea that politics requires a position to be taken, not an algorithm that works with the logic of 'if... then'. Decisionism knows that the matter of politics is the exception, not the norm; the anomaly, not the consequentiality. And that therefore the 'political' is autonomous from technical or economic logic: it is incalculable. To avoid misunderstandings, it should be emphasized that the decision in this sense is not only that of the sovereign dictator but is a collective fact: it is a revolution, an activation of constituent power, a civil war, a class struggle. The great moments of history are not born from calculation but from will, from pre-normative freedom of action. Form, order, norm, come later. A machine can suggest to an administrator how to deal with an emergency (which is the temporary deviation from the norms), on the basis of sophisticated algorithms that learn from the experience of the machine itself: but acting in the absence of norms, re-inventing the world, re-interpreting procedures, requires a thought that has critical force, explicit purposes, and that has the courage to enter the incalculable arena of the New . The machine is conservative, it can only reproduce the existing, adapting it to new circumstances – in fact, for now it is not even able to drive a car. The decision, on the other hand, is potentially innovative, as well as certainly risky – assuming that it is still possible in a society in which citizens are pushed to think and act in ways that are increasingly similar to machines. Decision requires what no machine can have: political energy, invention, imagination. Indeed, the machine prohibits action, freedom: it imprisons it in its logic, which is then the logic of its programmers and its producers”.

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