With this work we add a fifth chapter to a series that, from the beginning, has aimed to understand what it really means "sovereignty" in the era ofartificial intelligenceThe first four Papers (read below, ed) have built, piece by piece, a necessarily concrete system. We talked about cloud and who controls the computational power that AI runs on; chip e personal data; of the models that are reshaping entire economic sectors; and finally of industrial capacity, questioning the possibility for a country like Italy to participate in this transformation not as a spectator, but as an actor.
With this fifth Paper we go up a level: from the technological substrate to the representationWe are no longer concerned only with who owns the means of production of artificial intelligence, but with how that intelligence describes the real economic world. This is the transition from infrastructural sovereignty to what we propose to call the sovereignty of representation: the capacity of a economic system to be seen, understood and correctly evaluated by the machines that increasingly mediate the decisions of those who purchase, invest or choose a supplier.
The risk we want to focus on is that ofalgorithmic invisibilityManufacturing excellence that exists in reality, but isn't adequately represented in the data and sources used by generative systems, risks disappearing from the eyes of those who delegate a growing portion of their purchasing process to those systems.
The following pages (here the link) analyze the passage from the world of Google to that ofGenerative AI and pose a question that directly concerns industrial policy: how can we ensure that the machines through which the world will increasingly search for products, skills and suppliers are able to recognize the true depth of the Italian production system? To transform this question into something measurable, Rivista.AI has also decided to launch a permanent observatory on the representation of Italian industrial sectors in generative systems, developing the Made in Italy AI Visibility Index: a replicable research protocol that analyzes the key sectors of Italian excellence.
The sovereignty of representation arises from here: not from the claim to control what machines say about Italy, but from the responsibility to ensure that they can see what Italy really is.
The published text is the fifth in a series of analyses dedicated to Artificial Intelligence and technological sovereignty by Franco Bernabe, President of TechVisory, which FIRSTonline hosts courtesy of the author and the AI Magazine.
Here are the precedents AI, time is running out in Europe / AI, the French gamble, and the risk of a patchwork of national initiatives / AI: What the European Mobile Telephony Precedent Teaches Us / AI in Italy: The playing field is not just digital but industrial.
