Globalization without rules has been and is certainly one of the epochal upheavals that is most marking our times and which, from the United States to Europe, has already caused social and political upheavals unimaginable until a few years ago. But the arrival of artificial intelligence in force and the acceleration of digitization promise or threaten to disrupt our lives even more, if a way is not found to manage the transition from the old to the new world by absorbing its devastating social effects . This is what emerges from the very interesting new book by Massimo Gaggi, correspondent of the Corriere della sera in New York, who in "Homo premium - How technology divides us" (Editori Laterza, pp.159, euro 15) tells how already now and always more robots and Internet giants, from Amazon to Facebook and all the others, are revolutionizing the existence of all of us who helplessly witness unprecedented changes.
After the robots that replace manual workers, artificial intelligence is now also spreading in professions, services and intellectual jobs: from analysts to doctors, from engineers to lawyers, from travel agents to journalists, there are many professionals who risk their jobs. The potential of artificial intelligence is enormous but the dangers are also infinite. Jerry Kaplan in his "Humans need not apply" comes to speak of 30% of the population destined to lose their jobs" if remedial measures are not taken and Kai-Fu Lee, president of the Chinese Institute for Artificial Intelligence, argues that the latter has enormous potential and can do "extraordinary things for us, for example in the treatment of cancer, but it will replace man in a large number of tasks", except in creative professions and jobs that require empathy.
Artificial intelligence is a sign of progress that should not be demonized but managed. But we must know, warns Gaggi, that the prospect of a new season of social inequality is one step away and not only in the United States but throughout the West because, on the wave of new technologies and in the absence of an adequate political response , on the one hand there are pockets of poverty from unemployment or underpaid precarious jobs and on the other a wealthy elite who use technology to live better and longer.
Subjugated by the fascination of the infinite possibilities offered by the digital universe, "we have not realized how unfair, brutal and concentrated is the new technology born from the innovations of Silicon Valley". Today the brains of the web focus on the latest technology, the blockchain, to open a new season of the Internet, but if we don't intervene soon we risk other social and political earthquakes, such as those that brought Donald Trump to the White House and the populist movements of various coinage to electoral success in Italy and in Europe.
Sadly, as it is revealing the Facebook scandal, which is just the tip of the iceberg, the Internet giants have taken over Western societies and with their algorithms they are able, not only to accumulate disproportionate wealth and limitless power, but to heavily influence everyone's life of us by eroding our free will and undermining the very foundations of civil coexistence and democracy.
It is true that every technological revolution the lost jobs have always been replaced in the long run by a greater number of new ones, but will it be the same this time too? Who will manage and how long will the transition take? These are the doubts that dominate our age and that fuel anxieties and fears. Unfortunately, so far politics, both of the right and of the left, has proved "incapable of directing processes that change the economy, social relations, even the perception of democracy".
Faced with epochal problems such as those raised by the arrival of artificial intelligence and the sprint of digitization but also such as those of the new phase of globalization or the demographic crisis and the aging of the population, the political debate underway in Italy makes us smile if not cry, being light years away from the real issues that will condition our future and that of the new generations. But the exact awareness of these problems is missing all over the world and the answers are even more missing. "However, the time has come to build them" and to wake up he sends us to tell us the book by Massimo Gaggi that really deserves to be read and meditated on.
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