Artificial intelligence is not what public debate thinks it is
AI is not conscious.
It has no body that enters into relation with objects. It manipulates symbols; it does not encounter the world. The difference is metaphysical.
It will not replace the human mind.
Because it does not do the same thing a mind does. It does not see, does not feel, does not desire. It runs computations over patterns of language.
And yet it changes everything.
It redefines what we are, what we know, what we decide. It is the most exacting test ever set before the philosophy of mind.
And it pushes the value of labor upward.
Procedures and skills are collapsing in value. The only thing that grows is what machines cannot do: ask questions, choose ends, take responsibility.
Human labor has three floors. AI is flooding them from below.
For fifty years the economic value of a worker was their competence. Today that competence, if it can be described in language, costs a fraction of the price. What remains — what is worth something — is the ability to ask the right question, to choose the end, to take responsibility for a course that was not foreseen.
It is a deeply MOI move: human creativity is not centripetal, it does not come from inside the head. It is centrifugal — it comes from the horizon, from the world we do not yet know. That is the region machines cannot reach.
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AI is the latest chapter in the history of the media.
Cave painting, writing, print, photography, cinema, television, digital screens, generative artificial intelligence. They are all ways in which an object enters into relation with a body, showing something that was not accessible before.
I have taught philosophy of the media at IULM for fifteen years. The MOI lets us see AI as a relative — not an alien — of Lascaux, of Gutenberg, of early cinema. The problem is not "that AI exists". The problem is what kind of object it is.
What I change in the public debate.
No. But understanding why requires revising what we think consciousness is. It is not just a matter of hardware or software — it is a matter of what it means to have a body that encounters objects.
Not wholesale. It is submerging procedures and skills, but not responsibility for ends. Wages are rising twice as fast in sectors exposed to AI: AI redistributes value, it does not erase it.
What was marginal until yesterday: asking the right question, choosing the end, taking on a positive responsibility. No longer "what can I do", but "where do I want to go".
We can use them, as we use books. But they are witnesses to nothing. They have not seen the world. They have only read what others have written about the world.
Stupid, no. Different, yes. Every new medium changes the mind that uses it. Writing changed memory. The screen changed attention. AI will change decision.
It produces images that resemble art. But the encounter between a body and an object is missing — and it is from that encounter, according to the MOI, that aesthetic experience is born. It is an art with neither author nor spectator.
Economically, perhaps. Philosophically, no — it is an irreversible event. Even if the market collapsed tomorrow, what AI has revealed about our mind can no longer be unseen.
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I regularly give keynotes, lectures, and appearances at festivals, podcasts, and roundtables on AI, consciousness, media, and freedom. I am available in Italian and English, in person and remotely.