Technology · 2026
Il robot emozionato
Machines simulate ever more convincing emotions. But a feeling that is merely performed, with no body that has something to lose, is it still a feeling?
Machines simulate ever more convincing emotions. But a feeling that is merely performed, with no body that has something to lose, is it still a feeling?
What does it take, today, to be recognized as human? Technology keeps redrawing the line between us and our imitations.
The series that surgically severs life from work as a thought experiment: who are we when memory is cut in two?
Artificial intelligence produces texts, images, answers. But is there thought in there, or only its linguistic shadow?
Can a machine be conscious? The thorniest problem in the philosophy of mind, put to the test by AI.
Villeneuve's desert as a metaphysical stage: ecology, power, and prophecy in a science fiction that becomes myth again.
A conversation with the philosopher of the hard problem on virtual reality and consciousness: what it really means to be real.
A dialogue with the neuroscientist on consciousness as a “controlled hallucination” — and on the limits of an entirely brain-centered idea.
If a machine stores every answer, what is the point of the effort of learning? A defense of learning as experience, not as archive.
ChatGPT bursts into the debate: the real disorientation is not that machines think, but that they force us to ask whether we do.
Mirror or alien? Projecting our own image onto AI is the surest way to misunderstand it.
Algorithm-generated images and the vertigo of a creativity without an author: who creates, when the machine is the one creating?
Freedom as a scandal for deterministic science: why we keep feeling free even when we are told we are not.
The Slovenian philosopher between dialectics and techno-capitalism: how the oldest thought illuminates the most contemporary obsessions.
Denying thought to machines reveals a prejudice: for us, little is enough to say “mind”; for them, nothing ever is. The real difference lies in the ends.
Inside the “black box” of large language models: why reducing them to the “next token” is as misleading as attributing consciousness to them.
After the AI that answers, the AI that acts. When a system performs actions in the world, where does the tool end and responsibility begin?
The distance between mind and computation is not one of degree but of kind: an ontological question before a technical one.
Like Manzoni's character who denied the plague with impeccable arguments, certain critics dismiss AI with mere talk — and miss the target.
A breviary against the clichés: from “creative” AI to “conscious” AI, eight widespread beliefs put to the test of philosophy.
When machine-made images and texts become infinite, what becomes of their value? An economy of meaning in the age of overabundance.
From cybernetics to transformers, a history of AI told in the first person — by someone who has studied it since it was still called robotics.
Starting from a colonoscopy, an experiment on the boundary of the self: consciousness is not enclosed in the body, but coincides with the world it meets.
A small archaeology of the intimate: how a garment tells centuries of modesty, hygiene, and ideas of the body. A philosophy of the smallest things.
A long dialogue on the Spread Mind: the radical thesis that consciousness does not lie in the brain, but is made of the very objects of the world.
Lanthimos's film as a philosophical fable: Bella's innocence becomes the mirror in which adult civilization discovers its own monstrosity.
The “New York Times” versus OpenAI case: why, conceptually, training a model is not copying. A position against the current.
Against easy enthusiasm: language models imitate the surface of language, not the experience from which language is born.
Avatars, deepfakes, and digital copies: what is left of identity when our image can be replicated and made to act without us?
On the arrival of large language models: how a writing machine works, and why writing is not yet thinking.
When ideological orthodoxy rewrites the heroes of fiction: a defense of the freedom of storytelling against the control of the present.
From “Soul” onward, animation as a moral machine: children's films and the new doctrine of the self to be fulfilled at any cost.
Gina Carano's firing as a symptom of the times: how far can an industry punish the private opinions of its performers?
A proposal for rethinking personal identity: the self not as a center hidden in the brain, but as a process open onto the world.
Do the brain's colored images really explain the mind? A critique of the idea that consciousness can be read inside the neurons.
Reality, perception, and physics: a journey into the most naive and most difficult question — is there a world out there, independent of us?
Rethinking humanism after the machines: not a fortress to defend, but a meaning to reinvent in a world now populated by intelligences.
AI overwhelms a way of teaching and assessing. But it is precisely here that a university founded on what machines cannot do may be reborn.
An ethical call against the temptation to delegate and abdicate: to exist is to choose, and from that burden there is no shortcut.
On Andrea Tagliapietra's book: the mirror as the “king of metaphors,” between Narcissus and Dionysus, and the never-solved enigma of what it means to see.
On Federico Leoni's essay on Kapoor: the aesthetics of reversal, the skin as boundary, the mirror as an operator of reversibility between inside and out.
Freedom exists, but it is not science that guarantees it: against the determinism that would reduce our choices to chemical reactions.
A defense of autonomy against paternalism: the risk of a society that, in order to protect us, ends up deciding in our place.
Open-access scientific publishing and its paradox: when publishing freely means paying, and knowledge becomes a commodity again.
A comment on Walter Veltroni's interview with an artificial intelligence: what it does, and does not, mean to “converse” with a machine that has never seen the world.
The character of places as a way of being in the world: a playful exchange, under the beach umbrella, between two opposite ways of understanding existence.
Neuralink's interface lets you move a cursor with your mind, but it does not “read” thoughts: why consciousness remains beyond the reach of the chip.
April 2020, in full lockdown: a public intervention on the difficult balance between public health and individual freedom.
Money is made of time and trust, and it realizes value only where there is a human will to be exercised. AI, which produces content with neither value nor will, cracks the promise at the heart of the economy.
What if AI generated artificial consumers? The hypothesis of a hybrid economy, run by superintelligent agents devoid of consciousness — and of the ethical values that have sustained, for all their flaws, the human one.
I write regularly for cultural magazines and newspapers, in Italian and English. I am available for articles, reviews, op-eds, and editorial collaborations.