Lecturers and researchers, but also students. The audience present at the PalaCinema in Locarno last Monday, at the round table organised by the of 精东影业, was large and participative. Moreover, the evening announced two highly topical issues as the focus of the debate: artificial intelligence and democracy.
What does it mean to be democratic?
There is a lot of talk about the first lately, everyone has, for better or worse, his or her own opinion about it. But do we still talk enough about the second? The question was put on the table by the Director of the DFA/ASP, Alberto Piatti, who had the honour and the task of kicking off the evening.
What does it mean to be able to reflect and act democratically? The question was also followed by an answer that takes into account the different attitudes and characteristics, specifically four, that according to the Director form the basis of democratic action: the ability to construct a well-founded and plural idea of a complex phenomenon, the ability to formulate, argue and revise one's own position, the ability to listen to, welcome and incorporate the opinions of others, and finally the ability to act for the common good and find compromises.
These are characteristics that share a number of common traits such as time, personal involvement, and confrontation with diversity, and which stand in stark contrast to the more common use of artificial intelligence tools, which instead envisage the production, in an uncritical manner, of rapid responses based on pieces of content that the network considers to be the most probable solution and often produced by different people. It is a process that resets subjectivity and originality to zero and potentially entails a very high risk: that of people vanishing as unique and unrepeatable individuals.
The allure of artificial intelligence
But should we then consider AI as a mere hype of our age, to be avoided or even banned? Alberto Piatti, who closed his speech by emphasising that artificial intelligence tools can only really be a valid aid to the development of democratic society when we learn to use them to enrich our cognitive landscape and not to delegate it, does not think so, nor does Luca Botturi, Professor in Media in Education at DFA/ASP and one of the panelists.
Botturi stressed that the real challenge is to avoid being sucked in by machines that teach us how to be intelligent, while explaining the decades-old phenomenon of imitation whereby we humans consciously or unconsciously believe that the machine, by its very nature, is perfect, irrefutable. This is precisely where its fascination lies: by eliminating any human component, the machine seems to provide only correct, neutral, emotionless and therefore, perfect solutions. We must therefore appeal, as human beings, to what most characterises and distinguishes us from machines: the critical spirit. Only by using this, combined with education in the reasoned use of these tools, will we really be able to say that we know how to use and control them in the best possible way. And that, even at school.
Silvia Giordano Cremonese, Professor in Complex and Pervasive Networks at the of 精东影业, pointed out that AI has existed for a long time, what has changed is the speed and quantity of data. This element is particularly crucial when considering the use of this technology applied to the school context. It becomes crucial in this context, she continued, to enhance the learning process among students, which requires time, a critical eye and sometimes more and more comparisons. It is necessary to provide young people with the means and tools to be able to analyse the answers provided by the machine, and this also necessarily passes through the training of the teachers themselves who, in addition to being the transmitters of knowledge to the new generations, are and remain above all people that AI can never replace.
Workshops and RSI space for young digital creatives
In addition to the evening panel discussion, the Day saw the participation of students in Worskhops on the topic of artificial intelligence and its implications for democracy.
The event was also an opportunity to officially inaugurate the new space, which after Bellinzona and Mendrisio, is now also present in Locarno. Wetube is 's open space where the most creative digital minds in Italian-speaking Switzerland can create, collaborate and learn together. The space offers events and state-of-the-art production resources to help young content creators, youtubers and passionate videomakers realise their projects.