There is a lot of talk, and rightly so, about Artificial Intelligence. ChatGpt, for example, is the intelligent software that can write texts, generate reports, solve complex problems, translate songs into other languages and solve mathematical exercises, in short, produce what is required of students: for this reason many schools have banned this application.
But it’s a vain thing!
In fact, the web has long been full of apps that translate and solve problems. And it is not even useful to apply counterproductive forms of prohibition: rather, rules are needed that develop the critical sense of students by helping them to use algorithms without being slaves to them, also because using them as shortcuts is a form of mental slavery, while knowing makes you free; information available in a short time is an advantage if used as a basis for comparisons and for debate by comparing ideas and values that come from the past.
And if new technologies cannot be stopped, we might as well study them, explaining their dangers, controlling them and curbing their unscrupulous use as a substitute for human qualities.
But without taking anything away from technological evolution, we can try to focus every now and then on the beauty of natural intelligence, which until some time ago did not require adjectives to be distinguished from anything else.
Intelligence, according to the definition found in the dictionary, is: «that complex of psychic and mental faculties that allow man to think, understand or explain facts or actions, develop abstract models of reality, understand and be understood from others, to judge, and at the same time make him capable of adapting to new situations and of modifying the situation itself when it presents obstacles to adaptation”; a continuous human faculty that develops gradually starting from childhood, accompanied by awareness and self-awareness.
We are therefore not just a sum of information, our brain is not a computer, we cannot pause or restart to function better, we are not executors of functions, even if many decisions are entrusted to the measurement capacity of artificial intelligence. And even in small way we delegate many functions to the cell phone, to automatic calculation, to the digital map that guides our steps
A great philosopher proposed an interesting analogy: Would you stop walking on your own two feet just because there are means that can do it for you? We would get sick soon. Yet we tend to do this with our brain by delegating many functions to the machine.
So every now and then we try to de-virtualize our social life. Online is not evil, the way in which it is used can be: the machine always lives in the present, in us the present and the past coexist in an unpredictable, uncalculable way, towards the future.
To be intelligent we need a body: it is in the body that passions, impulses, long-term memory and thoughts that we can only enjoy offline are inscribed. Human intelligence is not a calculating machine, it is a process that articulates affectivity, corporeality, error, desire, conscience.
We need direct friendly discussions, capable of opening up to suggestions, listening and reflection.
