Strolling through informatics #21 – A Country Can't Live on AI alone

previous #20 ––– next #22

by Enrico Nardelli

(versione italiana qua)

We discussed in the previous post some aspects that are exclusive to human intelligence, as an expression of a mind embodied in a physical body with the characteristics of our human race.

I'll just add a brief mention here of the fact that there are also a whole series of other values, which we can call "social intelligence" values, that give meaning to human societies as they are made up of people, such as, for example, compassion, solidarity, imagination, humor, and so forth, which also appear to me to be completely beyond the reach of cognitive machines, in general, and in particular those that possess what I call mechanical intelligence, universally known as artificial intelligence.

Despite these limitations, cognitive machines – and particularly those that use artificial intelligence techniques – will become increasingly widespread, due to their undoubted utility, while people will change the type of work they do. This should be understood in the sense that their work will increasingly involve the use of cognitive machines to assist humans in routine intellectual activities. This is a process analogous to what has happened in the past, both recent and distant, with more and more manual work, previously carried out directly by humans, increasingly entrusted to industrial machines, while humans maintained a role of control and supervision.

For this reason, it is of the utmost importance that every person be appropriately educated and trained on the foundations of informatics, the scientific discipline that makes possible the design and implementation of cognitive machines. Only in this way will everyone be able to understand the difference between what such machines can do and what they must not do. Indeed, while the third revolution in power relations has handed over to cognitive machines the dominance over the human species in the dimension of pure rationality, in human society there are many other highly relevant dimensions beyond this one, the only one in which cognitive machines operate. For humanity to continue to direct and govern its own future, it must be careful not to lose awareness of this specificity. To this end, proper education from the earliest years of school on the scientific foundations of informatics and on the social impact of its technologies is necessary. We will return to the theme of how to govern the development of computer systems in humanity's best interests in a subsequent post.

I draw attention to a particularly important aspect at this moment, when artificial intelligence systems are on everyone's lips for their impressive performance, which is due to the enormous amount of available data, advances in processor technology, and progress in algorithmic techniques of deep learning. This involves believing that a country needs only "intelligent systems" to be at the forefront of the digital society. In the history of technology in general and of informatics technology in particular, there are moments when it seems that a certain approach is absolutely the winning one, only to discover, perhaps after a decade, that we've exaggerated somewhat.

I am absolutely not denying the importance of this sector of informatics, and it is vital to invest in it, but we cannot forget that at the foundation of the entire digital world are the "normal" computer systems, whose state of implementation leaves much to be desired and to which much more attention should be paid. In many nations that in the last decade have begun to allocate very substantial sums of money for research in the area of artificial intelligence, the most attentive analysts have observed that such efforts must not happen at the expense of improving computer systems that don't work quite as they should. Investing only in the implementation of systems based on machine learning, when traditional computerization still doesn't work as it should, is a bit like buying yourself a Ferrari while forgetting that you have holes in your shoes and ruined clothes.

For a professional or a small business, I think it is much more relevant to have the ability to organize one's data effectively and autonomously and to be able to carry out simple processing with computer programs developed on one's own. It is these basic skills, analogous to those of being able to write a report or maintain simple bookkeeping, that I believe are needed to seriously implement digital transformation, more than artificial intelligence or one of the many fashionable English words that are heard increasingly frequently in the media these years.

We will return to the theme of the impact of informatics on the world of work in an upcoming post.

[[The posts in this series are based on the Author's book (in Italian) La rivoluzione informatica: conoscenza, consapevolezza e potere nella società digitale, (= The Informatics Revolution: Knowledge, Awareness and Power in the Digital Society) to which readers are referred for further reading]].

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The original version (in italian) has been published by "Osservatorio sullo Stato digitale" (= Observatory on Digital State) of IRPA - Istituto di Ricerche sulla Pubblica Amministrazione (= Research Institute on Public Administration) on 26 February 2025.