This evening Massimo Zamboni will be a guest of La Milanesiana, the review conceived and directed by Elisabetta Sgarbi. The event attended by the musician and writer (Volvo Studio, 9 pm) is called “Lost Connections” and is part of a cycle dedicated to Artificial Intelligence. The program includes a theatrical prologue by Andrea Pennacchi, a reading from the book by Johann Hari Stolen attention (The ship of Theseus) and the reading and concert by Zamboni. Here is an excerpt from his speech dedicated to Artificial Intelligence and the theme of the Milanesiana: the return.
The theme of this Milanesiana is – you know – the Return. Declined in sub-themes, like the one this evening, which concerns the term Artificial Intelligence. Return is a beautiful word, one of the densest in the entire lexicon. The ancient Nostos, the return home, to the lost place, to our deepest self. If we accept that childhood is our true homeland, where the condensation of our subsequent destiny is distilled, the resulting unbridgeable detachment takes the form of a localized pain that rises in melancholy, due to the impossibility of being implemented until in conclusion. We are shipwrecked in this sense, and we will never be granted the landing place that the gods granted to Ulysses/Odysseus. This pain is irredeemable, engraved in men until it becomes their nature.
How all this accords with the idea of a coexistence – or rather, of a use – of an Artificial Intelligence seems difficult to accept. The artifice presents itself as an overcoming of nature; and features an Artifex, an expert operator, in the role of command. How many expert maneuverers direct this eruption of Artificial Intelligence into our mental or daily horizon, masked by the ineluctability of technological progress, we will never know. They act on the very substance of the world, on the reality represented, making it similar to the one they intend to represent. A phrase like Artificial Intelligence as a cultural metaphor creates a sense that is required to adapt, causing the world to make a predetermined change. It is, in fact, a pervasive and persuasive system that would like everything to resemble itself. By accepting this representation of the world we actually accept the consequent rules, which foresee our progressive being marginalized.
Yet to ridicule the current enthusiasm for the intelligent machine, a simple glance from the window would suffice, or to adopt the glance of an animal, or to accept the mutability of time, to be surprised by the infinity of the foliage, to value physical abilities of our body. But they say, we need systems capable of processing the multitude of data and drawing indications from it. But it has also been said – none other than the great emperor of the Mongols, Genghis Khan, had deigned to say it – that numbers are only quantity, and quantity is fear. And that the stars are not to be enumerated.
The question remains whether machines can have autonomous thought, whether they are organizing themselves to have it. Certainly they can rethink, organizing the data received in schemes that do not include empathy, affection, tears for the misfortunes of others, desire, reverie, abandonment. They are not allowed the mixing, the genetic drift. Even more, they are not allowed to Return.
Animals are allowed instead. Because that’s how they are: they simply know how to withdraw – no one says where – you sense the hard times among men. And then they come back. As soon as there is the minimum environmental practicability they return to where they disappeared, and have always been. Instinct guides them. A verified intelligence to rely on. And they don’t just think; but they think again. You know, there is a donkey who lives with us in the meadows of the house, and I often find him absorbed in his meditations. I look at him standing in the grass, still, looking at the ground. Associate, ruminate, think back to his adventures; like the time when, attacked by wolves, he defended himself with kicks and bites, seeing all the sheep around him exterminated. That episode left him, in addition to a scar on his muzzle, a deep thought, the idea of fragility. And what about other returns, like that of the wolf? Which Artificial Intelligence could quantify it?
