Part of the seminar series Thinking the Future: Conversations on Technology, Subjectivity and Ethics

Research on automatic information processing has always been driven by the idea of reproducing human intelligence with machines. Advanced machine learning algorithms, which inherit and develop this research perspective, are now able to perform many complex tasks that previously had always required the contribution of intelligence. Should we then conclude that machines have become intelligent? If one looks at the work of recent algorithms, one sees that intelligence is neither the point nor the purpose. The project of artificial intelligence has led to building machines that have not learned to become intelligent, but to do something else that humans do on the basis of intelligence: they have learned to participate in communication. Rather than speak of artificial intelligence, then, we might speak of a novel form of artificial communication.

Esposito is professor of sociology at the University Bielefeld and the University of Bologna and is the author of Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence.