Technological Humanism & Sustainable A.I.

In this chapter we first disentangle the philosophical categories that are at stake when talking about ‘digital environments’ having in mind the question about sustainable AI. As ethics follows ontology, in the second part, we continue addressing some ontological questions on artificial intelligence (AI). The most elementary is whether the AI exists. We will argue that what actually exists is not AI as such but AI systems that emerge from the combination and dynamic interactions of human beings and machines. In this sense also environments that are digitally mediated deserve attention, philosophical and scientific analysis. In other words, we must go from considering AI systems as technical systems with social consequences to considering them as technically implemented social systems. People are part of the AI systems, as designers and users. As a consequence, we can say that in AI systems the intelligent part is not artificial, and the artificial part is not intelligent. The question about sustainable AI is thus not a technical problem, but an ontological and anthropological one, a problem of human ecology. When we accept that intelligence can be found in a simple device, we succumb to what might be called the Toy Story effect. Toys do not play by themselves, as well as machines do not have intelligence. Both playing and understanding require the concurrence of a human being, and this fact has a number of ethical consequences. Given these reflections, we conclude that considering the nature and the virtues that human beings can develop in environments that are also digitally mediated, opens new scenarios for education, policies and innovation that has to be sustainable by design.