Triumph and Debacle: Ethics of Artificial Intelligence Between Exemption and Resonance

More than a tool in our hands, AI is now an environment, the so-called “info-sphere”, in which we are now totally immersed. The question, in this perspective, is no longer what we can do with AI, but what AI can do with us. This paper analyzes the tendency to delegate to AI decisions that affect our lives and that were previously managed exclusively by humans. Pushed to its extreme consequences, this replacement of human capabilities produces a wasting effect. This seems to be confirmed by the current trend recorded on social media regarding the functional illiteracy of the new generations, in which the growing diffusion of artificial intelligence is accompanied, in the mass of users, by a worrying natural numbness. If biological evolution marked the passage from homo habilis to homo sapiens, in short, technological evolution risks leading from homo sapiens to homo insipiens.