How AI Has Overcome the Dichotomy Between Past and Future Knowledge

Today we are witnessing, in an updated form, the curious revival of a famous querelle, that between Ancients and Moderns. Arising in Italy with the irreverent and anti-classicist writings of Tassoni, Boccalini, Lancellotti, it then passed to the France of the Sun King who, as often happens beyond the Alps, took great credit for its paternity (and anyone wishing to delve deeper into the subject has an excellent 900-page Folio classique prefaced by Marc Fumaroli). Well, if yesterday the dispute revolved around the poetic perfection of Homer or the actual wisdom of ancient philosophers compared to the present, today instead it revolves around AI that is devouring entire sectors of the humanistic knowledge of yesteryear (from education to translation studies, from philology to poiesis, from encyclopedism to history), also tarnishing that divine gleam that man – perhaps with misplaced boldness – attributed exclusively to his own species.

Among today's local representatives of the Ancients there is certainly the classicist Ivano Dionigi who, in his very recent Magister, still claims the old (but for him sacred and unsurpassable) methods of Greco-Latin humanistic knowledge, looking first to Aristotle, for whom "man is the only being to have logos", and to the school "as a counterweight and also a counterpart to the prevailing technological monotheism". Fundamentally on the same line, although more zigzagging on AI, also moves Umano, poco umana by Giuseppe Girgenti, another classicist of great standing. Yet Gemini and ChatGPT (their open version, not even the paid one) develop a logos already almost superior to ours in terms of balance and speed of ideation, and it is only the first cry of these algorithmic entities (still in their infancy so to speak), which can only grow and improve beyond belief, that is, to genius and beyond. Even school - especially the Italian one with its aberrant distortions and partialities - seems today an antediluvian institution, a real living fossil, compared to the perfect artificial, self-taught pedagogue, a sort of cyber simulacrum of the private teacher or of Chiron. In truth, the advent of AI is like a small domestic Copernican revolution that dethrones man and his value-based junk from the center of the cognitive world to downgrade him to a dwarf planet, cold and whirling. On the other hand, it now seems quite obvious, and even a little fatal given the sad direction the world is taking, that in the last 2,500 years neither Plato nor Aristotle have introduced more light of intelligence or justice than the traffic light has modestly done since the day of its invention in 1920. And the traffic light – a chronometric regulator of urban traffic – is to AI what Pithecanthropus is to Sapiens , so much so that in the future, if we really want to avoid human extinction, it would perhaps be worth having everything regulated by some quantum supercomputer (as for example in the post-atomic world imagined by Ridley Scott's Raised by Wolves series).

So if we consider carefully the parallel between Ancients and Moderns today has changed, because the paradigm has changed: that old dichotomy is now ephemeral because it has already been subsumed and surpassed by AI which – the omniscient database of humanity – incorporates ancient knowledge and its methods to project them towards new knowledge and a new, highly advanced methodology. Those born within this paradigm, that of AI, are immersed in their own habitat; while those born yesterday – those that youngsters ironically call the Gutenbergs because they still print documents without trusting the cloud – feel like survivors to be scrapped, therefore invoking the “good old days” as a last desperate castle. In the end Guicciardini, an unremarked sixteenth-century forerunner of the quarrel, had understood everything: “Whoever knew how to change his nature with the times […] would be divine. But it is an effect of nature that, just as one who has a habit, is not easy to change, so one who is accustomed to governing himself in a certain way, or has an inclination by nature, cannot easily vary his style”.

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