Description of the Course Material
This is a refereed scientific monograph that addresses issues of complexity, with particular reference to anthropological transformation and the new paradigm shift introduced by the so-called digital revolution and artificial intelligence.
We are in the midst of a process of anthropological transformation (1996), which takes the form of an overturn of the complex interaction between biological evolution and cultural evolution; a process with numerous implications in terms of paradigm, citizenship and inclusion, with considerable repercussions on the identities and subjectivities at stake. A radical change in codes, cultures, modes of production and sharing, hierarchies (disintermediation), linked to multiple variables and concomitant causes, which is proving to be yet another opportunity for elites and restricted social groups.
In addition to a renewed focus on rules and rights, this social complexity requires an approach to complexity that avoids reductionist and deterministic explanations, but also, and above all, a new ethical sensitivity. Technology has become part of the synthesis of new values and new criteria of judgement, and social actors are faced with the possibility of making an irreversible qualitative leap. Contrary to hegemonic narratives, digital technology - whose profound epistemological implications we still underestimate - has led to an increase in the complexity of dynamics, processes and systems, and not to their simplification. Cognitive sphere, emotional sphere and social sphere. It is time to recompose some fractures, in an attempt to inhabit the boundaries, the hybrid zones and the tensions of the hyper-technological civilisation: a civilisation based on programming, automation and (hyper)simulation; a civilisation that, in addition to re-dimensioning/marginalising the space of the Human and of responsibility, continues to feed an old and counterproductive illusion: That of being able to expel/eliminate error (a fundamental pre-requisite of any knowledge, of life and of freedom itself) and unpredictability from reality and its representation.
In this perspective, the challenges of change can be traced back precisely to the urgency of rethinking/redefining the centrality of the Person and the Human, within environments and ecosystems in which there is no longer any boundary/limit between natural and artificial.