AI: towards a critical utopia

It is commonly understood that AI is one of the most disruptive technologies being developed. It may affect almost every aspect of society – from knowledge sharing to economic interactions, from making art crafts to finding cures for our diseases – and of personal life – from making friends, to finding a partner, from dealing with the pain for the loss of beloved people, to helping us managing our households through smart objects. Understanding the relationship between AI and society is a complex endeavour, since its shape and its evolution are not an immutable technological law, but instead the consequence of specific choices, both private and public, that could very well change over time and may of course influence its sustainability. Some powerful politicians like Vladimir Putin have declared that who will lead the researches in the field of AI, will lead the world, and of course many funds are coming from the armies (Harari, 2015) and from governments that seem to be working for monitoring and controlling us (Greenwald, 2015; Zuboff, 2018). Many others come from the finance world and are meant to increase the incomes of a few rich persons, regardless the risks ran by the rest of the population (O'Neil, 2016).