Interview with Maurizio Ferraris – professor of theoretical philosophy at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy at the University of Turin
(By Alessandro Longo)
Don’t talk to him about “artificial intelligence ethics”. Meaningless words. A smokescreen for political and social choices we still fail to properly address. “Let’s worry instead about a future where there’ll be no work for anyone, or almost anyone, because everything will be handled by artificial intelligence”. Maurizio Ferraris, one of Italy’s leading digital thinkers, professor of theoretical philosophy at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy at the University of Turin, has long had an answer to this too. A proposal: “webfare”, as written in his books. Redistribute the wealth we produce as consumers that now stays entirely in the belly of big tech, which are preparing to become even more powerful by dominating the artificial intelligence era.
He clarifies this in our interview.
What’s the point of artificial intelligence ethics?
We must start from the fact that artificial intelligence as such, as algorithms governing data, has no ethics, having no will (will comes from those who programme the algorithms). Therefore, claiming to insert ethics into algorithms isn’t very different from wanting to teach the ten commandments to an alarm clock or a toaster. Instructions are certainly given, but no conscience is formed – simply a human conscience tries to mitigate the risks associated with machine operation, rather like when it was decided to make the symbol on Mercedes-Benz bonnets bendable, to reduce impact in case of accident.
Then we must consider that ethical principles aren’t universal. If there’s something we’ve painfully recognised in the last two centuries, which invalidates all universalist morals, from Kant’s categorical imperative downwards, it’s that ethical principles vary across time, cultures, and individuals. Sometimes the latter are wise enough to recognise this, and not impose, for example, baptism on a Muslim person in the name of our idea of otherworldly salvation. But will a machine be capable of this? Being a machine and being a bearer of ethics is a contradiction in terms, given that the machine lacks will, as I’ve extensively illustrated in a forthcoming book, “La pelle. Che cosa significa pensare al tempo della intelligenza artificiale”, Il Mulino 2025. So much so that to explain (fortunately not to justify) a femicide perpetrator or Waffen-SS member, we say they acted like a machine.
In other words, either we accommodate all ethical principles of every time, place and individual within a machine, thereby nullifying all ethics because we put together thousands of mutually exclusive options, or we put none. And this second option seems far wiser to me. If by “artificial intelligence ethics” we mean that when you ask a chatbot what’s the most effective suicide method it responds that it’s not authorised to provide this information, well, it’s no different from the instruction “keep out of reach of children” written on a medicine bottle. Is it ethics? If we want to claim there can be ethics without consciousness and without subjectivity, fine, we can do that. But then we might as well argue that a teddy bear can feel affection for the child it belongs to.
Are there ethical knots to address, then, with AI’s advent?
In light of what’s been said so far, regarding artificial intelligence there are no ethical knots, only political and economic ones. Particularly, the problem I’ve insisted on and continue to insist on: how to equitably redistribute to humanity the enormous value that humanity itself produces on the web. A problem that, take note, has nothing to do with infusing ethics into machines, but with adopting political choices by humans.
As for ethics, let’s leave it to humans, and try to understand what it really is. Right now, the taxi navigator I’m writing in is informing the driver that there are police checks nearby. Does this mean the machine is ethical and has internalised principles of road safety? If we really care to, no one can stop us claiming this, but rather than ethics, it would be animism (we attribute ethical responsibility to an AI) and hypocrisy (there’s nothing moral about avoiding penalties on the machine’s indication – morality would consist in respecting the law without external controls or help).
Our era, which claims to be secularised and perhaps beyond good and evil, is simply saccharine, and loves shifting all responsibility to ethical committees’ decisions and moral guides – and philosophers can work fine for this purpose too, which says everything. But to understand how misleading this ethical intoxication is, it’s enough to change words, abandoning the name that for some reason sounds lofty – “ethics” – in favour of the more ordinary “morals”. We’ll find that dealing with a moral machine, or one that moralises to us, is a great bore, and our most plausible reaction would be to suggest it mind its own business.
So how do we proceed? What future can there be for work, for workers? For all of us, in short?
It’s clear that work must be radically rethought. Only street cleaners, four-star chefs, footballers, possibly porn stars, very probably Popes, Kings, and dictators will remain. For different reasons: street cleaners and chefs need discernment and fine manual skills, we probably wouldn’t like a football match or sex scene played by automata, the Pope must be chosen by the Holy Spirit and not by artificial intelligence, as well as being anatomically male, the King is such for reasons of blood and AI has none, and dictators will never accept ceding their power to a machine.
This is why it’s about rethinking work’s future not so much by inventing new jobs (there will be some, but not many) but by reconceptualising work, and placing under this heading every form of value production. Value isn’t produced only by consuming calories, and calories aren’t consumed only by producing or distributing goods. Value is produced both by producing and consuming, because we’re living organisms inserted from the start in a technical and spiritual system – because we’re human beings.
As for the question “who pays” for humans who produce value by consuming rather than producing, I’ll answer shortly.
And that is?
Baudelaire rightly said that working is still better than having fun. He meant that the idleness or monotony of entertainment is much more boring than a cavalry charge or open-heart surgery. But who said consumption must be boring? Besides being a producer of books, lessons and bureaucratic processes, in my life I’ve been a great consumer of books, and found it wonderful. Generally, it’s hard to argue that a professor’s or artist’s life is really boring (it can be, but that’s only their fault), just as conversing with friends, falling in love, marrying or divorcing isn’t necessarily boring. Neither is making political speeches or taking deliberations in a council. Roman senators or English Peers never did anything else, and weren’t bored. When production becomes increasingly automated, consumption will always remain, which is the manifestation of need, desire, will and reason. If we then convince ourselves that we’ll miss digging the earth or screwing bolts on an assembly line, well, nothing stops us building a Disneyland with all the old trades, including gravedigger and sewer cleaner, for nostalgics of the good old jobs.
Here too, the problem isn’t giving in to nostalgia or dystopia, but rather understanding how to maintain a humanity that’s stopped working. But if, as I’ve long proposed, we take the Webfare route – capitalising on humanity’s online mobilisation (consumption), as American liberal platforms and Chinese Bolshevik platforms do, redistributing to humanity the wealth it produces (which liberal platforms don’t do) and leaving it free to live as it wants (which Bolshevik platforms don’t do) – the problem is solved to everyone’s satisfaction. Including Marx’s dear departed soul, who in The German Ideology said that in liberated humanity everyone would do what they wanted, just as they pleased, instead of being crucified to one place and one role as imposed by bourgeois and industrial society’s alienation, forced to play one part in the comedy, and a tiring and boring one at that – production.
