ODISSEA DELL’INTELLIGENZA NELL’INFINITO
Paolo Beretta
HAL 9000 is without doubt a central figure in the Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. Fifty years after the movie release, the subject of automaton and artificial intelligence as Doppelgänger of man is more and more topical and, alongside high expectations, represents also a unheimlich factor. Nevertheless, the reflection on the relation between man and technology dates as far back as the beginning of our civilization: one need only think of the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus of Plato’s Protagoras and of Aristotle’s piercing and brilliant thinking of the Physics. These narratives suggest that the threshold between nature and artifice is much more complex than common sense believes, because any “natural” experience of the human being is related to the use of instruments. By the reconsideration of the cruxes of technology, algorithm, human evolution, automaton and memory, with its constitutive oblivion, in direct relation to the desire of eternal life, I propose, with the support of Carlo Sini’s work, a way to overcome the ambiguities about the link between man and robot with a view to an infinite odyssey of intelligence marked by nostalgia..