FRAMEWORK

The relationship between human beings and technology is one of the most pressing issues facing us today.

Artificial intelligence technologies (AItech) concern not only specific professional fields, but are now from

early childhood fully integrated into our daily lives, opening up the prospect of world changing innovation

and development alongside threats and potential pitfalls of equal magnitude. AItech contribute, in fact, to

generating and exacerbating complex phenomena such as hyper-connection, unique thought,

homologation, and deresponsibilization of consciences.

These phenomena expose human existence to threats associated with the increasingly unlimited power of

the human being to use technologies for the destruction of him/herself and nature as well as for the

unchecked overcoming of the boundaries of the human condition. These threats or risks lead to the

catastrophic prospect of an overwhelming by the machine, which culminates, in Hannah Arendt’s words, in

the elimination of the human being’s own human stature.

Although the dangers connected with these phenomena are clear, the relationship between the human

being and AItech needs to be rebuilt with regard to its criticalities but also to its capacity to make the

existence of human beings more intrinsically “human”. Although the complexity of the current relationship

between human beings and technology is undeniable, it is due to this same relationship that humans

originally initiated and cultivated the process of humanization of him/herself and the natural world. It is in

fact the technological (in the form of the stick, the stone and the flint, ...) that first allowed

human beings to make nature more amenable from an operational-functional point of view. This

transformation of nature was a condition that made possible the birth and flowering of thought in the form

of introspection, dialogue and sociality.

The ecopedagogical study of the human-technical relationship provides a powerful interpretive lens for a

deep understanding of both the critical issues and the extraordinary humanizing potentialities of AItech.

Although the ever-accelerating evolution of technologies foregrounds the risks and consequences of

AItech, it is thanks to the human-technology relationship that humans originally developed the process of

humanization of the natural world and of themselves. They progressed this process thanks to the invention

and use of technology that was useful to render human existence more manageable, effective and

comfortable. They cultivated this process also thanks to a technology not only useful but significant for

developingg and extending human feeling and intimate expression.

This critical relationship between human beings and technology is now more important than ever. A

relationship that must take account of the problematic aspects that it presents today, but also and above

all of its humanizing possibilities. This critical relationship is not automatic and cannot happen by chance.

On the contrary, it must be initiated and cultivated early on, starting from elementary school, through the

formation of the capacity for thought and discernment. The human being is in fact from the beginning

called to form him/herself specifically with respect to the capacity of discernment necessary to contain the

possible consequences of the use of AItech and to again grasp the opportunity through technology to

humanize him/herself and the natural world.

It is a formation that accompanies the new generations early on and in an far-reaching, universal way from

elementary school, to cultivate those particular human qualities, critical thinking and judgement, necessary

for reflective, critical and ethical guidance and orientation of new artificial intelligence technologies

(AItech), so that they remain at the service of the flourishing of the human.