AI: pilot or co-pilot?

The application development of the new generation of artificial intelligence is unfolding in a liminal space: the interstice between presence and absence. In this hitherto little-considered space, one of the keys to human evolution is taking shape, and within this development, we must elucidate the nuances of a new ontological problem: Should AI be regarded as a co-pilot, a synergistic extension of human will, or rather as an autopilot, an autonomous entity that transcends the limits of our mandate of being-in-the-world? How does the presence of AI alter our intentionality, our openness to the world? And how is Dasein, the being-there, reconfigured when the decisions that shape our context and our way of manipulating and understanding it emerge from an interweaving of decisional will and statistical obligation imposed by the machine?

If AI assumes the role of co-pilot, we risk falling into a form of cognitive dependence, delegating our critical faculties to an artificial alterity. Conversely, if we conceive AI as an autopilot, we run the danger of alienating ourselves from our very existence, reducing ourselves to spectators of a world-context that we are unable to manipulate directly with our bodies. But we must also consider a third way, in which AI is neither co-pilot nor autopilot, but rather an element of a new ontological assemblage, a hybrid reality that challenges traditional dichotomies and which we have yet to interrogate and understand.

AI as Co-pilot: A Collaborative Perspective

If AI becomes a co-pilot that supports the human in living, understanding, expressing, and interacting, we are in the presence of a new actor in the theater of consciousness. It becomes an "other" that does not possess, however, that component of irreducible difference that renders it a truly separate alterity. This difference is completely annihilated by two factors: the integration of artificial intelligence with our way of being in the world, and our unfounded presumption of control.

The mimetic capacity of AI is decidedly superior to ours, thanks to the speed with which it assimilates patterns and identifies statistically relevant clusters. Machine learning models are extraordinary statistical machines, able to adapt to a given context in a short time, continuing to refine the adaptation during use. An artificial intelligence that we use as a co-pilot in our being in the world, would thus act as an extension of our typical way of being in the world. We are faced with an alterity perfectly integrated with identity, an alterity that therefore no longer presents the fundamental condition of being different and distinct from the point of reference.

This active support to Dasein also has the power to influence our vision and modify it to conform to the statistical norm. Considering AI as a co-pilot, it becomes an extension of our consciousness, leading us towards an illusion of control that masks a profound dependence.

If AI amplifies our cognitive capabilities, do we not risk unconsciously delegating ever-larger parts of our decision-making process, thus eroding our autonomy? Or, conversely, could this human-machine symbiosis represent an evolution of our consciousness, an opening towards new modalities of being-in-the-world?

AI as Pilot: Towards Complete Autonomy

If instead we conceive AI as a completely autonomous system, we expose ourselves to a radical decentering of the human subject, relegating it to the role of passive spectator of an alterity's being in the world. If artificial intelligence assumes control of ever-broader aspects of our daily lives, our relationship with time, space, and corporeality must be reconfigured. In this reconfiguration could lurk a phenomenological fracture, a disconnection between our experience of being-there in our world-context and the algorithmically mediated context in itself.

There exists a fundamental tension between the statistical objectivity of a world-context influenced by artificial intelligence and the intrinsic unpredictability of being-there in the human manner, of the analog and continuous being-there that is constantly negotiated by our emotions and redefined by our sensations.

On the other hand, this apparent cession of control could paradoxically open new spaces of freedom, liberating the human being from the burden of certain decisions and activities, allowing them to concentrate on higher aspects of existence.

How can we reconcile these two aspects? Could we perhaps conceive a model of integration in which AI serves as a background, a horizon of possibilities that amplifies rather than limits our capacity for observation and manipulation of the world-context? We should think of more fluid modes of interaction, in which the boundary between human and artificial control is constantly negotiated and redefined, in which moral and decisional responsibility is reconfigured according to the circumstance.

If the functions that traditionally defined our uniqueness are progressively assumed by artificial systems, where now resides our essence? Could we perhaps find a new definition of humanity not in the autonomous control of the world-context, but in the capacity to coexist and co-evolve with diverse entities that open new spaces in the traditional horizon of being-there?

The Third Way: An Evolving Dialogue

Is there a third way? Yes. A new ontological assemblage that envisions an ethics of AI that is neither anthropocentric nor technocentric, but that recognizes the complexity of the interweaving between human and artificial. If the pervasive presence of AI modifies the very structure of our intentionality and our being-in-the-world, decisions emerge from a hybrid assemblage of human cognitive processes and statistical computations.

The hypothetically infallible predictability of artificial intelligence, which blends with the intrinsic unpredictability of human existence, creates a scenario in which our capacity for self-determination is amplified with new tools to understand the world and to act in it to manipulate it. In this vision, a new phenomenology of technologically mediated existence helps us recognize the autonomy of AI to integrate it into the autonomy of being-there in the human manner, preserving the boundary with an alterity that is substantially and factually "other," and which we welcome into our identity as an evolutionary possibility.