How the pandemic pushes us towards the future  

Paper by Francesco Grillo and Claudia De Sessa expanding on Francesco's column published on the Italian newspapers Il Messaggero and Il Gazzettino del Nord Est

Scan of the paper edition. 

The only thing we can predict is unpredictability.

Faced with the resiliency of a virus that was supposed to test the world’s own resiliency, even the Economist – the newspaper that has been conjugating irony and wisdom for more than a century and a half – had to admit that 2022 marks the beginning of a new era. We have simply entered an age where those certainties we tried to cling on are no longer there. Does this mean that homo sapiens, a species characterized by its drive to dominate nature, needs to accept being at the mercy of phenomena it can not control? Does this especially mean that the West, previously so confident in its of its own strength, is now losing? Absolutely not.

However, 2020 will be a new beginning we will have to get accustomed to by finding new institutions and new decision-making mechanisms that concern everyone. New intellectual instruments are now needed, because the ones we had were conceived for a world way more stable. We should even get back an ancient ethic that would put us back in harmony with a universe we thought we could dominate.

Never before in history, the speed of humanity has been so abruptly interrupted. However, innovations have long been harboring under the dust of inaction and are now being rediscovered. These radical discontinuities concern companies, the job market, politics, the economy and the daily lives of each and every one of us, from New York to the smallest Italian village.

It has been two years, but it seems life two centuries have passed. Two years ago, nobody had heard about Zoom, the platform funded by a 30 years old Chinese engineer that immigrated to California and that is one of the many examples of US/China integration that go beyond the facade of hostility. Two years later, half of our lives are now happening on video-calls, reducing thousands of perhaps useless travels. Perhaps, the “new normal” is already here: Facebook and Twitter have already decided that once the pandemic is over, their employees will be allowed to work from home forever (except for younger people). Around the European Union, many corporate were able to manage teams of thousand of people wile travelling aroung the world until the end of next year. We have troubles imagining – with our nineteenth century eyes – a future where a company is able to survive without meeting in person.

Cinemas, shopping malls, small telephone shops, big hotels are just some of the long list of daily realities that may not open again. However, there are many other jobs – not necessarily new – that will be ever more present. Paradoxically, there could be more space for quality agriculture, for tourism in centers that are desert now.

The biggest change will be, however, in the convergence that is happening between internet and biology.

The RNA Covid vaccine has been the greatest achievement of the pharmaceutical industries together with biotech. It could be the beginning of the end for cancer, but also the end for the companies who reached that goal. A platform vaccine becomes a software open to further elaborations and that becomes more valuable the more it is used. Every elaboration diminishes, however, its potential to preserve its economic value.

We are at a crossroad between a huge step forward and an imminent crisis which could be irreversible.

Despite the almost miraculous survival of some European countries, every European Member State is in a frail situation, between the subsidies of the Recovery Fund, an incomplete European Union and public debt that risks on spiraling out of control and create uncertainness.

How can we deal with the complexity we have up until now just witnessed?

Surely, not by closing our eyes and hoping for the best. Rather, with our eyes wide open but with different spectacles. The biggest problem may indeed be a cognitive one.

After all, the question on how to transform information into knowledge has captivated philosophers and thinkers for millennia. We have stopped caring about it. We have segmented knowledge in so many niches, populated by experts that by definition have difficulties (and little interest) in recognizing links between profoundly interlinked phenomena.

We are in the era of the great uncertainty. We will survive only if we will give up on all the certainties we have constructed during the years where we thought development was limitless. At a certain point we even invented a “principle of precaution”, which means never undertaking an action that may hurt someone. This approach belongs to the past. In this new context, not taking risks, not admitting the limits of our knowledge and methodology, equals to surrendering. We would need more experimentation (and mechanisms to extract knowledge) rather than reforms taken from a guidebook. We need to re-discover Ulysses in order to sail towards the future. We are in a different world and being enthusiastic rather than terrified of it will probably be the key to success.

One crucial step forward regards the news ways in which technology allows us to create knowledge. Nowadays we find ourselves in a paradox: we have an incredible amount of qualitative and quantitative information but no fundamentally new way to analyze it. If with computers we accessed the ability to compute large amount of numerical data that we inputted in the machine, we should now look at the new frontier: involving machines – in particular AI – in the different stages of the scientific progress: from asking questions to generating the data, to analysis and interpretation of results.

One relevant step forward in this sense is that of ontologies. Ontologies are a way for AI of classifying information in order to autonomously draw links between concepts[1]. This allows the machine not only to execute a command (which can take the form of a decision tree, giving the illusion of “artificial thinking” while it is just running through a predefined path) but of autonomously asking questions and answering them, further allowing it to learn from contexts and nuances. Ontologies are already being used in various fields, such as the biomedical one, physics and economics, although much like AI itself they’re still in their infancy. Properly set up ontologies could however open up new frontiers in the realm of  interdisciplinary research – which is often presented as a necessary approach but is hard to execute in a methodologically sound way- , especially if they managed to breach the border of social sciences [2] .

Perhaps, they would provide a valuable, intelligent computing tool that could help us create links between the many specialized researches. Although full of potential, AI must not be seen as a magic wand. The limits of this technology are many and – curiously – profoundly human. Algorithm biases, stereotypes, racism, lack of common sense are all issues that have been observed in AI [3] . Moreover, ontologies require formalized and as much as possible harmonized language in order to better discern contexts and patterns. In academia, terms are extremely precise, but the same term may mean two very different things in different fields . Cross-field terminology harmonization is perhaps an exercise that could reveal itself extremely useful in making knowledge more accessible for the AI tool.

These issues also call for very specific and innovative regulatory tools that will help us avoid making AI threatening or worse, useless. Algorithm explainability and auditability (i.e. the capacity of explaining the algorithm autonomous reasoning (“black box”) and the ability of an AI system to be evaluated and assessed) are vital to the safe usage of this technology [4]. Security and data transparency is also key. Lastly, we need to have a serious, metaphysical reflection about the future. We must start to ask again those existential questions that determine not what we can, but what we should do in this upcoming future. Philosophy is, in this case, of no less importance than any high-tech advancement we can conceive.

We are entering a new globalized and data over-abundant world. We relied on machines to help us compute large amount of information that we struggled to handle. It is now, perhaps, the time to repeat the process, just one step further and with full conscience.

[1] Earley, Seth. «The Role of Ontology and Information Architecture in AI», 18th of May 2020.
[2] Kusters, Remy, Dusan Misevic, Hugues Berry, Antoine Cully, Yann Le Cunff, Loic Dandoy, Natalia Díaz Rodríguez, et al. «Interdisciplinary Research in Artificial Intelligence: Challenges and Opportunities». Frontiers in Big Data 3 (2020): 45.
[3] Gebru, Timnit. «Oxford Handbook on AI Ethics Book Chapter on Race and Gender». arXiv:1908.06165 [cs], 8th of August 2019.
[4] Onose, Ejiro. «Explainability and Auditability in ML: Definitions, Techniques, and Tools». 13/12/2021. neptune.ai, 11 giugno 2021.