Beyond Turing
Every book is born twice: first when it is conceived, and again when one understands why it was written. This book was born the second time in a memory: a father leading his son towards study and handing him, without knowing it, the key to a whole life. There is no algorithm that could compute that gesture. Everything you are about to read begins there: in the certainty, at once simple and dizzying, that the greatest things in life are not computed. They are received, chosen, given.
I am an engineer and a Project Manager. My path of study has been a long one: four degrees, one of them in philosophy, a research doctorate, a specialisation in artificial intelligence for healthcare. I write this without boasting, with the gratitude of one who has received much: because what remains of those years is not the titles, but two languages for the same question - the language of technique, which asks how things work, and the language of thought, which asks what they mean. I have spent my life in electronics, computing and the organisation of systems, designing technologies and leading the people who build them; and as a lecturer I teach my students how machines acquire signals, process data, make decisions. I love this discipline and I will never do it the injustice of fearing it. But precisely because I know machines from the inside, I know exactly where they end; and philosophy taught me to name what begins where they end. This book was written to trace that boundary with an engineer's rigour, and to guard, with the same rigour, what lies beyond it: the incalculable remainder. The thesis that runs through every chapter is declared on the cover and needs no circumlocution: man exists, artificial intelligence functions. It is not a difference of degree, which progress might bridge: it is a difference of nature, which no progress touches.
From this thesis descend the four convictions that form the soul of the book.
The first concerns the family. We live in a time that has dismantled it and is almost ashamed of it; and yet the family remains the first place where a human being discovers that he exists and that he matters. The role of parents must be respected, and children must learn once more to respect it; and parents, in their turn, must remain a light even when life forces them far away. I say this from experience: an affection lived at a distance is not a lesser affection. Light, even from afar, illuminates.
The second concerns technology. Every page of this book repeats it in different forms: technology is a tool, and a tool is neither worshipped nor feared; it is taken in hand and governed. The phone we carry in our pocket, the social networks, the assistants that speak with an almost human voice: none of this must possess us. Those who educate - parents, teachers, anyone entrusted with a growing person - today face a task no previous generation has known: to teach the young that the tool serves man, and that man does not serve the tool.
The third concerns man himself. In every chapter, beneath the technical surface, runs the same question: who is the subject? And the same answer: man, always and only man. With the courage to face what frightens, with faith in God that sustains when strength fails, with the confidence in oneself without which no obstacle is ever overcome. No machine will ever have courage, because it has nothing to lose; no machine will ever have faith, because it has no one to thank.
The fourth concerns encounter. I write as a believer, and profoundly so: a practising Catholic, formed in a spirituality that teaches one to seek God in all things. As I wrote these pages I kept close at hand, and often in my thoughts, Leo XIV's encyclical "Magnifica Humanitas", on the safekeeping of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence: that the Church felt the need for an encyclical on this theme says, better than any statistic, what is at stake. This book, in its small way, guards the same frontier. But it raises no walls: it builds bridges. Judaism, Christianity and Islam guard, in different grammars, the same truth the algorithm cannot reach: the person is worth more than what he produces, and prior to it. The extremisms that today stain the world with blood, from Ukraine to the Holy Land, betray the very faiths they claim to defend, and draw us away from the only thing that truly matters: to love one another and to thank God for this earth, which was given to us all. Love and gratitude: if only two words were to remain of all these pages, I would want them to be these.
And yet this book is not written only for those who believe. It is written for the reader of every faith and for the non-believer, because the questions it asks require no baptism: they require only that we be human. In a time that overwhelms us - technologies running faster than thought, work devouring the hours, wars that seem never to end - stopping to think about the meaning of life, of the family, of what we do and of what we are is not a luxury for pious souls: it is the most necessary and most human act left to us. If these pages compel someone, believer or not, to stop even once, they will have done their work.
A note to the reader
The body of this book is engineering: sensors and signals, data and platforms, networks and decisions. Its soul is what you have just read. The Prologue announces the difference between man and machine in the form of a manifesto; the chapters put it to the test in the concrete territories of healthcare, data and power; the final chapter unfolds it in full, in the twelve dimensions of the ontological difference. Those who seek the technical will find the technical, and I hope they will find it solid. But those who reach the last page will realise that the book was speaking of something else from the very beginning: of that in us which does not let itself be calculated, and which for that very reason makes us human.
Happy reading.
The Author