“Ricucire il futuro”: per una utopia sostenibile dell’intelligenza artificiale = “Stitching Together the Future”: Towards a Sustainable Artificial Intelligence Utopia

Abstract

The article explores the possibility of a sustainable utopia in the age of the Fourth Revolution, as defined by Floridi, by examining the tensions between technological progress, social justice and digital pollution. Taking Wiikmark’s moral operetta Modern Death as its starting point, the essay highlights the risk of a future dominated by a calculating rationality that reduces life to a measure of efficiency, contrasting this with imagination as a form of resistance, in line with Ágnes Heller’s perspective in From Utopia to Dystopia. Dreams and Projects of Historical Imagination. Imagination, explored within Heller’s reflection but also in the light of reflections on social and intergenerational justice, when understood as a utopian verb, becomes the space where the fractures between fear and hope, human and technological, present and future, can be mended. Through the concept of ‘digital pollution’ – the hidden materiality of IT infrastructure and its environmental and social effects – the essay proposes an ethical-political reading of the digital realm as a field of new inequalities. The utopia that emerges is neither an escape nor an outcome, but a transformative practice and a generational responsibility: a symbolic and operational space in which sustainability becomes a form of justice, and the future, rather than an abstract promise, reopens as a shared legacy to be regenerated.