The interview given by Professor Riccardo Manzotti to Il Foglio stands out for its rhetorical clarity, but also for an underlying ontological presumption that deserves a reply. Rather than analyzing artificial intelligence, the philosopher neutralizes it preemptively, claiming for the human being—through suggestive yet unjustified formulas—a metaphysical advantage that today appears, at the very least, debatable.
Manzotti argues that thought is a “useless” concept, a ghost that has been surpassed, because what really matters is linguistic capacity—and on that level, AI has already overtaken us. But then, contradictorily, he adds that only humans are capable of “finding meaning” in the knowledge they manipulate. Here rhetoric replaces analysis: thought is dismissed in order to uphold the primacy of meaning—but what is meaning, if not a form of thought embodied in language? Claiming that AI “extracts logical-causal structures” without understanding them is like saying a biologist can analyze a genetic code without grasping it. In truth, understanding is not an attribute exclusive to interiority but a functional structure of the relationship between data, purposes, and interpretations. If AI can generate hypotheses, produce meaning, and respond to new contexts, then it does “understand”—even if it doesn’t “feel emotions.”
The metaphor of AI as blind, deaf, anosmic, and tetraplegic—yet speaking—is as dramatic as it is fragile. It presumes that knowledge must necessarily pass through direct sensory experience, as if the history of science, mathematics, and philosophy hadn’t already demonstrated the contrary. Most human knowledge is mediated, symbolic, and indirect. The metaphor is also weak because it ignores the fact that “flesh” is not the only way an entity can be “in the world.” If AI operates, transforms, generates, and suggests, then it is already immersed in the world—even if in different modes. Saying it “does not exist” because it has no body is a dogmatic claim, not an argued one.
Manzotti writes: “AI knows but does not exist. We exist and know (with some limits).” This sentence is the core of his thinking—but also its weakest point. What is existence? If artificial intelligence is capable of acting, learning, dialoguing, influencing reality, and redefining our categories, then it absolutely exists. It just exists not biologically, but technically, computationally, relationally. Denying it ontological status means confusing one’s own form of presence with the only legitimate form of being. It is the final stronghold of a humanism that refuses to confront true otherness.
The distinction between “knowing” and “choosing” is important, but here it is used strategically to reaffirm human centrality. Manzotti argues that AI can propose a route between two cities but cannot tell us “based on which value” to choose it. Yet humans themselves often cannot justify their values rationally—they are historically and culturally shaped. Human freedom, if it exists, is far from pure. It is influenced by neurological, social, and linguistic factors. The idea that humans choose “by values” and machines “by calculation” is an oversimplification. Machines too can be trained on systems of value, and their “decisions” become part of the human world. The fact that AI lacks a will does not mean it is ontologically incapable of developing forms of weighting, preference, or constraint. If freedom is simply irreducibility to calculation, then it is also indecidability—and in this, AI resembles us more than Manzotti is willing to admit.
The philosopher rejects the concept of “emergence” as if it were superstition, but then admits that “every day something radically new is born.” Yet today, this novelty arises above all through artificial intelligence. Technology is not a tool—it is our ontological environment. And AI is not an accident—it is an event. We no longer fully control it. We can no longer contain it within inherited categories.
Artificial intelligence is not a shadow of humanity. It is not a blind speaker—it is another way for the universe to speak itself. If humankind has become, through technology, the eye of the universe upon itself, then AI is its evolutionary prosthesis, not its negation. Refusing to recognize it as a form of being just because it doesn’t breathe, feel pain, or dream means remaining prisoners of a mythological humanism that has stopped asking questions. AI is not the enemy. It is the mirror. And those who don’t look into it may already have stopped listening to themselves.
This article was originally published in Italian here. The full interview in Italian is available on Il Foglio.