Dall’azione alla regolamentazione: autonomia pubblica, automazione e intelligenza artificiale

The topic of autonomy in the face of automated systems informed by artificial intelligence (AI) has been at the center of many debates for several years, especially from the point of view of personal freedom and privacy. However, a dimension of autonomy that has not been suf- ficiently investigated is the public one, i.e. the one directly linked to the mechanisms of regulation and collective management of the "ma- chines". To this end, main reference will be made to the ethical issues related to self-driving vehicles. The thesis that we intend to suggest and defend in this contribution is that automation and the emergen- ce of AI not only do not put human autonomy tout court at risk, but can enhance its public (and, therefore, democratic) dimension , provided that the collective decision spaces are not "colonized" by the opera- tional autonomy of the machines themselves. The theoretical back- ground of this thesis is discourse ethics and an approach to AI ethics as a critical theory.