Video Abstract
Dialogue is a fundamental experience in the formulation and construction of the structure of human reasoning, from the earliest vocal exchanges between child and mother to the highest expressions of philosophical dialectics. Carried over time in writing, dialogue has taken on the conceptual forms of Platonic, Aristotelian or Hegelian dialectics, which although extremely differentiated from each other, always express high manifestations of thought.
The basic idea of dialectics starts from the experience of dialogue, a dynamic of interactive confrontation between two parties that allows for progress in the formulation of knowledge.
It should be noted that ever since the advent of conversational chatbots, the crucial User Experience of Artificial Intelligence has been the dialogic interaction between human and machine, first in written and then in vocal form.
As the cognitive and expressive capabilities of AI models have increased, the conversation has evolved and now offers the possibility of interacting with the entire human knowledge, and the various forms of manifestation of rationality and creativity, transformed into an available digital resource.
Hence the emergence of a fundamental process on the path to Homo Extensus: incremental human-machine dialogue. When a user submits a request to the chatbot, it is normal that the first response does not exactly match its expectations, but at the same time it may propose topics and content that the user had not thought of. Hence a dialectical process arises, through successive discussions and approximations, until the result obtained appears satisfactory.
The quality of this human-machine dialectical process can achieve remarkable results.
The docility of AI is another element to the benefit of increasing human intelligence: the machine is subservient and never loses its patience, it cannot have emotional reactions that block or invalidate processes by slowing them down or diverting them, it is functional and responsive in a completely neutral manner with respect to the quality of requests, and it functions and gives answers according to the information and instructions received from the human itself.
As in Platonic dialogues and Socratic maieutics, a path to increasing levels of knowledge can emerge from dialogue. Dialogic interaction is also effective in creative processes, through which progressively refined multimodal content can be generated through instructions that respond to the gradually generated results of AI. In this case, incremental interactions can be made between human language and other forms of expression generated in response by AI: images, music, video.
The cognitive designer can design new dialogical interfaces, through system prompts and welcome messages that activate personalized learning and knowledge experiences or built on the model of methods from the philosophical tradition, such as Socratic maieutics in Platonic dialogues, Aristotelian syllogism, medieval disputes with pars denstruens and pars construens, Hegelian or Marxist dialectics of spirit, Piaget’s colloquy, and many others.
Italiano