The University of New York Tirana hosted the conference Artificial Intelligence vs Human Intelligence, in collaboration with the Italian Institute of Culture, the start-up Wild Creative Industry, the University of Arts and the network of Albanian artists 7 Chambers. The event gave the start to the photography and new images contest Artificial Intelligence vs Human Intelligence open to creatives and students from Albania and Kosovo. The contest is an artistic project, launched by the Italian Institute of Culture and the start-up Wild Creative Industry.

Artificial Intelligence has brought the digital technology to an unprecedented creation capacity. At the same time, it’s clear to everyone the risk, above all among new generations, of loose intuition and analytics capacities, of naifly think that someone else will comfortably take care of the job.

Let’s get back for a moment to the first slow and suddenly every year faster progress of the contemporary technology. Let’s try to see it from a detached, neutral and rational vision. In 1964 the Canadian Marshall McLuhan, in his book Understanding Media, showed undoubtedly technology and new media are extensions of the human body. They boost the performances of individuals and societies. They create new opportunities and rise the quality of productions and new ideas. Digital technology is an extension of the human brain. Like the wheel is the extension of the foot, or houses are the extension of the skin and so on.

In time, technology has improved our quality of life. But, on the other side, the first reaction of individuals and societies to a new media is apathy. The human body takes a break after a long and hard work, which will be easier from now on. Technology and new media help and help a lot, but they cannot replace individuals and societies, even if individuals and societies would agree on it. Without human intelligence, technology and new softwares may turn everyone’s lifestyle in a sudden passive daily experience. It’s like you have an empty agenda and you think it’s full.

The work of two other great personalities such as Amos Tversky and Robert Kahneman, Nobel Prize, is essential in this brief vision and for a lateral, vital, innovative approach to innovation. New technology may raise the level of inactiveness and lead to judgements under growing uncertainty, to cognitive bias, hasty choices, counterproductive decisions, to a wrong personal attitude towards oneself, to a losing bet on fake and cool easiness of living, to the conviction that everything is done, achieved, perfect and, at the end, useless.

Ideas and creativity don’t work like that. Culture and the world of business work even less like that. Human intelligence is always first. Everything starts from it. Innovation comes from an inextensible part of the human body: life or, more specifically, art life. From this point of view, Art is the opposite of Artificial.

Artificial Intelligence is a supersoftware. It’s an IT product among others. There’s human intelligence behind it and will always be. The other way around is simply inhuman undoing. Human life drives on another road. In this journey, it’s of capital importance to sustain and speed the free, equal, global experience of creative intelligence. This is one of the main purposes of the contest Artificial Intelligence vs Human Intelligence. AI is a huge box of algorithms waiting to be open and put to some good use. It needs to be challenged, to be questioned, starting from individual’s talent, ambition and capacity. It can be useful or useless, depends on how we approach it. Tech-Humanism may be the way and Tirana a little vanguard creative laboratory for new ideas and culture.

In conclusion, I’d like to refer to the essential work of Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize. He’s one of the founding fathers of the Artificial Intelligence. As his research proved, humans take decisions moving from a bounded rationality, considering few stereotyped information. They make choices in the harmful haste of feeling satisfied. That attitude brings to a more and more bounded, limited and unsatisfactory experience in business, work and daily life. An artistic, critic, free, human approach to the AI tech-revolution can bounce back the apathy and an opiate effect on new generations. It’s an impressive future challenge. It’s the core of the contest Artifical Intelligence vs Human Intelligence: the opportunity to test creativity, enrich portfolios and move over to a new, more confident, aware, personal and creative thinking in the heart of the next Europe.