Dalla cognizione alla comunicazione. Epistemologia degli algoritmi secondo la teoria dei sistemi

The present contribution aims at questioning the reasons why the level reached by the processes of digitization of information stimulates interpreters to hypothesize that a radically new way of making sense of data is inherent in this trend. The thesis we propose to investigate here, echoing Elena Esposito’s recent work, is that of considering these programs not as reproducers of intelligence or thought but as tools aimed at acting adequately as partners of communication. Our analysis will proceed by providing an interpretation of the phenomenon mediated by Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. According to Esposito’s analysis, the goal of algorithms would be to produce a lack of control in a controlled way, to leave open the possibility of ‘informational surprise’ to the user, allowing the construction of meaning in a new way. This paradoxical programming of unpredictability, if interpreted as a phenomenon about the sphere of communicative interaction described by Luhmann’s theory, and not about intelligence, would help to make it more comprehensible how interaction with algorithms allows the societies that use them to process unpredictable information that cannot be ascribed to any cognitive process as a self-induced instrument of reflection. This would make it possible to anticipate the dysfunctional effects that such an increase in information complexity might produce.