The ruling of the Court of Rome, which deemed the dismissal of an employee for a justified objective reason to be legitimate – based on a company reorganization carried out also using artificial intelligence tools – deserves to be read not only as a technically correct decision, but as a historic step. He is, upon closer inspection, the “patient zero” of a technological pandemic that has been brewing under the radar for some time and which today also officially enters the jurisprudence.

Who is “patient zero” of the technological pandemic

Almost a century ago, in 1928, John Maynard Keynes wrote a short essay entitled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” In those surprisingly timely pages, he warned of a new “disease”: technological unemployment. “We always discover new ways to save manpower – he wrote – and we discover them too quickly to be able to relocate that manpower elsewhere”. The ruling of the capital’s court seems to give substance, for the first time in such an explicit way, to that prophecy.

From a legal point of view, the decision is technically flawless. The judge applies well-known categories: freedom of economic initiative, unquestionability of organizational choices, effectiveness of the reorganization, causal link with the elimination of the post, impossibility of relocation (the so-called repechage). Nothing revolutionary, if read from the traditional perspective of labor law. Yet, it is precisely this apparent normality that marks the turning point: the law puts its seal on the era of the technological replacement of human beings. The world changes. But how?

The atomic bomb that is exploding in society

Already ten years ago, the most pessimistic – or perhaps the most lucid – argued that with AI “people are useless”. It was the provocative title of an essay by Jerry Kaplan who, in 2015, compared the work on artificial intelligence in the Stanford laboratories to a new “Manhattan project”: a research destined – like the atomic bomb – to have a shocking impact not only on the means of production, but on the very conception of who we are and what our place in the world is.

Rome, designer fired and replaced by AI: for the judges it is legitimate – by Arianna Cerone

Here we are therefore catapulted into the era of technological substitution and the transition from human work to post-human work. It sounds like the plot of a novel by Philip K. Dick, but instead it is the reality that also knocks on the door of the courts.

Thus human labor will be separated from money

The issue, however, is not to stop a transformation that has now become unstoppable, but rather to govern it. We are, therefore, faced with an epochal crossroads: maintaining structures based on the capital-salaried labor dialectic unchanged, thus exposing ourselves to the risk of being overwhelmed by a profound existential and social crisis, or accepting the technological revolution and, together, revolutionizing human societies from the foundations, making them evolve. On the other hand, correlations taken for granted for decades, such as that between work and income, are starting to unravel.

Work, manual and intellectual, tends to become a prerogative of machines: first supervised by humans, according to the interactionist model described by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, then increasingly autonomous. Thus, income – once commensurate with the quantity and quality of the work performed and in any case suitable to ensure the worker and his family a free and dignified existence, pursuant to Article 36 of the Constitution – which has become increasingly poorer over time, today comes to progressively separate itself from human work performance.

Will we all end up condemned to the minimum income?

Hence the emergence, less and less theoretical and more and more pressing in the recent debate, of the idea of ​​a basic universal right: the basic income. Not an extemporaneous suggestion, but a political and economic philosophy developed over about fifteen years by scholars such as Philippe Van Parijs and Thomas Piketty. The assumption is simple and radical: if work, as we have known it for over two centuries, is destined to drastically reduce (and with it income), social cohesion can only be safeguarded by guaranteeing everyone a minimum endowment: of income, services and even capital, as a sort of early inheritance.

Utopia? With the eyes of the present, perhaps yes. But often utopia is nothing other than the present of tomorrow. Another attentive observer of Silicon Valley, Martin Ford, already warned in 2015 that artificial intelligence would not produce simple work tools, but real workers. Now that what until yesterday was only an alarming prediction has become a reality, a radical political response is required – as Martin Ford himself hoped for – and is no longer just desirable but necessary, to prevent the “victims of automation” from remaining without resources and representation.

A revolution that cannot be governed with old ideas

There is no shortage of hypotheses: from Piketty’s participatory socialism – with a capital endowment for young adults financed by progressive wealth taxation – to forms of web tax or Ia tax intended to finance a basic income. Up to the prospect, far from far-fetched, of a European minimum income, which could finally give substance to the idea of ​​the Union as a community and not just as a market.

The ruling of the Court of Rome tells us, ultimately, something simple and at the same time disturbing: this revolution has already begun and cannot be governed with the old mental, social and political categories. To this end, a radical paradigm shift is needed, because it concerns all of us. Even the person writing these lines, who – who knows – may already have been, at least in part, replaced in the processing of this article by an artificial intelligence tool.

Rome, designer fired and replaced by AI: for the judges it is legitimate – by Arianna Cerone