“AI does not lead to any fanciful realization of science fiction scenarios.”
Philosopher Luciano Floridi made this point while discussing the opportunities and risks of artificial intelligence in society. His argument shifts attention away from machines suddenly awakening as humanlike agents. Contemporary AI is powerful without possessing the inner life, general understanding, or independent purposes imagined in much science fiction. It can classify, predict, rank, recommend, and generate at enormous scale. Those capabilities matter because institutions use them to shape information, opportunity, labor, and public services. The absence of a fictional machine mind does not make their consequences less real.
Science-fiction framing can distort priorities in two directions. Dramatic stories about superintelligence may pull attention toward distant possibilities while discrimination, surveillance, misinformation, labor displacement, and environmental cost receive less scrutiny. The same stories can also encourage companies to describe ordinary software as an autonomous being, making commercial systems appear inevitable or beyond human control. In reality, people choose the data, objectives, infrastructure, business model, access rules, and conditions of deployment. Responsibility should follow those choices rather than dissolve into the metaphor of an independent machine.
Floridi’s work often treats the digital environment as part of the world in which people live and act. AI therefore poses questions of design and stewardship. Who can access information? Whose behavior becomes visible to whom? Which values are translated into a score? How are errors corrected? What resources are consumed? These are not secondary matters to address after the technology matures. They are features of the system itself. Ethics belongs within procurement, engineering, evaluation, and governance because social arrangements are being built along with the code.
A realistic view supports proportionate action. Some applications may need transparency and routine monitoring; others, such as systems affecting liberty, health, employment, or essential services, require strong evidence and enforceable limits. Certain uses may be unacceptable even when technically possible. Public debate improves when it distinguishes capability from marketing and present evidence from speculation. Floridi’s sentence clears away an imaginary future so society can see its actual agency. AI is not destiny arriving from elsewhere. It is technology being developed and installed through decisions that can still be challenged and revised. Floridi’s refusal of fantasy is not a reason for complacency. It is a demand for seriousness: judge AI by the institutions, incentives, resources, and consequences that exist now, and build governance capable of changing them. Present choices deserve more attention than imaginary inevitabilities because those choices are where public agency can still operate.
Current AI can be socially powerful without possessing consciousness, human understanding, or independent purposes.
Treating software as an autonomous character can hide the people and institutions making consequential choices.
Discrimination, surveillance, misinformation, labor effects, and resource use already arise from deployed systems.
Distant speculation should not displace evidence, remedies, and accountability for consequences occurring now.
Data, objectives, infrastructure, business models, and deployment rules are selected by organizations and people.
Governance can require proof, limit uses, create appeal rights, and reject applications whose costs outweigh their value.
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