IL PALAZZO DI CRISTALLO. Potere e libertà nell'era dell'Intelligenza Artificiale

This thesis examines the ways in which the growing use of digital technologies and Artificial Intelligence is transforming the legal and political categories of power and freedom. Its central premise is that AI systems cannot be understood simply as technologies requiring legal regulation, they also contribute to shaping the conditions within which power is exercised, social order is constituted and freedom can be exercised. The thesis develops this argument through the image of the “Crystal Palace”, which Fëdor Dostoevskij invoked critically as a symbol of industrial modernity and of its faith in technical rationality. Reconsidered in the context of contemporary technological change, the Crystal Palace becomes a conceptual figure for a social order increasingly organised around the ambition to make reality transparent, calculable and governable through data. Power, within such an order, no longer operates just through explicit commands or identifiable acts of coercion, is also exercised in diffuse and constitutive ways, through the design of environments, the organisation of possibilities and the prior structuring of the conditions under which action takes place. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework, the thesis explores the relationship between law and power, the progressive datafication of reality and the emergence of algorithmic forms of normativity. According to that, Artificial Intelligence is examined not only in terms of what these technologies make possible, but also in terms of their capacity to alter the conceptual categories through which legal and political thought consider the subject, the decision-making process and responsibility. A central concern is that, as law is increasingly translated into processes of prediction, classification and automated decision-making, it may progressively come to coincide with its own technical implementation and it may risk losing the distance from the factual order upon which its normative character depends. Dostoevskij’s “underground man” provides a critical counterpoint to this process of rationalisation: on one hand, the figure points to the impossibility of reducing human existence entirely to calculation and, on the other, to the inadequacy of understanding freedom as mere individual arbitrariness. The problem is therefore not just recovering an absolute freedom unconstrained by rules or institutions; it is, rather, to determine the legal and political conditions under which it remains possible to resist an order capable of anticipating and shaping behaviors and choices. The thesis finally argues that, even when law is at risk of being absorbed into its own technical realisation, it preserves a function that cannot be reduced to the efficient organisation of social reality. That function consists in keeping open spaces for judgement, contestation, responsibility and collective action. Crossing the threshold of the Crystal Palace, in this sense, is neither to submit passively to its order nor to retreat into the sterile refusal of the underground. It is, rather, to occupy a critical position from which the possibility of a new “beginning” in the common world may still be preserved.