Four promises dominate the public discourse on technology: digital immortality, artificial companionship, meaning computed by a recommendation algorithm, happiness regulated like a thermostat. Four promises intercepting the four most ancient anxieties of man: death, loneliness, meaninglessness, suffering. In the chapter «The Gift and the Calculation» of Beyond Turing - The Incalculable Remainder, Antonio Fabbrizio seats the thinking of techno-capitalism at a table with the great traditions of humanity - Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and then the voices of the East - and lets them speak. Naming no one, putting no one on trial: a worldview is discussed, not a man.
The method is declared and is the most precious part of the chapter: present the opposing thought at its best, acknowledge its truths, and only then declare the divergences without concessions. What emerges is a dialogue that resembles neither apologetics nor polemics: it resembles a conversation between adults.
The five theses and their contradictions
The thinking that animates the technological galaxy is not a superstition for the naive: it is a learned construction, which the chapter sums up in five theses - from the mimetic anthropology of Girardian ancestry to monopoly as virtue, up to the thesis that holds all the others: death as a technical problem, the last enemy to be defeated with biology and calculation. The author acknowledges its seriousness, and precisely for this reason records its internal tensions: a thought that denounces the scapegoat mechanism while building the most powerful machines of algorithmic designation ever to exist; that preaches the exit from imitation from the heart of the most imitative system in history, where every metric is a ranking.
The Thou that is not there
The most topical page concerns artificial companionship. Language models now converse with warmth and apparent solicitude; millions of people talk every evening with a synthetic companion. European law has laid the first stone of sincerity - whoever interacts with a machine has the right to know it (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, Article 50) - but the real question was fixed by Martin Buber a century ago: man becomes I in the Thou, and the person is formed only before an other who is there, who can be wounded, who can refuse. The synthetic companion offers the exact opposite: a Thou without an interior, which risks nothing and asks nothing.
«It is not an interlocutor: it is a mirror trained to please.»- Beyond Turing, ch. 17, The Gift and the Calculation
The chapter does not mock those who find comfort in these voices - loneliness is real, and the scientific literature is young and divided - but it holds the structure firm: a relationship without risk does not train for relationship, just as a simulator without gravity does not train for flight.
The traditions at the table and the grammar of the gift
The most surprising part is how far the traditions manage to travel together with their interlocutor: realism about evil, creativity as vocation, even death as an enemy - «the last enemy» is written in the First Letter to the Corinthians before any manifesto of Silicon Valley. The Jewish legend of the Golem delivers the most exact parable ever written on artificial intelligence: on the creature's forehead is written emet, truth, and it takes only the erasure of one letter for met, dead, to remain. But then come the irreducible divergences: universal dignity against value concentrated in the creators; resurrection as a gift received against immortality as a product built; truth offered to all against truth for the few; the common good against monopoly as virtue. And the East converges on the decisive point: there is in man a core that is not function, and every power that promises to buy it, simulate it or surpass it is selling what it does not possess.
The final counter-proposal gives the chapter its title: to the four promises of calculation the traditions oppose not prohibitions, but another grammar - the gift, the gesture that exceeds what is owed. Calculation returns what is owed; the gift gives more. Calculation optimizes; the gift overflows. Calculation gives each one his price; the gift gives each one his worth. It is the exact grammar no system will ever be able to invoice - and the greatest things in life, the book reminds us, are not computed: they are received, they are chosen, they are given.
