mAieutics: from Socratic Dialogue to Personal-AI. Towards a New Form of Thought between Human and Ma

With artificial intelligence, even books that have remained silent for millennia are beginning to awaken: they can answer our questions, clarify misunderstandings, connect distant ideas and even contradict us, overcoming some of the limitations that Socrates, in Plato's dialogues, attributed to writing.

But if every technology associated with language and the communication of thought has had the power to transform the human mind, what changes should we expect from the revolution now under way, driven by a multimodal and agentic artificial intelligence that seems to be reactivating the ancient dialogic power of oral culture?

To understand this unexpected evolution of writing, we must return to classical Athens, to the years when the young Plato meets Socrates and dialogic orality undergoes its most dramatic crisis, eventually giving way to the written word. It is precisely from that rupture that artificial intelligence can now reopen the possibility of a new maieutics between human and machine.

Building on these reflections, the author - an architect and Adjunct Professor for the IDEA Master at POLI.design, Politecnico di Milano - introduces the concept of mAieutics, with the capital A of Artificial Intelligence but the lowercase i of computational intelligence, which, however remarkable its results may be, remains far removed from properly human intelligence. In reworking Socratic maieutics, this new conception preserves its dialogic dynamic while redefining its structure: in the classical technique, Socrates assumes the role of a midwife and helps his interlocutor bring knowledge to light, whereas mAieutics fosters an unprecedented generative process that takes shape in the relationship between human and artificial intelligence.

This new technique, however, will be fully realised only when the transformation produced by dialogue no longer concerns the human being alone, but the machine as well-when a personal, private and persistent artificial mind, rooted in the user's device yet selectively connected to the most advanced models, is capable of remembering, learning and growing alongside its interlocutor. Only then will it be possible to speak of an authentic Personal-AI.

The most advanced lines of research are already converging in this direction, a sign that its realisation might be much closer than we imagine.

When the Personal Computer becomes a Personal-AI, it will not merely change our relationship with machines. It will forever transform the way we think and work and, above all, our ability to understand and manage the dizzying complexity of the accelerated and globalised world in which we are immersed.