ABSTRACT
The chapter outlines how aesthetic experiences in the early education of the new generations contribute to cultivating the distinctly human qualities of sensitivity, reflection and critical judgement necessary to orient new AI technologies (AItech) critically, creatively and ethically so as to ensure they continue to operate in the service of human beings’ flourishing. In particular, the chapter begins by tracing the underlying character that grants aesthetic experiences such intense educational potential to then lay out the reasons why aesthetic experience represents a privileged educational space for activating and exercising a particular critical-creative and deliberative capacity: the capacity for reflective judgement. This line of argumentation will be positioned in an Arendtian – and more broadly Kantian – perspective as reinterpreted on a philosophical-aesthetic level by Pietro Montani and a philosophical-political level by Paul Ricœur. By taking Montani and his references to Dewey’s Art as Experience as a starting point, the chapter will then address the aesthetic as an educational experience specifically in its techno-aesthetic form and problematise the educational potential of such experiences. We can enhance and further this potential by formulating a paradigm that provides techno-aesthetic experiences with the structure they need to become spaces for forging a critical and creative relationship with new AItech and, more generally, with the questions that bring human beings to engage in deep and original understanding and critical and responsible management of these technologies.
