Governing Innovation to Shape Its Ethical Outcome

Source: Il Sole 24 Ore – “The Ability to Govern Technological Innovation Defines Its Ethical Outcome”, Paolo Benanti, December 2025

The illusion of technological neutrality

In contemporary debates on the global economy, artificial intelligence is increasingly presented as a “natural” macroeconomic force, capable of generating growth, efficiency and stability almost by inertia. Paolo Benanti’s article challenges this narrative by recalling a fundamental principle: technology is never neutral—neither in its effects nor in the distribution of the value it produces.

Believing that innovation alone will automatically lead to collective improvement means removing politics, institutions and governance choices from the equation.

AI, productivity and the distribution of value

Benanti refers to economic analyses that foresee an extraordinary increase in productivity driven by AI, with potential effects on structural variables such as public debt and the sustainability of state budgets. Yet the key issue is not how much value is created, but where that value accumulates.

If the gains from cognitive automation are concentrated primarily in capital—within infrastructures, platforms and proprietary models—the outcome is not progress but a structural imbalance: growth without redistribution, efficiency without justice.

The asymmetry between capital and cognitive labour

The article identifies a specific risk: AI could accelerate an already ongoing dynamic in which labour income is progressively compressed while value shifts toward those who control computing systems, data and digital architectures. In this scenario, human labour does not disappear, but it loses economic and political centrality.

This is not an inevitable destiny, but the result of precise choices. Allowing innovation to follow market logic alone means accepting automation as a tool for power concentration.

Computation as the new sovereign infrastructure

One of the most significant points in Benanti’s analysis concerns the concept of “cognition” as a new infrastructure. If computing capacity becomes a primary productive factor, then AI is no longer just a technology—it becomes a structural component of economic sovereignty.

Ignoring this shift risks repeating familiar mistakes: privatising essential infrastructures and later socialising the costs of their consequences. Governing AI means recognising its systemic nature and acting accordingly at the fiscal, regulatory and institutional levels.

Ethics as an outcome, not an ornament

The core of Benanti’s argument is clear: the ethics of innovation does not arise from declarations of principle, but from the rules that shape its effects. AI itself is neither “good” nor “bad”; what matters is the architecture of power into which it is embedded.

The ethical outcome of innovation depends on our ability to govern it—to decide who benefits from its gains, who bears its costs, and which rights remain non-negotiable.

Why this matters for Algopolio

Algopolio was founded on precisely this awareness: technological innovation, if left without democratic governance, tends to reproduce and amplify existing inequalities. Defending digital rights today means intervening before asymmetries become irreversible, before computation replaces political decision-making, before efficiency is used as an alibi for exclusion.

Innovation is not neutral. And our capacity to govern it is what will determine—concretely—its ethical outcome.