October 4, 2025
Artificial Intelligence and the Metaverse
What Paradigm Shift?
Humanity today finds itself facing a rift in history, a moment of suspension in which Time itself takes on new forms. No longer just the Kronos of the measurable flow of days, nor the Kairos of the decisive moment, but also the Aion – that absolute and undivided duration that seems to transcend the temporal dimension we have always known.
When Artificial Intelligence meets the Metaverse, we are not witnessing a simple technological evolution: we are facing a paradigm shift that redefines the very coordinates of our existence. Value no longer lies in the enduring processes that have structured work, capital, and society for two hundred years, but in the instantaneous and unpredictable connections that weave a new reality.
In this transition, humans are confronted with emerging hybrid entities – combinations of human and machine that escape the legal categories forged by the Romans to this day. The classical Dominus, lord of the territory and the people, gives way to a meta-domain – a space of relationships that is simultaneously beyond and above traditional domains, connecting and sometimes transcending them.
The law, which has always been the guardian of social order, is struggling. It operates in reverse time, always intervening after the event, filling gaps that have already opened up while technology proceeds with its own generative grammar.
Authenticity is no longer a material fact—the unique and certifiable original—but becomes a relationship, recognized and validated by networks of subjects through systems of traceability and shared responsibility.
Finance has overturned the ancient balance: no longer subject to state power but allied with large technology companies, it generates a neo-feudalism in which work—once the heart of the Anthropocene—becomes a marginal element in the face of capital that moves instantly everywhere and into everyone, risking the creation of a fiscal and regulatory no-man’s-land.
Yet, in this apparent dissolution of certainties, the possibility of a new technological humanism emerges. Meta-domains can become cognitive representations of value ecosystems—no longer simple eco-systems to be protected with guardrails, but axi-systems based on values that recognize life itself as a generator of prosperity. Agentic Artificial Intelligence can take on the role of mediator between complex systems, helping—not replacing—states to navigate a reality where knowledge, economics, and governance are intertwined in ways that challenge any traditional disciplinary separation.
Technology—understood in the Heideggerian sense as the cognitive weaving of reality—reminds us that every node in the network produces itself and its environment in an inextricable way. It is therefore not a question of chasing technology with regulations that are always too late, but of integrating different types of knowledge into the shared creation of a new grammar of the human.
The seminar on October 4, 2025 explored this transition with a transdisciplinary approach, intertwining philosophy and technology, law and economics, ethics and the future. A dialogue that goes beyond technological fads, seeking guidance in an era that asks us to rethink what it means to be human when machines become co-creators, when territory becomes ubiquity, when the instant becomes eternity.
Education—a fundamental goal of humans in their relationship with others and with themselves—takes on an even more radical dimension today: not only the mind turned to the example of the past and the hand reaching toward the future, but the ability to consciously inhabit this paradigmatic suspension, this moment in which the old world is not yet dead and the new is not yet born.
In keeping with the tradition of the 3H project – Homo, Humus, Humanitas – we have sought to question technologies in the light of fundamental human values, knowing that the real challenge is not to dominate transformation but to understand before acting, to weave together – like the ancient weavers of reality.
