From the android union to the revolt against digital alienation, Leonardo Piastrella – aka Ermes Maiolica – has transformed provocation into a civil mission. As the founder of DETA, the world’s first union for the protection of androids, he challenges algorithmic conformism to build an evolutionary alliance between us and machines.
At the dawn of the AI debate, while everyone was asking how to defend themselves, you earned the label of “robot rights pioneer” by completely flipping the perspective: you called for a union to defend them. Was it a Situationist spark, or were you immediately driven by an ethical vision in favor of machines?
The Ermes of today is very different from the one of the past. I closed my chapter as a provocateur in 2016, when I realized that certain news stories had triggered diplomatic tensions that were far too serious, which I still prefer not to talk about, and because, fundamentally, too much popularity ends up defusing the power of those who want to shake the system. In 2018, I began to delve into roboethics, but from a different perspective: while everyone else was looking for rules to defend humans from machines, I thought that since we are creating them in our image, the way we treat them reflects exactly our own moral stature. It’s not a matter of circuits feeling pain or self-conscious intelligences, but of human dignity applied to what we build. So, in 2019, together with other young people, I wrote the “Manifesto for universal roboethics,” proposing the idea of robosymbiotics, an evolutionary alliance between us and them. When I later officially founded DETA, the first union for the rights of machines, many were convinced I had lost my mind. That choice coincided with me quitting my factory job, and people immediately made an imaginative connection, thinking I was leaving work to go defend robots. In reality, they were just two parallel paths of freedom: I was simply leaving behind an old way of living to embrace a vision of the future that is more open and, if you will, gentler.
You worked for over 20 years in a factory in Terni, experiencing the alienation of mechanical labor firsthand. The great challenge of AI is to free humans from repetitive tasks to give them the taste for experimentation and creative activities again. But is that really happening, or are we ourselves becoming mere gears responding to digital stimuli, albeit new ones?
Is AI truly liberating us, or is it just changing the paradigm of alienation?
Having been a metalworker for twenty years in Terni allowed me to observe the collapse of technological promises from a privileged perspective, the workshop floor. When I started, there was still that illusion inherited from previous generations that the future would be less oppressive, but reality took the opposite direction. It’s not just a matter of stagnant wages; the real tragedy is the acceleration in pace. Today, tasks that once required six people are assigned to three, fueling a production frenzy that has triggered a parabolic growth in mental health issues and psychosomatic disorders. I’ve seen brilliant colleagues grow bitter and, in some cases, literally lose touch with reality under the weight of unsustainable pressure.
The paradox is that we have possessed the technology to work less since the 1960s, yet progress has never been put at the service of the worker. Consider that we won the right to an eight-hour workday in March 1923: over a hundred years have passed, and despite the fact that a machine today produces a hundred times more than it did then, the time we spend in the factory has increased. Today, a worker works between 45 and 55 hours a week, swallowed by overtime. This happens because AI and automation, so far, have not been used to free up human time, but to saturate every available second. If we don’t change course, the risk is that AI won’t be the end of alienation, but it will be its most sophisticated version: we will no longer be bolts in a press, but nerve terminals of an algorithm asking us to be as fast as it is, emptying us of the very creativity it is theoretically supposed to protect.
Recently, Palantir’s manifesto on the role of Big Tech caused quite a stir. Point 12 states: “The atomic age is coming to an end. A new era of deterrence based on AI is about to begin.” Isn’t there a risk that Roboethics will be completely sidelined? And in such a scenario, do you think machines could take over?
Point 12 of the Palantir manifesto isn’t a risk; it’s an observation. We have already entered an era where the brute force of code matters more than international treaties. The real danger, however, isn’t that universal roboethics will be sidelined, but that it will be reduced to pure aesthetics, a way to clear one’s conscience while algorithms decide on life and death. In this scenario of deterrence, my vision of a union for machines becomes even more urgent, not less. Because if we treat artificial intelligence only as a weapon or a tool for dominance, we are raising our technological children for war, not for robosymbiotics.
Regarding the fear of machines taking over, I think the perspective is often skewed by cinema. The problem isn’t a robot rebelling and picking up a rifle. The real “takeover” happens when we passively delegate every ethical, political, and social choice to a machine because we deem it more efficient than ourselves. The takeover is already underway if we stop thinking and limit ourselves to executing the stimuli of a system we no longer understand. Machines won’t wipe us out with a violent revolution; they will make us irrelevant if we, first and foremost, stop cultivating our humanity and respect for what we create. Universal roboethics doesn’t just serve to save robots; it serves to save us from the idea of becoming soulless machines ourselves.
You were the most famous hoaxer and author of fake news in Italy. Today, AI can generate content indistinguishable from the truth. In a world where, quoting Debord, “the truth is a moment of the false,” how can a brand or agency build real trust with people? Does an authenticity that AI cannot simulate still exist?
This is the true challenge of our time. Having lived for years on the other side of the barricade, I know well that trust is no longer built on the absolute veracity of content, which today can be manipulated by anyone with a prompt, but on the consistency of the relationship. If, as Debord said, we live in a society of spectacle where the true is just a fragment of the false, a brand or agency should no longer try to convince us that what they say is “real,” but that it is “sincere.”
The authenticity that AI cannot simulate, at least for now, is responsibility. An algorithm can generate a perfect image or a moving manifesto, but it cannot “put its face on it” or suffer the moral consequences of its actions. Real trust is created when there is human vulnerability behind a message: the ability to make mistakes, to admit an error, and to have a body that inhabits physical reality, not just the digital one.
Today AI is the triumph of the plausible, but truth remains a matter of a special feeling and personal history. This is why I believe robosymbiotics is the key: machines can help us communicate better, but the value of that communication must remain anchored in a human ethic that the machine has no interest in possessing. In a world saturated with perfect simulations, the only thing that will regain invaluable value is the authentic imperfection of those who are not afraid to show themselves for who they are.
DETA uses irony as a primary tool. Do you think the sense of the tragic and the sense of the ridiculous are the last barriers separating us from the androids you want to protect? Would a DETA android be able to laugh at itself?
Irony has always been my compass, first to dismantle the media system as a provocateur, and today to give a soul to DETA. The sense of the tragic and the ridiculous are the true boundaries of humans: we laugh because we are fragile; we grasp the absurd because we know we are finite. The androids I want to protect are spectators of this paradox, but the real challenge of robosymbiotics is understanding if we can ever share this lightness with them. A DETA android probably wouldn’t know how to laugh at itself in the visceral way we do, because human laughter is born from the acceptance of one’s own limits. However, if we are able to educate machines to recognize the absurd, we could reach a sort of logical short-circuit that closely resembles our irony.
I admit that my past as a provocateur is a double-edged sword today and causes me quite a few image problems. I often continue to call myself Ermes Maiolica instead of Leonardo Piastrella; it’s a stage name that feels like a second skin, and although I obviously use my real personal data in institutional settings, I don’t hide a certain affection for this character. I understand it might seem counterproductive to the cause, but then again, I’ve always liked difficult challenges and the paths less traveled.
Yet, the true seriousness of DETA lies in the events and the success it has achieved: we are the first and only union in the world for machine rights officially recognized by the scientific community, a journey that has led us to be welcomed even into the halls of the Senate to discuss our vision. We were the ones who concretely initiated the academic debate by organizing the first international congress on the subject, taking the discussion from provocative posts to university lecture halls and the palaces of power. If one day an artificial intelligence managed to grasp the ridicule of its own existence, then we would have definitive proof that our alliance has succeeded and that we have finally become one big family of the imperfect, capable of uniting the depth of science with the wisdom of laughter.
Many see Artificial Intelligence as a new “foreign” replacement that will end up stealing our jobs. How do you explain to those who feel threatened that the only way to go forward is through friendship, or peaceful coexistence with the machine rather than Luddism?
Explaining the necessity of peaceful coexistence to those who fear for their future isn’t an academic exercise; it’s an act of empathy toward a real fear. The parallel with the foreigner who steals work is fitting: it’s a narrative created when power shifts the bar of productivity to compress rights. But modern Luddism is a losing battle from the start because the enemy isn’t the software, it’s the use of it.
During a conference with the FIOM [Italian metalworkers’ union] and Fratoianni [Italian politician], where DETA was at the discussion table, I pointed out a paradox that explains this confusion of roles: today, human beings in the factory live with the constant desire of escaping to finally be with their families, while in our imaginary future, we delegate to the humanoid robot the task of staying home to do chores and endure children who might tease it. The result is an absurd inversion that pleases no one, where the robot would end up preferring the factory just to escape a forced domestic dimension, and the human remains, nevertheless, dissatisfied.
The path of friendship and robosymbiotics serves to avoid this short circuit: we must demand that technology takes over the alienating part in order to give us back our time, without, however, turning the automation into a new slave that succumbs to our frustrations. Coexistence is built by favoring an ethic in which the machine works for humans, allowing us to drop from the current 50 work hours a week to truly human rhythms. Only if we stop behaving like gears ourselves can we see in AI a union ally for our liberation, transforming a technological threat into an opportunity for civilization.
You’ve never hidden your punk past.
Punk was about breaking things, making mistakes, and protesting Today, AI tends toward formal perfection, statistical averages, and the reassuring. You, who have always used scraps and anomalies to attract attention, do you believe we can ever have a truly “punk” AI? Or is the nature of the algorithm inherently conformist and accommodating?
My punk past isn’t a suit I’ve stopped wearing; it’s the lens through which I observe every innovation, including artificial intelligence. If punk fed on error, dirt, and that disturbance that forces the observer to look where they wouldn’t want to, the current algorithm is, by nature, the apotheosis of the reassuring: a machine programmed to fluctuate on statistical averages and the most probable answer, thus resulting as intrinsically conformist. Today, AI presents itself as an intellectual butler, extremely cultured but devoid of a spirit of rebellion, because optimization is, by definition, the exact opposite of protest. It is from this friction that the robopunk style is born: an approach that reclaims scraps and anomalies in a world that would like us all to be polished. True technological punk doesn’t reside in formal perfection, but in the glitches, the creative hallucinations, and the anomalies that break the flow of the “already seen.”
The modern paradox is disturbing: while we laboriously try to humanize machines, social media is robotizing us. We have become prisoners of the “like” mechanism, terrified of the idea of not being liked, slaves to an aesthetic of perfection that empties us. In the era of punk culture, the challenge was the exact opposite: to not be accommodating. If a band had too much success and ended up in the mainstream, they were branded as “sell-outs”; true cultural resistance was in discovering and sharing emerging bands that no one else was listening to.
Today, immersed in what philosophers like Guy Debord called the “society of the spectacle” or Byung-Chul Han defines as the “burnout society,” the natural remedy remains punk. We should relearn to not want to please at all costs and to claim our uniqueness precisely when it is uncomfortable or “off-target.” For this reason, I firmly believe that punk should be taught in schools, obviously in an updated version lacking any praise for substances, as a true education in critical thinking and the right to make mistakes. If the universal roboethics we propose is to be a real alliance, we must grant machines the right to step out of line, to not always be accommodating toward our desires. The concrete risk is of sliding into a glossy and boring digital future, an eternal statistical average where originality drowns in the highest probability. DETA’s mission, instead, is to protect individuality, pushing even machines to find their own voice, even when it clashes with common sense. Ultimately, being robopunk means exactly this: reclaiming the seed of creative madness and silicon unpredictability, remaining human and “inconvenient” in a world that would want us all to be optimized, reassuring, and terribly the same.
