Why Does Umberto Eco Still Matter in the Age of ChatGPT?

What if the fiercest critics of artificial intelligence and its loudest cheerleaders were two sides of the same coin, minted back in 1964?

Welcome, dear reader. I’m Gerd Dani, and I’m writing to you from my desk at FreeAstroScience.com, where we try to make hard ideas soft enough to chew. Today we’re going to talk about AI, but not in the way you might expect. No benchmarks, no doom clocks, no techno-utopias. Instead, we’ll borrow the eyes of a semiotician who died a decade ago and see if those eyes still work. Stay with us to the end, because the question we’ll land on isn’t whether machines can think, but whether we still can.

📑 Table of Contents

1. How did a failed job application shape how we talk about technology?
2. Why does every new invention split us into two camps?
3. What makes AI different from every earlier panic?
4. Is language the real battleground?
5. How does Eco help us escape the trap?
6. What does the third way actually look like?
7. Where do we go from here?

How did a failed job application shape how we talk about technology?

Here’s a story I love. In 1964, publisher Valentino Bompiani slapped the title Apocalittici e integrati on a hastily gathered collection of essays by a young Umberto Eco . Eco needed the book to qualify for an academic chair with an odd name: Pedagogy and Psychology of Mass Communications.

The competition for that chair? Nobody showed up. It went empty.

Yet two things were born from that stillborn application. First, a phrase that would stalk every technological debate for the next sixty years. Second, Eco’s lifelong love affair with semiotics, which he would finally teach from a proper chair in 1975.

So every time you hear someone called “apocalyptic” about AI, or “integrated” with it, remember: these words were forged to sneak comic books and television into university lecture halls. They started as tools of inclusion, not of war.

Why does every new invention split us into two camps?

Open any news feed. You’ll find the same old cast, just wearing new costumes.

From the personal computer to the cellphone, from the ebook to the internet, people tend to cluster around two poles . On one side, those who stare sadly at a world that will never come back. On the other, those who can’t look away from the glittering promise of what’s next.

Eco himself got asked this, constantly, about everything, as if technology were a football team you had to cheer for . Sound familiar?

The two tribes at a glance

Both camps, Eco argued, are comfortable . And comfort is the enemy of thought.

What makes AI different from every earlier panic?

Let me be honest. When I first read Eco’s 1964 essays as a physics student, I thought the framework was brilliant but a bit dusty. Television, cinema, radio, these were channels. They carried culture to the masses, softened it, packaged it . Fine.

Then ChatGPT arrived. And the dichotomy came back with a vengeance.

Why? Because AI isn’t one more innovation in a long line. It’s what I’d call a meta-innovation. It reshapes everything it touches: your news, your school, the way you speak, your languages, what you think is true and what you know isn’t, music, art, books, even your heating system . The works.

You could call it a Pandora’s box. But the moment you say that, someone labels you an apocalyptic . See how the trap works?

Is language the real battleground?

Here’s the thing that keeps me up at night.

For centuries we measured our own intelligence by our command of language. Alan Turing built his famous test on exactly this idea: if you can’t tell, in an ordinary chat, whether you’re talking to a person or a machine, the machine wins .

ChatGPT and its cousins pass that bar more often every month. They talk to us without sounding like broken records. They convince us . And from words alone, they now spin images, videos, songs, and very soon the movements of robotic bodies we already see on the horizon .

So we’re stuck with the big question: do these programs actually understand what they’re doing?

A small thought experiment

Imagine a parrot that has memorized every conversation ever recorded. It replies perfectly. Does it know what it’s saying? Now imagine a newborn child. She doesn’t yet know what she’s saying either. Where, exactly, is the line?

The honest answer is we don’t know. What we do know is that these systems act, and they act every day more widely, changing the social and cultural air we breathe .

How does Eco help us escape the trap?

This is the part I find most beautiful.

Eco noticed something sneaky about the apocalyptics. Their refined, elitist critiques of mass culture were themselves the most polished product of that same mass culture . Their position, he wrote, is a consoling one. It sketches a little club of “supermen,” meaning themselves, who rise above the herd .

Anyone who consumes mass culture and then criticizes it gets to feel elevated. But that elevation is itself mass-produced. A mass of supermen, each sure of being the exception.

Eco put it bluntly in his essay on Superman: if Superman never parks in a no-parking zone, he’ll never start a revolution either . His heroism keeps the world exactly as it is.

Now flip this to AI. The apocalyptic who defends the superiority of the human species ends up, paradoxically, endorsing the integrated’s blind faith in the new . Whether the future looks like Terminator or a harmless well-trained parrot, neither camp questions the deeper mechanisms shaping our shared life with people, plants, animals, objects, and machines .

HAL 9000 simply takes the place of the house cat. The family picture stays the same .

What does the third way actually look like?

Here’s where semiotics rides in, not to save us, but to sharpen our vision.

Semiotics takes cultural products seriously, no matter their pedigree . That’s why, thanks to Eco, it became possible to discuss comic books in the same lecture hall that had only ever discussed Dante . He wasn’t saying The Divine Comedy equals Superman. He was saying both are objects of human meaning, and both deserve analysis.

Apply this to AI and something clicks into place.

• The integrated doesn’t analyze AI because they’re happy with it.
• The apocalyptic doesn’t analyze it because they think it’s beneath them .
• The analyst looks at the texts AI produces and the texts we produce about AI.

The analyst’s toolkit

Technology shapes society, yes. But society, in return, draws the lines along which technology can grow . A commercial, an image, even a chat dialogue becomes a clue to dig into, a doorway to the culture that produced it .

A tiny formula for thinking clearly

Meaning of AI = f ( what it does, how we talk about it, what we imagine it to be )

The last two variables are not background noise. They are the subject.

Where do we go from here?

Eco’s final wink, I think, is this. Turing bet on language as the mark of the human. Eco bet on laughter . The ability to laugh and to make others laugh might be the last outpost of our species. The day a machine cracks a joke that genuinely surprises us, we’ll have a new problem. Until then, we have time to think.

This article was written specifically for you by FreeAstroScience.com, where we explain hard science and harder ideas in plain language because we believe one thing above all: never switch off your mind. The sleep of reason breeds monsters. Goya knew it. Eco knew it. We keep repeating it because every generation forgets.

AI will keep changing. The apocalyptic will keep wringing hands. The integrated will keep posting benchmarks. You, dear reader, can do something harder and more interesting. You can stay awake, read the signs, and ask the questions neither camp wants to ask.

An intelligence is an intelligence. Ours still has the edge, but only if we use it.

Come back soon to FreeAstroScience.com. We’ll keep your mind company. Bring coffee, bring doubts, bring better questions.