This is how artificial intelligence will pay our future pensions

After decades of alchemy, promises and compromises on the rules for leaving work earlier and with more generous paychecks, a hypothesis arrives that shatters all certainty: at retirement time it will no longer be the individual worker who will take leave of the workforce, but he and his digital twin, his personal vertical artificial intelligence, i.e. his computational capital.

A trail of invisible but traceable contributions that the individual leaves behind. A Copernican revolution that is not only technological: it is social, cultural, identity. We are not facing the usual fanciful prophecy of some futurology guru. Outlining this scenario, with the strength of someone who manages the country's main social security fund, is Valeria Vittimberga, director general of the Inps. In the episode of Codice, to be broadcast on Rai1 on 4 July in the late evening, she reasons about this concrete prospect, launching a message that sounds like a conceptual earthquake: "Digital realities run faster than our rules. Today, the value of a worker is measured not only in years of employment but in the intangible assets he or she creates: data, relationships, proactive inputs that continue to generate value even after he or she leaves the company. It is essentially the added value that each employee brings that counts'.

The trajectory is marked: contribution and seniority will be replaced by added value. If this prospect were to take shape, it would change the very definition of work and blow up the rigid barrier separating productive activity from retirement. It is a demonstration that the public system has learnt to pick up on the new trajectories of the economy: no longer just hours worked and contributions paid but algorithms, neural networks and artificial intelligence that already help the INPS to map transformations and to direct controls and inspections in a predictive manner, Dr Vittimberga confirms.

Our job from now on will also increasingly be to train AIs to perform tasks. As is already the case in other technologically advanced countries in Asia and the Middle East, when we are hired, we will also be evaluated on how well we have trained our personal AI to work with us and in our place, and it will be it, as our most valuable asset, that will remain in the company. It is the computational capital that will continue to pay off even after the employee leaves the company. A true revolution in social rather than technological terms, the one hypothesised by the Inps summit, which would imply a rethinking of the very idea of work and also of that now entirely outdated rigid frontier separating the recognised phase of a worker's productive activity from that of his exit from the active sphere. Retirement at this point will be the very concept of retirement as we understand it now.

An urgency made all the more pressing by the demographic skin change that Italy is experiencing. The empty cradles tell of a country that is ageing and prolonging its active life: we are second in the world for life expectancy, first for the vitality of the over-70s, who are increasingly returning to work, increasing the GDP by billions. In regions such as Lombardy and Veneto, according to demographer Giampiero Dalla Zuanna, 0.5 per cent of GDP comes from pensioners who continue to produce wealth.