This is how artificial intelligence will pay for our future pensions

After decades of alchemy, promises and compromises on the rules for leaving work earlier and with more generous checks, a hypothesis arrives that undermines all certainties: at the time of retirement it will no longer be the individual worker who takes leave of the activity, but he and his digital twin, his personal vertical artificial intelligence, that is, the 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-related. We are not faced with the usual fanciful prophecy of some futurology guru. Valeria Vittimberga , general director of INPS, outlines this scenario with the strength of someone who manages the country's main pension fund. In the episode of Codice, broadcast on Rai1 on July 4th in the late evening, she reflects on 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 not measured only in years of employment but in the intangible heritage he creates: data, relationships, proactive inputs that continue to generate value even after he leaves the company. What counts essentially is the added value that each individual employee brings».

The trajectory is marked: contributions and seniority will be replaced by added value. If this prospect were to take shape, it would change the very definition of work and break down that rigid barrier that separates productive activity from retirement. It is proof that the public system has learned to capture the new trajectories of the economy: no longer just hours worked and contributions paid but algorithms, neural networks and artificial intelligence that already today - confirms Dr. Vittimberga - help INPS to map transformations and to direct controls and inspections in a predictive way.

Our work from now on will increasingly also be that of training artificial intelligences to perform tasks. As is already happening in other technologically advanced countries in Asia and the Middle East, when we are hired we will also be evaluated for how we have trained our personal AI to work with us and in our place, and it will be the AI, as our main valuable asset, that will remain in the company. It is the computational capital that would continue to yield results even after the employee leaves the company. A true revolution in social terms before technological, the one hypothesized by the INPS management, which would imply a revisiting of the very idea of ​​work and also of that now completely outdated rigid frontier that separates the recognized phase of a worker's productive activity from that of leaving the active sphere. At this point, the very concept of pension as we understand it now will retire.

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