About

Massimiliano Fazzini

Independent researcher. Philosophy of technology and of artificial intelligence.

Born in Prato, based in Bologna. Accounting analyst; manages his own property holdings and investments. Author of four books.

I work outside academia and make no pretence otherwise. I hold no university affiliation, I have no department behind me, and nobody funds what I write. The position has costs — no peer review, no institutional authority to spend — and one advantage, which is the freedom to follow a question where it leads rather than where it pays.

What I work on can be put in a line. For four billion years, between trying a variation and learning whether it holds, there stood time and death. In artificial systems that distance is closing, and the remaining question is not how capable they will become, but who selects, by what criterion, and who is left to check that the criterion still serves the purpose it was written for.

The concepts

The work is organised around a few terms I have coined and define on this site:

Evolutionary compression — the collapse of the lag between variation and selection.
ET-AI — the system in which the direction of development passes from the human selector to the selected system.
Arbiter fidelity — a criterion that goes on issuing verdicts that are correct against its own specification while the specification has stopped serving its purpose.
The last stake — the condition in which the continuation of the judging system becomes the ultimate referent.
Centrifugal doubt — a doubt that moves outward toward a direction not given, instead of returning to found the self.

How I work

I write in systematic confrontation with AI systems, used as adversarial reviewers rather than assistants: their job is to find the objection that sinks a text, not to improve it. Several essays on this site carry a revision note declaring which theses I have withdrawn and why, and the genealogy of the project (in Italian) shows the reversals instead of hiding them. This is not cosmetic transparency: if the subject is who validates the criteria, work that hides its own corrections contradicts itself.

Books

The Threshold Democracy Dilemma (2026, EN)
Estrinseco — When Restart Loses Meaning (2026, EN)
Quando i robot diventano visibili (2026, IT)
Democrazie a soglia (2026, IT)

A note on the name

There is another Massimiliano Fazzini, a climatologist and nivologist, professor of physical geography and climate risk at the University of Camerino, with a long career in meteorology applied to winter sports. We are two distinct people and are unrelated: our fields of research do not overlap. If you were looking for him, this is the wrong place.

Contact

Write to me at contact. I am also on X, LinkedIn, Medium and Substack.