Only by historical analysis can we discover what makes up man since it is only in the course of history that he is formed.

Ulrich Beck represented cosmopolitan society as overcoming the nation-states as the container of the respective civil societies. In order to understand these profound changes, sociology itself appears inadequate, populated as it is by definitions that Beck considers as zombie concepts: “the conceptual apparatus of the sociology of modernity appears in crisis because it is inadequate to describe the situation of societies in which the borders of the nation-states that contained them have dissolved in an extremely rapid period. Rather than a definitive departure from that sociology, Beck’s invitation to the international community of sociologists is to recalibrate their concepts in a cosmopolitan perspective» (Porcelli 2005: 8). The social contract, which was at the base of the construction of what Anderson defined the imagined communities, sanctioned the renunciation by the populations of part of their prerogatives of freedom favouring the security guaranteed by the sovereign power. The present global health emergency seems to have proposed the same social pact: more security and less freedom, especially people segregated within the resurging nation-states by new borders and walls. The remaining residue of globalisation is its economic-financial globalism. Ethnographic analysis along border areas reveals a consolidated cross-border identity experienced in people’s everyday lives as a tactic of resistance against the erection of new self-containment barriers. This contribution aims to analyse the salient aspects of this phenomenon in the city of Gorizia, which for decades has constituted an integrated metropolitan area of the Italian and Slovenian zones, defining a specific cross-border identity shared by both Italian and Slovenian citizens. This identity has not given way in front of the walls that have been restored in recent months in order to contain the contagion and therefore could represent what de Certeau defined as a tactic of resistance that in the present case bears witness to the invention of an increasingly cosmopolitan daily life. In this respect, the main points of the project book submitted for the candidacy of Gorizia-Nova Gorica as European Capital of Culture 2025 will be examined. The title of the bid book itself specifies the cosmopolitan identity of the area under analysis: “Go borderless”.

This paper broadly surveys the present adoption of Artificial Intelligence in mainstream enterprise applications and envisions a future in which businesses and organizations of all sizes will derive value from AI-enhanced applications.In this context, Artificial Intelligence refers to a broad spectrum of technologies which have the potential to move the enterprise applications paradigm from one of replacing human effort with machine effort where the machine can simply outperform humans in terms of reliability and operations per unit time, to enhancing human activity by adding artificially intelligent machine activity to model and interact with real world complexity in ways that exceed human ability to synthesize and derive insights from the data tsunami under which many organizations are awash.The present and potential contributions of various primary forms of Artificial Intelligence are considered with respect to applications which drive marketplace innovation, applications which enable marketplace differentiation, and applications which simply enable and improve operations and recordkeeping.A framework is proposed for use by business and technology leaders and enterprise architects for maintaining alignment with organizational goals and values, identifying consumable Artificial Intelligence technologies, and create a value-oriented roadmap for prioritization and implementation.

Consideration of the intersection of human and technology issues and the influences of each of these is the key issue discussed in this paper. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have provided many situations to contemplate with the numerous impacts on society both positive and negative. These new and innovative functions will bring with them additional questions and many overt and covert ethical considerations. Along with the rise of big data, many believe that we have exceeded our worst fears about giving over control and manipulation of our private information. This leads us to the question whether technologies are empowering us or subjecting us. Technologies are becoming more and more capable of performing tasks previously assigned to humans. In many cases, this is a good thing to eliminate routine human tasks. Even in the preliminary phases of understanding AI, there is an infinite amount of questions and concerns. With these concerns, it is imperative that we consider all questions with equal attention and security. Debates will certainly continue over fundamental issues such as the changes to our employment and daily life.