Beyond the screen: the fracture between digital and physical space in the age of AI

This essay traces the transformation of software from an instrument of representation, confined within the screen, into an agent capable of acting on the physical world. It follows the passage from early personal computing through the Internet, mobility and sensing infrastructures to contemporary AI systems that make operational decisions with increasing autonomy, in dialogue with work on ubiquitous computing, software studies, surveillance capitalism and the philosophy of information. It argues that the boundary between digital and physical space has not simply faded but has changed nature, giving rise to a borderland in which human and machine actions intertwine, an onlife dimension. The notion of fracture is used here in a double sense: as a gap between two dimensions governed by different logics, and as the rupture of the division that for decades kept the screen and the world apart. Since this rupture may leave no way back, the essay concludes that the task is neither to restore the separation nor to accept passively an automated reality, but to understand and inhabit the fracture, deciding which purposes, limits and values should remain with human beings.