About

Alessandro Pavoni (b. 1975) writes on language, thought, and the dialogic turn in artificial intelligence. He formulated the concept of computational maieutics and is the author of Prompt Ergo Sum (2025).

His training is historical. A degree in Modern History from Università degli Studi Roma Tre shaped a way of reading the present through the long arc of its precedents — a method that runs through much of what he writes today.

For roughly two decades he worked in digital industries as a builder, an operator, and a founder. Q Division, Resellify, Spektor and Ways are some of the names that punctuate that period. They are mentioned here because they happened, and because they are part of how a humanistic formation learned to engage with systems, platforms, organisations, markets, and new forms of technological language.

They are not, however, the centre of the work.

The centre is the question that emerged in the last years of that path and continues today: what changes, philosophically, when language is generated by a system that does not mean? And what changes for us, the speakers, when we discover that what comes back is legible — not only as the machine's answer, but as the form of our own attention?

Computational maieutics

The term names a practice and, behind it, a thesis. The practice is reading what a language model returns as a reflection of the question that produced it. The thesis is that the dialogue — not the prompt and not the isolated answer — is the proper unit of analysis.

The mirror has a craft. To use it well is to learn to ask in such a way that the reflection is worth attending to.

Prompt Ergo Sum is the book-length elaboration of this position. Prompt Thinking is the continuing notebook, published on Substack, where the argument is tested, complicated, and when necessary rewritten.

Pleasure as attention

Alongside this work, SOSTA gathers the more sensory register of his authorial practice: pleasure as a form of attention, taste as language, hospitality as ritual, and material culture as a way of reading the present. It is a register formed over years, through work, advisory practice, relationships, and close encounters with the worlds of food, beverage, and hospitality. Not a second centre, but a concrete extension of the same gaze.

Now

He lives between Rome and Dublin. He continues to develop the framework of computational maieutics through writing, dialogue, and editorial work.