Scienza e decisione pubblica: le garanzie dello Stato di diritto e la sfida dell’intelligenza artificiale

The essay addresses the relationship between public decisionmaking and scientific knowledge. Although scientific evidence constitutes an indispensable foundation of rationality and effectiveness for legislative, administrative, and judicial choices alike, it remains inevitably provisional, fallible, sectoral, and shaped by dominant paradigms. This conditions decision-making processes, encouraging precautionary approaches and procedures capable of making the reasons for public choices explicit and verifiable, thereby enabling their democratic accountability. In this perspective, the paper examines the institutional and normative mechanisms through which modern legal systems mediate the relationship between scientific expertise and public power, focusing on administrative procedures, judicial review, and the value of the separation between epistemic input and decision-making authority. These safeguards deserve to be preserved, especially today, as the advent of artificial intelligence raises the risk of substantial erosions of the guarantees that legal systems have so far provided to citizens and constitutional values, emphasising the essential need to safeguard an authentically human decision-making capacity