An algorithm is not enough. Whether it’s a real object or a virtual reality, the problems grow on themselves. An electric car is much more than the latest generation batteries and the autonomous driving system: the rare earths for its hi-tech heart come from dangerously endangered territories, where creeping wars are endemic and pollution is rampant, while software for its management they are not so sophisticated as to foresee all the options in the traffic of a metropolis. And an app is also a risk-ridden opportunity: it can push millions of people into negative behavior or manipulate the lives of millions of others. It happens that the logic of a neural network and the shared ethics of Western societies come into conflict. More often than you imagine.
The algorithm, in fact, is not enough. A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston was one of the first to notice it in the 90s, with the strength of a visionary: his name is Kenneth Keniston and in one of his travels he had landed at the Polytechnic of Turin, where his lesson remained memorable. “The crisis of the engineers’ algorithm” was the title and in that dry formula was the message that thirty years later has become widespread awareness. What engineers, projects, inventions and achievements do are much more than the calculations that gave them life. And much more than the sum of the steps with which an idea is transformed into a machine or an infrastructure or a creature of a metaverse in formation. Technology is inseparable from the complexity that characterizes our individual and collective lives. Each manifestation generates multiple effects. Often unpredictable or difficult to conceive. White swans and black swans, those destructive events, because they are beyond our reach, which the epistemologist Nassim Taleb described in an essay that has now become a classic.
How to run for cover? Many universities are trying. Now the Polytechnic of Turin has been added to this selected group of universities, where the seeds sown by Keniston continue to germinate. “This academic year marks the beginning of a new curricular course – explains Juan Carlos de Martin, professor of computer engineering, co-director of the Nexa Center on Internet and Society and vice-rector for culture and communication of the Polytechnic of Turin. -. The name is Great Challenges ». Evocative enough to convince boys and girls to face the adventure: it is, as they say in university jargon, a “compulsory training” for all students. There are six Challenges, modeled on the emergencies of the 21st century, namely: Climate, Mobility, Digital, Health, Energy, Technologies and Humanity. Each articulated in four directions, creating a network of 24 courses, with 150 students each and – another novelty – managed by pairs of professors: a professor from the engineering world and a professor, on the other hand, who was trained in the universe of human sciences and social. It started on Tuesday 1 March: a further couple introduced this hybridization of knowledge: the economist and political scientist Jeffrey Sachs and the philosopher of science and scholar of evolution Telmo Pievani, used to telling how the research tree can turn out to be lush and unexpected.
«The classic approach, made up of mathematics and models, no longer works: training engineers means training aware citizens at the same time – observes de Martin -. Already today they work in multidisciplinary teams, in which designers and jurists, philosophers and economists interact. In fact, every project goes to society. It has an impact that you have to understand and then know how to manage ». And this is also one of the reasons why technicians and specialists continually come across a key term, which goes beyond the fashions of the moment: ethics. «When it comes to technology, we cannot fail to speak of the ethics of technology. And this awareness is now common to all ». It is no coincidence that among the professors involved in the Polytechnic of Turin there is also Vera Tripodi, a moral philosopher, a scholar of the intertwining between hi-tech and our continuous individual and collective dilemmas. With three other teachers, Isabella Consolati, political scientist and philosopher, Roberto Lalli, historian of science and technology, and Alvise Mazzotti, sociologist of technology, she was recruited on the occasion of the birth of Theseus: this is the new Center for studies on technology, society and humanity and has just seen the light. The four professors – underlines de Martin enthusiastically – “are the first four children, exceptionally promising, of an organization destined to expand and involve all our teachers”.
The Polytechnic follows the models that are tested in other leading universities, from the Technische Universitat of Munich to the Ecole des mines in Paris, from the Ecole Polytechnique of Lausanne to the Technical University of Delft. Europe has decided to run, while in the United States they have long ago embarked on an epochal challenge. The super-technology of Silicon Valley wants to reshape the future, from how we age to colonization of the Solar System, questioning the very concept of what human beings are and pushing the boundaries of “singularity” when intelligent machines will be able to rival us, cognitively imperfect creatures. “Unpredictability seems to be the only certainty and a possible answer – explained the rector Guido Saracco – is to train more and more creative engineers”.