Interview with Guido Saracco: automatic transcription, it may contain errors.

Alessandro Oppo: Welcome to another episode of Democracy Innovators podcast and our guest today is Guido Saracco. Thank you for your time. You're a professor and you are also rector of Polytechnic of Turin.

Guido Saracco: Yes, it's a pleasure to be here with you. Actually, I ended my mandate. In Italy we have a single mandate of six years where you can actually put into practice your ideas, your program, and then that's it. You have to quit and leave another rector in your place.

Alessandro Oppo: And you have written a book that is called "Technosophia" with Maurizio Ferraris. And I would like to ask you why, how it happened and if you'd like to tell us something about this book.

Guido Saracco: Yeah, well indeed everything starts from a part of my program as a rector that was meant to change the way we are educating engineers. At the Politecnico di Torino we are a technical university and we have graduation programs in the area of architecture and engineering.

Architects do build around persons and communities so they intrinsically have in their education pathway disciplines like sociology, economics, philosophy, psychology. But this was missing completely in the area of engineering. And nowadays, without having such knowledge, engineers cannot properly conceive a technology. Technology is always built for a specific goal and it is part of the creativity of engineers. I know that engineer and creator look like two conflicting things and engineers are depicted like a grey person that is with thick glasses and sometimes bald, more applied in science and mathematical or physical way, but he is a creator by definition because engineers are producing technologies and a technology has never been there before being conceived by a technologist to solve some problem or to catch some opportunity.

Nowadays with the fall of the previous big companies - here in Torino, where I am speaking from, is the city of the largest automobile factory of Italy. FIAT, Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino, that changed into Fiat Chrysler Automobile, then changed once more into Stellantis with this agreement with Peugeot that is now hosting what was FIAT before. This big company was dictating the products and driving the economy. And engineers were just asked to do the stuff, technical stuff. But the decision on a product was taken by someone in the company from the design area or from the economics area.

Nowadays, we are directly asking engineers and groups of interdisciplinary professionals like engineers and designers and economists and also philosophers to conceive a product together and engineers cannot avoid having some expertise in social and human sciences. Otherwise they are not in the first place understanding the problems they have to solve, that are more and more complex and depend on humans and on societies. And on the other side, cannot properly assess the consequences in society of the technologies they are conceiving, which need to be predicted. Otherwise, you are at the risk of having a product that is failing in the market, even if it may be a good solution from a technical viewpoint.

So with this in mind, at the Politecnico di Torino, we introduced philosophy, sociology, economics, law, political sciences, in the bucket of disciplines that can be picked up by engineers to strengthen them. And we also introduced modules, education modules, in which they cooperate with a scientist from hard science or a technologist and a human scientist, a philosopher, to face some problems, complex problems, we call them "grandi sfide," which means big challenges. I'm talking about the problem of global warming, the problem of reduction of inequalities that are expanding, or the problem of relationship between humans and machines like artificial intelligence-driven ones.

By working in groups of students that have different backgrounds, the second year of engineers after the first year of hard sciences - you know, analysis one, analysis two, physics, chemistry, informatics - they breathe complexity in this "Grandi Sfide" module and they hear the opinions of the technologists and human scientists. And that's a very good playground to strengthen their critical sense, their soft skills, but also thinking skills.

And then we also added in the master part, not only in the bachelor, but also in the master part of the education pathways of engineers, we introduced challenges that are something like innovation challenges from industries. An industry comes, pays the Politecnico di Torino to open a challenge, students get into this challenge and working in groups think of innovation solutions. Once more there is a tutor from the industry which may be an economist, manager or a technologist, but they understand already within the pathway, the educational pathway, the complexity and what is needed outside.

Because the first thing I underlined to my colleagues, and they elected me because it's a democratic process in the university, is that we have to change. We cannot continue teaching the same way we have been teaching from ages, from the beginning. So solid hard science bases and then methodologies for the design in the different engineering disciplines. We need this immersion into human and social sciences.

So this led me to get into contact with many philosophers, sociologists, economists, and one of them was Maurizio Ferraris and together we are both positive towards technologies because there are many philosophers that think that technologies are sort of human-eating stuff. On the other hand, me and Professor Ferraris think that technologies are the sublimation of human intelligence and creativity because they come from humans. They are created by humans. And for this reason, we decided to write "Technosophia," this book published by La Terza, in 2023.

And there we give opinions from our different viewpoints. I'm a chemical engineer, he is a philosopher, on different stuff, also proposing solutions that are based on our two different viewpoints and knowledge. And it's a sort of ping pong. We at the beginning were thinking of writing as a single author merging but it's impossible and so by this ping-pong we little by little converge into some possible solutions for the severe problems we are facing in many directions in this very fast changing world and which is sometimes threatening but we were trying to find, according to our positive attitude, solutions. This is the reason why we wrote "Technosophia."

Alessandro Oppo: I totally agree about the, I would say, I would call it human-centered approach and also the fact that inside the Politecnico people have the possibility to study something related to human science and the past of humans maybe. And I'm thinking about this separation of knowledge that often we have seen. And so basically you're saying that we should have more people that study both hard science and human science, so a hybrid.

Guido Saracco: There is an opportunity now in our legislation that is to take simultaneously two different degrees, "doppia laurea," double degree, which happened a few years ago. It was a decision from the parliament and I know personally the member of the Chamber of Deputies or "Camera dei Deputati," Alessandro Fusacchia, that was the driver of that change. It's not really come to an effective practice because it needs some definition of specific procedures. This tail after you take a decision, it's not yet done. You need to put it into practice and it requires the modification of several administrative stuff.

But when I was young, I could not be a student simultaneously of philosophy and physics. When I finished my high school, I was uncertain whether to become a philosopher or a physicist. I decided to become an engineer, which nowadays is a sort of mix, as I told you. But at my time, it was not like that. The career of engineer was based on hard sciences and then technical stuff.

This is an opportunity we have at the Politecnico Torino. We have some possibility to have a double master degree into neighboring disciplines like chemical engineer and environment engineer, chemical engineer and energy engineer, in a sort of accelerated pathway, like in three years you get two master degrees. And so there is this attempt to mix cultures without losing quality and I think that this is strongly needed.

I think that the university is too fixed and too conditioned by chains I would say that are sticking onto a too inflexible way of declining or describing the curricula because the world is changing and you need to change. I'm not in favor of producing curricula ever changing. So we need to focus on the core competences and then have maybe some small parts of the education pathway that merge you into a specific task. Because these last tasks are changing so fast that we cannot keep up with this change.

And what I mean is that if you take some education pathway of five years, a three plus two, Bologna process, and you keep it fixed. When a guy or a lady gets into it, it gets out of this pipeline and it may not recognize the world that it has been prepared to face through the education pathway. So the change is essential. This requires profound modification of our teaching and we are at the risk that the universities, as we know them now, are going to be offset by other ways of educating people, which I hope will not happen, but we need to change.

For this reason I'm also involved with some universities that are trying to provide working students or procure a continuous education, mostly online because when you want to reach people working you cannot pretend that they are gathering into specific locations. It has to be engaging even if it is less easy than in presence but this profound change is going to face a sort of tsunami now with the generative AI and I was there for the last year of my directorate when Sam Altman was launching this post on Twitter. "Look we have prepared this ChatGPT you can try it there" - that was a revolution because it was the first LLM and they couldn't take this into account in my rectorate so I started studying how to embody this kind of tremendous tool into education pathways because otherwise you cannot turn your face elsewhere. You have to face this.

And this is a revolution in the revolution I promote. And this once more implies that we have to change our techniques and pedagogical techniques. And this is tremendous stuff. I just finished writing a book. I'm going to refine it with the editor, with La Terza, the same editor of "Technosophia." It's a book on digital ally. I call it like that. So something like it's your ally, it's sort of private, it's producing the functions that you need to expand your cognitive potential.

And that's something that we have to conceive, design, put into practice in a different way from what is happening. I mean, ChatGPT is now able to reply to whatever question on whatever topic in seconds to be marketed worldwide to as many people as possible but this personal AI I think should be the solution that is a good compromise between privacy, respect of our learning process. We cannot know everything. We need to specialize somehow and your AI should be specialized alongside with your learning process. And that's the way to protect it but you use this kind of tremendous tools that are now happening.

For this reason I wrote this new book that is going to be in the libraries in January 2026 and it was fun. Sometimes it's scary because it's really challenging your human being. But it's amazing. I hope that Europe, if not Italy itself, is going to clarify what we are going to be in 10 years time and change the educational pathways according to this hybridization we are going to have where the human should be in control. But you cannot avoid using this kind of tremendous tools.

These are the things that are keeping me passionate about science and technology now. After becoming a rector I left the research in my specialization area. You know, in Italy we have this "tuttologo," which means expert of everything. And there is this joke: "Are you a topologist? Are you a specialist?" "Also" is the reply. Because when you become a rector you really need to know what motivates your colleagues in order to motivate them. So you become really... you leave your specialization and become...

But this allows you to get a holistic view of everything and also understand better these complex dynamics and also propose solutions that are keeping complexity into account but also can resist because alone we cannot find a proper solution for everything.

Alessandro Oppo: I'm thinking the world is changing and if "Technosophia" was published in 2023 and now you have written a new book like...

Guido Saracco: "The Digital Ally," I would say.

Alessandro Oppo: Yeah, like what changed? Like did you change anything? Like did you change any idea? Because just a few years passed but a lot of...

Guido Saracco: I give you an example, I think it's going to be interesting for our listeners, our followers here. At the time of "Technosophia," one of the things we were proposing was to try to assist old people. We are growing as a country in Italy and Japan - the two developed countries that are aging most. We have many more people that need care becoming older and less and less people that are young caregivers to these old people.

We were thinking in "Technosophia" to have young people in what we call in Italy "servizio civile universale," so a sort of period of life after the graduation where young people give something to society with a small wage and in which a single young man or young woman would go to four or five old people and talk to them and get memories out of their brains. Old people nowadays are not born in the digital era or are not used to digital tools. And so their traces, digital traces are nil. And this means that these precious memories are not going to stay with us, is going to go away, pass away with them.

But extracting these memories, a state like Italy can get a lot of data and maybe do something with this data that can justify a specific assistance, so it's a sort of circular economy. Old people give memories through these young caregivers to the state and the state gives better sanitary assistance.

At that time we were thinking of having this human-to-human interface, but one anthropologist, friend of mine, Cristina Cenci, told me, "Look, I'm not sure, and there are several evidences that things go otherwise, that humans are eager to talk to humans about their own memories and they prefer maybe to talk to a digital tool, digital interface. Because between humans there is some barrier. Who is this guy? Who is this lady that is asking me things? It takes time and maybe you never succeed." With a digital thing, it's maybe easier and this is the way telemedicine works. Sometimes you get more information for medicine through digital telemedicine sensors or talks rather than talking to people and then so this is preparing them when they come in case of need.

But then this was strengthened when ChatGPT came and it was after. I mean we were finalizing "Technosophia" so we couldn't take it into account but nowadays we know that it's tremendous stuff to talk to and it's enabling the possibility to have agents that are behaving like humans but are digital and with whom you can talk.

This on one side, but if you take this into a private personal agent, your digital ally, and it lives with you. It grows with you and it remains yours. It's not driven by ChatGPT. It's not giving data outside. It's an LLM that is closed on your device and grows with you because you are a source of data daily with your experiences, with your talks and with all the things that you have read, you have learned. Little by little this device becomes you. And this device is not going to die.

You are going to die, but he is going, or she, depends on how you call it, she's going to remain with a sort of carbon footprint of your brain, of your way of thinking, of your way of producing solutions. And this automatically gives you memories available, memories of a lifetime, but very precise. But this is yours, so you cannot use them unless you desire.

So think of a human being with his digital ally that comes to the end of his life and has to decide what to do with this. Will it be incinerated with me? Destroyed? Or will it be available to my son, my daughter? This is tremendous stuff. It's difficult to avoid having sort of... I don't know how to translate it in English... sort of skin electricity.

But it's something that is there, is going to happen. And maybe it's not bad to happen because this is a way to control this. What these big techs are doing is they're running directly to transhumanism. They're running to something that is no more a human being, it's something integrated. They want to talk directly through the brain without even talking through a language. Direct connection of thought.

I mean, we are not that fast. We need to think. Language is very effective but has our timing. I don't want to be hybridized with something that is running faster than my brain and is going to control my brain. These are what... when I told you I hope that our state will decide what we're going to be in 10 years time in order to design things so that it happens in a controlled way. I don't see anyone raising the glance at that level.

We are trying to cope with what happens and limit this and that, but there is no strategy, no vision at the moment. So one of the reasons why I wrote "The Digital Ally," the "Alleato Digitale," is exactly to provide some options and complete solutions in the direction of having some tool available which is not overwhelming us. But at the same time, you cannot avoid it. As I told you, you cannot say it doesn't exist. Let's continue educating people as it has never been produced. This is nonsense.

And the strongest battle at the moment between China and the US on who is going to come to super intelligence first. That's breathtaking on one side but it's very dangerous on the other side because who is coming to this before the other, can dominate the world and may be the cause of conflicts, war, because it's so dangerous. So we definitely have to get some control into this.

At the moment I don't see very much, I see Europe leading this, as always, with the AI acts and... But the two poles that are competing now seem not to have significant constraints to this rush. And this is one of the major issues.

My current activity for Politecnico is production of cultural media or events, theatre plays, documentaries for the cinema or the television and so on. We are going to have a series of podcasts on the possible end of the world, which has to be intended as end of humanity that we can cause ourselves through technologies. There are so many options, but one option is that the rush to be the leader of artificial intelligence leads us to such a powerful tool that the opponent may start the war to avoid the dominance of the other. So this is one option, but there are so many.

Alessandro Oppo: I was thinking about the AI ally and as you said, safety and ownership is very important because otherwise I'm thinking it would be owned by big tech and also I would be quite scared by having a direct connection. Because they say that a safe computer is a computer that is not turned on, so that is off. And so having a computer that is on, connected to the internet would be quite scary in terms of safety. And this importance of data, it's connected maybe in some way to dataism, this possible new religion where data is the most important thing.

Guido Saracco: I was fond of Dadaism, those artists that were the futurists. I remember a nice exhibition in Palazzo Grassi in Venezia on Dadaism, these artists that are fond of technologies and are sort of... Boccioni, Balla, these painters. Marinetti, I don't know whether you know them. I mean, they're in the early years of past centuries in Italy. I'm not aware of this dataism, but it's a technological issue. The more data you can handle in quality, the better it is for your use of artificial intelligence.

So there is a culture of data and quality of data that is spreading around in all industries. Because if you have good data that are coherent and consistent at the same time, then you can draw inferences through this machine learning, deep learning algorithms. So this is the way to go.

I know that a company like, formerly called Solvay, that is a chemical company, now it's called Science Co. It's changed the name recently, parts of it. They applied sensors everywhere on a plant where they produce the Teflon plastics, those that are used to prevent food from adhering to the pan. And by sensors and by different control pathways derived by machine learning on this data, derived from the sensors, they could control the plant in a different way from the ordinary way of controlling plants like the level of liquid in a tank is lowering, then you put additional liquid so that it gets back to the right level or the temperature is rising, you put more cooling agents into practice and then it gets lower. This is typical way of controlling chemical plants.

But they, through different artificial intelligence-based controlling tools, they could increase the productivity by 20%. This is another way artificial intelligence is changing things so that those that like me or my colleagues teach people how to design and how to act as professionals. We cannot avoid this because this is effective in so many things. I'm not talking about the area of language, large language models that we were talking about before, but the simple use of data and artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning techniques.

So this is actually there and it's changing so many things that we need to first of all change the way we are teaching people so as to prepare them to use these tools and not try to... But get back to the beginning of our talk. In order to be stronger and to be in control, you need to be prepared through human social sciences. I'm expecting less specialization on hard issues, hard sciences, because these tools can do a lot of the job for you, and the revival of human and social sciences that are strengthening your critical sense of things and helping you to connect the dots and take decisions better.

This is fun. This is the last part of my career. I have been improving also personally as a person, as a leader through this. I'm happy to be engaged in this wide span of disciplines to understand complex problems and I will go on with my career of writer, of creator, among social networks, providing common people with my thoughts and also producer, through Politecnico di Torino, whatever people like to see or listen to.

And there I bring reflections of science and technology versus the problems or opportunities that are there in society unsolved or uncaptured. And this is fun, I have to say it's fun. I'm much more engaged than when I was a researcher in my narrow disciplines and I had to be there running, you know, the "publish or perish" attitude that you have to keep if you want to be fast in your academic career. But now it's part of my life where I feel more engaged and happy with what I'm doing.

Alessandro Oppo: Wonderful. And I was thinking about other ways of teaching, educating people. Also this technology could help people also in terms of governance. There were also in the past in Italy some experiments of direct democracy that didn't really work. But I'm thinking about new tools that could allow people to find new ways of governance.

Guido Saracco: Well, yes, I understand. My personal view is that... I hope that my activity has also a goal: get the awareness of common people higher about the problems but also the opportunities to find scientific and technological solutions together. If the level of awareness of people rises also the level of politicians, also by keeping the current government structure will adapt. The complexity of the world would need politicians that are keeping the pace with this complexity and fast change. This is difficult because politicians are common people and basically they are elected in democracies.

We need to raise the level of people to have a rise also in the level of politicians. But when I was rector, I also promoted schools of technologies for politicians. And I got engaged with the left, center, and right parties, independently. They were asking us different strategies to get to their either young students of schools of politics or already active politicians. But if every one of us, every university does that, that would also help.

You get to be a politician and you get some tailored education pathway to be aware of what's going on and what are the potentials. And if institutions like academics or universities, public universities take this into account, are bound to be independent, not to have biases, and this is going to be positive stuff.

On the other hand, there are attempts to use digital means, sharing of knowledge to common people and involvement of common people. I would suggest our viewers to go through the work of Dirk Helbing that was writing on this and how to render the Internet something that is really not biased. But it was not successful and it is tremendous stuff because nowadays the internet is the place where you can easily exchange data, information, strongly biased and is strongly governed by market opportunities. The key players are Big Techs, Google, but the most visited platforms are commercial marketing-oriented platforms. It's difficult to amend this.

Dirk Helbing was proposing a sort of reliability score for different web pages that will help you to have something there granted as independent to avoid fake news but the web has become really a sort of bazaar. At the end of the story I personally decided to work getting into this bazaar with my own opinions, driving Politecnico di Torino to produce culture, also through social networks, but also through theatre plays, films for the movies, for the cinema and television, bringing our viewpoints and also not just producing knowledge sharing to common people, but also producing for politicians some education packages.

The role of technology in society is becoming stronger and stronger. They cannot avoid knowing something about that. I thought that this would have been working more. Maybe your platform here has a sort of thoughts or is pursuing different ideas, but this is what I decided I would like to bring to this interview.

Alessandro Oppo: Yes. No, what I was thinking before, like in terms of governance is because like what you were saying about the AI ally that in some way if I have an AI ally and you'll have one and then we have a conflict, then the two AI could eventually talk together and help us to resolve, to fix the conflict.

Guido Saracco: Yeah, you know, one opportunity, you always have, you're right, you always have to decide whether you want to put into contact with your stuff. And in an education context, you have the allies of the students and the ally of the teacher, and they can be in contact. And the teacher may understand much more about the effectiveness of his teaching practice to the single students.

A tremendous potential is that through the ally, the ally can act as your evaluator daily and understand whether you are following or not and procuring information not just to the teacher but also to you directly underlining that you should read this and that to recover or you are okay you can dare to go beyond the limit and expand your knowledge so this is called designing on the single person the educational pathways. This is going to be helped by the personal AI. Now that's amazing, there are so many things. I will send you a signed book of mine.

Alessandro Oppo: Thank you. Yeah, I was thinking also two things. One is that, I mean, with this kind of AI ally that could evaluate us in some way, we could also not do take exams anymore. Like maybe it could be like just the AI agents that tell us if we are ready if we understood the topic or not.

Guido Saracco: I think that you will always have to put the human in the loop. I mean, it's okay, but the teacher should check something. I mean, any artificial intelligence based solution needs to have the human in the loop. And if you are the tested stuff, you cannot be the human. You are already the human in the loop, but you need to check whether the AI gave you the right... I mean, the human in the loop should be there.

But the advantage in the education is that AI is always with you. And from time to time, because a teacher, I was teaching and I'm still teaching 250 students at the beginning of their education pathways in chemistry. I cannot be there for any one of them. I cannot. But from time to time I can, based also on what's going on, I will be... it will be possible to be there when it's needed, to the student when it's needed. In any case, check what has been going on because you cannot rely 100% on AI.

The most trivial stuff is the hallucinations, but it's always safer to have the human in the loop. From time to time you have to have the teacher that is checking. But indeed, it is going to simplify a lot and be more effective. The risk of nowadays practice is that you don't understand anything. You get after six months to the exam, you are rejected and you go back to the beginning. If you follow online, in real time, the preparation, you can recover and then that would be easy to pass the exam at the end. But if the gap is six months, that's tremendous. And sometimes this happens because the teacher has no time for a single student. And with this undersized staff of teachers at the university in Italy, this is a serious problem. The digital AI can help a lot there to fragment the classroom and to have a personal assistant. That is going to simplify and maybe also make some new pedagogical schemes possible.

Alessandro Oppo: I'm thinking about... Would you like to share something about your personal background?

Guido Saracco: Yes, I think to end up, my personal background is I was a scientist in catalyst science. I was dealing with the development of after-treatment systems for the exhaust of cars, for instance, to abate pollutants. At that time, my friends would pull my leg by saying, "You chemists are producing pollutants and then destroying them, you create your own job and it's a circular economy." This is correct, I mean, chemistry is always regarded as sort of polluting stuff, but it's also the solution to depollute things.

Then I became active in the area of global warming on the CO2 as a molecule and as a material that can produce something else. So as to catch the opportunity of sequestrating it from the atmosphere and then produce something with it. And once more they say, "You chemists were creating the fossil fuels with the petrochemical companies and then you produced the global warming and now you are picking up CO2" and once more again it's correct. So chemistry is indeed at the heart of nature and also what is called the Anthropocene, the era that is so heavily characterized by human products.

Indeed, as a chemical engineer I feel engaged into this and I'm also writing books on global warming. I just published at the end of 2024 a book called "Green Chemistry 5.0" with a publisher called Zanichelli that is very famous for schools. So that was my background, but as a rector I became a "tuttologo." So interested in everything and connecting the dots as I could.

Alessandro Oppo: I really like this expression about connecting the dots and if you have any message for the people that are researching for a new kind of use of technology, good use, I mean people that are connecting the dots basically.

Guido Saracco: I think that we cannot avoid being interested in everything and studying. In this period of my life, I'm studying like I've never been studying before. Getting information, digesting the information, creating thoughts, creating ideas. I think that every one of us should do this. And without fear. And this is a way to become actors of solutions. Wherever you are, whatever is your level of knowledge, you can improve it and it's going to be better for you. I think that our society should put this education in the first place. Otherwise, we are not keeping up with the changes and we are not going to find solutions and we are at risk. This is my message and this is something that I'm heavily involved in personally in this period of my life.

Alessandro Oppo: So thank you a lot for your time.

Guido Saracco: Pleasure. Thank you.

Alessandro Oppo: Thank you.