Program

Mauro Magatti

Sociologist and economist

Mauro Magatti’s talk – sociologist, economist and columnist for Corriere della Sera and Avvenire – takes as its starting point his latest book, co-written with Chiara Giaccardi, Macchine celibi (Bachelor Machines: Mechanizing the Human or Humanizing the World?), offering the cultural coordinates that will guide the dialogue between scholars and designers across the festival’s four research trajectories. A lucid interpreter of the contemporary world, Magatti’s thinking rejects extreme positions: he sits neither among the technophobes nor the techno-enthusiasts, but proposes a third way. From this balanced perspective, his analysis reveals a twofold phenomenon: on one hand, artificial intelligences that are learning to simulate human behaviors, language, and even personalities; on the other, human beings who risk reducing themselves to “bachelor machines” — isolated, hyper-performing individuals, emptied of deep bonds and unable to recognize the other, prisoners of a pervasive technical-digital system that, under the promise of total transparency, reduces reality to something controllable and manipulable.