AI Heroes: Guido Saracco (Rettore Politecnico Torino) - Preparing for an AI-powered future

🤖 As artificial intelligence advances rapidly, universities must evolve to equip students with the interdisciplinary knowledge and critical thinking skills to succeed, explained Guido Saracco, rector of Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy’s first technical university established in 1859. Saracco highlighted the profound impacts AI can have across industries. “With generative AI, this is going to be even more impacting and it’s going to change a lot of jobs, even in a very fast way. It’s going to substitute humans also at the white collarist level,” he said. To address this, Saracco is focused on "updating professors" through new training programs on AI developments like ChatGPT, so they can better educate students. "If we have not professors well trained on Chat, GPT and generative AI and the impact on their specialization, then it's not going to work." Beyond technical knowledge, Saracco emphasized nurturing well-rounded engineers and critical thinkers who understand the societal impacts of technologies. "The new engineer should understand the social problems he is going to solve with technologies and should also understand how technologies are going to change society - should be ethical and responsible," he said. Accordingly, the university has expanded collaboration between technical and humanities faculties. "We increased very much the presence of human and social scientists in our portfolio of professors because the new engineer should understand the social problems he is going to solve with technologies," Saracco explained. With AI poised to drive economic growth in Turin across manufacturing, mobility and aerospace, Saracco welcomed the Italian government’s plans to establish a national AI research center there. “I think it's going to be the burst for this area of Italy,” he said. Ultimately, Saracco believes melding technical excellence with humanistic perspectives is key for training modern engineers. "Technology should be driven by humans towards social good. And this need to know what is social good, what are the right things for society. And the new engineers coming out from Polytechnic known perfectly."