Leonardo da Vinci’s “Machines” and polytechnic culture: a useful lessonfor humanist hands handling artificial intelligence
Science, technology, mechanical gears, hydraulics and architectural calculations, details of birds’ flight to build machines that could imitate them, as well as beautiful drawings, accurate numbers, and fascinating illustrations embodying extremely refined artistry – the 1,119 sheets making up Leonardo da Vinci’s Atlantic Codex, preserved in the rooms of the Ambrosian Library in Milan, comprise all this. Moreover, this great volume (in the same format as a geographic atlas) embodies the quintessence of cultural traits that marked one of the best eras in Italian, as well as international, culture: the Renaissance. A blend between science and artistic creativity, amidst knowledge, craftsmanship and shared skills – a journey into learning and its narration. Astonishing “polytechnic culture” reviving in modern times that Greek wisdom based on kalos kai agathos (the ‘beautiful and good’) – beauty not purely conceived in aesthetic terms but, above all, able to “generate harmony” (to adopt the words Pope Frances used to address the artistic community at the Vatican). A machine civilisation with an artistic streak, humanism opening its doors to entrepreneurship and industriousness.
The exhibition featuring twelve drawings from da Vinci’s Atlantic Codex opened on Tuesday 20 June at the Martin Luther King Memorial Library in Washington (a building whose architecture is exemplary, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to create a public space open and accessible to everyone) and boasts long queues of visitors every day, including a lot of children, who can entertain themselves at dedicated tables and installations with games based on Leonardo’s works. And its title, “Imagining the future”, aptly expresses the value of an exhibition – the first in the United States – that moves along the perpetually interweaving paths of historical knowledge and engineering creativity, between traditional skills and the willingness to explore their new dimensions (as previously discussed in a blog post from two weeks ago).
An event entailing the “future of memory”, in other words, in full awareness of the wise message handed down by one of the greatest historians of the 20th century, Fernand Braudel: “To have been is a condition for being”.
The exhibition was organised by territorial entrepreneurial institution Confindustria, with Carlo Bonomi at its head, with the support of prominent Italian enterprises (Intesa Sanpaolo, ITA Airways, 24Ore Cultura, Dolce&Gabbana, Dompè, Pirelli and Trenitalia) so as to expose the great American public to a powerful illustration of the high quality of Italian manufacturing in a market that’s now become extremely demanding and competitive. Indeed, it focuses on key features of the Italian economic landscape: the very tight bond between doing business and creating culture, the role of “industrial humanism” acting as a productive – and therefore competitive – asset, the importance of insisting on particular “values” (beauty, quality, care for people, corporate ethics and therefore environmental and social sustainability) even while generating financial “value”.
The “machines” depicted in Leonardo’s twelve drawings exhibited in Washington (diggers, hydraulic structures, flight devices such as prototypes foreshadowing our helicopters or airplane wings) wholly express a blend of creativity and experimentation, a newly envisioned balance and sophisticated engineering techniques.
Knowledge in action – just as it happens with the best “made in Italy” goods and their unique “creative empathy” (quoting Franco Ferrarotti), which in many cases brings together market and society, productivity and social inclusion.
In Washington, the conversations had by business people, diplomats, politicians and cultural figures while admiring Leonardo’s oeuvres also bear witness to the importance of further exploring a topic that, lately, has come to prominence both in the United States and in Europe, a topic that concerns the relationships between science and the humanities and the necessity to reiterate the multidisciplinary structural nature of knowledge, as well as the need for progressively more expert skills able to “vertically” cut through various disciplines. Moreover, and above all, the need to reassert the relationships existing between different cultural spheres, giving science more room to expand, in equal measure with the humanities, however, so as to attain an increasingly more enhanced “polytechnic culture” – Leonardo da Vinci is undoubtedly a great example of this.
Indeed, a certain degree of apprehension has arisen – from the United States, in fact – a certain nervousness articulated, amongst others, by Nathan Heller, technology scholar and writer for The New Yorker: “University numbers in the humanities have dropped everywhere. It’s a mistake we’ll come to regret.” (La Stampa, 25 June).
Universities insist upon scientific subjects as they receive increasingly higher funding for them, also from the corporate world. Young people go to university looking for a “useful” technological education leading to well-paid jobs: “Faculties of humanities are at risk of losing the best students. This is a real and dangerous phenomenon”, states Heller.
Then again, developments in the digital world and artificial intelligence demand complex skills that won’t merely stop at “how to do things” but, above all, require to know “why we do things”, taking into consideration the ethical and social aspects of scientific evolution as well as the policies, political and cultural decisions we should take when faced with new technological frontiers, in order to understand, determine, and realise their consequences without giving in to a myth of “progress” seen as indisputably good and beneficial to all. That is, without the risk of “an eclipse of what is human by what is not”, in Heller’s words, and without neglecting the human dimension, our “inner life”, keeping an eye on the real world and not just on the economy.
In Italy, such considerations are also part of an ongoing discussion on the need to further emphasise STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) degrees, which enterprises are suffering a shortage of. A key debate on which knowledge and skills are useful for economic development yet, most probably, also one that requires some deeper consideration as regard to the humanities.
About ten years ago, entrepreneurial association Assolombarda, then headed by Gianfelice Rocca, was already insisting on adding the letter “A” for “arts” – the humanities – to the acronym, shifting from STEM to STEAM so as to include literature, philosophy, aesthetic and visual arts and radically improve culture and education.
This is still an ongoing debate (as the Polytechnics of Milan and Turin, which offer excellent philosophy programmes, are well aware of), precisely with respect to the new frontiers of artificial intelligence and the concerns of those who believe that algorithms shouldn’t just be written by engineers and mathematicians but also in collaboration with cyberscientists, neuropsychologists, philosophers, economists, sociologists, jurists and people of letters – in order to have said algorithms recognising multiple meanings, different shades of sense, ethical and social themes, policies and implications rights and duties. Human hands handling artificial intelligence. Being aware, in a very human way, of boundaries (recent stories, from the financial crisis to the pandemic and the war, have reminded us of this, forcing us to face our own fragilities).
Thus, reflecting on Leonardo da Vinci’s focus on the centrality of human beings in both the arts and sciences can inspire, even today, some very relevant thoughts.
Science, technology, mechanical gears, hydraulics and architectural calculations, details of birds’ flight to build machines that could imitate them, as well as beautiful drawings, accurate numbers, and fascinating illustrations embodying extremely refined artistry – the 1,119 sheets making up Leonardo da Vinci’s Atlantic Codex, preserved in the rooms of the Ambrosian Library in Milan, comprise all this. Moreover, this great volume (in the same format as a geographic atlas) embodies the quintessence of cultural traits that marked one of the best eras in Italian, as well as international, culture: the Renaissance. A blend between science and artistic creativity, amidst knowledge, craftsmanship and shared skills – a journey into learning and its narration. Astonishing “polytechnic culture” reviving in modern times that Greek wisdom based on kalos kai agathos (the ‘beautiful and good’) – beauty not purely conceived in aesthetic terms but, above all, able to “generate harmony” (to adopt the words Pope Frances used to address the artistic community at the Vatican). A machine civilisation with an artistic streak, humanism opening its doors to entrepreneurship and industriousness.
The exhibition featuring twelve drawings from da Vinci’s Atlantic Codex opened on Tuesday 20 June at the Martin Luther King Memorial Library in Washington (a building whose architecture is exemplary, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to create a public space open and accessible to everyone) and boasts long queues of visitors every day, including a lot of children, who can entertain themselves at dedicated tables and installations with games based on Leonardo’s works. And its title, “Imagining the future”, aptly expresses the value of an exhibition – the first in the United States – that moves along the perpetually interweaving paths of historical knowledge and engineering creativity, between traditional skills and the willingness to explore their new dimensions (as previously discussed in a blog post from two weeks ago).
An event entailing the “future of memory”, in other words, in full awareness of the wise message handed down by one of the greatest historians of the 20th century, Fernand Braudel: “To have been is a condition for being”.
The exhibition was organised by territorial entrepreneurial institution Confindustria, with Carlo Bonomi at its head, with the support of prominent Italian enterprises (Intesa Sanpaolo, ITA Airways, 24Ore Cultura, Dolce&Gabbana, Dompè, Pirelli and Trenitalia) so as to expose the great American public to a powerful illustration of the high quality of Italian manufacturing in a market that’s now become extremely demanding and competitive. Indeed, it focuses on key features of the Italian economic landscape: the very tight bond between doing business and creating culture, the role of “industrial humanism” acting as a productive – and therefore competitive – asset, the importance of insisting on particular “values” (beauty, quality, care for people, corporate ethics and therefore environmental and social sustainability) even while generating financial “value”.
The “machines” depicted in Leonardo’s twelve drawings exhibited in Washington (diggers, hydraulic structures, flight devices such as prototypes foreshadowing our helicopters or airplane wings) wholly express a blend of creativity and experimentation, a newly envisioned balance and sophisticated engineering techniques.
Knowledge in action – just as it happens with the best “made in Italy” goods and their unique “creative empathy” (quoting Franco Ferrarotti), which in many cases brings together market and society, productivity and social inclusion.
In Washington, the conversations had by business people, diplomats, politicians and cultural figures while admiring Leonardo’s oeuvres also bear witness to the importance of further exploring a topic that, lately, has come to prominence both in the United States and in Europe, a topic that concerns the relationships between science and the humanities and the necessity to reiterate the multidisciplinary structural nature of knowledge, as well as the need for progressively more expert skills able to “vertically” cut through various disciplines. Moreover, and above all, the need to reassert the relationships existing between different cultural spheres, giving science more room to expand, in equal measure with the humanities, however, so as to attain an increasingly more enhanced “polytechnic culture” – Leonardo da Vinci is undoubtedly a great example of this.
Indeed, a certain degree of apprehension has arisen – from the United States, in fact – a certain nervousness articulated, amongst others, by Nathan Heller, technology scholar and writer for The New Yorker: “University numbers in the humanities have dropped everywhere. It’s a mistake we’ll come to regret.” (La Stampa, 25 June).
Universities insist upon scientific subjects as they receive increasingly higher funding for them, also from the corporate world. Young people go to university looking for a “useful” technological education leading to well-paid jobs: “Faculties of humanities are at risk of losing the best students. This is a real and dangerous phenomenon”, states Heller.
Then again, developments in the digital world and artificial intelligence demand complex skills that won’t merely stop at “how to do things” but, above all, require to know “why we do things”, taking into consideration the ethical and social aspects of scientific evolution as well as the policies, political and cultural decisions we should take when faced with new technological frontiers, in order to understand, determine, and realise their consequences without giving in to a myth of “progress” seen as indisputably good and beneficial to all. That is, without the risk of “an eclipse of what is human by what is not”, in Heller’s words, and without neglecting the human dimension, our “inner life”, keeping an eye on the real world and not just on the economy.
In Italy, such considerations are also part of an ongoing discussion on the need to further emphasise STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) degrees, which enterprises are suffering a shortage of. A key debate on which knowledge and skills are useful for economic development yet, most probably, also one that requires some deeper consideration as regard to the humanities.
About ten years ago, entrepreneurial association Assolombarda, then headed by Gianfelice Rocca, was already insisting on adding the letter “A” for “arts” – the humanities – to the acronym, shifting from STEM to STEAM so as to include literature, philosophy, aesthetic and visual arts and radically improve culture and education.
This is still an ongoing debate (as the Polytechnics of Milan and Turin, which offer excellent philosophy programmes, are well aware of), precisely with respect to the new frontiers of artificial intelligence and the concerns of those who believe that algorithms shouldn’t just be written by engineers and mathematicians but also in collaboration with cyberscientists, neuropsychologists, philosophers, economists, sociologists, jurists and people of letters – in order to have said algorithms recognising multiple meanings, different shades of sense, ethical and social themes, policies and implications rights and duties. Human hands handling artificial intelligence. Being aware, in a very human way, of boundaries (recent stories, from the financial crisis to the pandemic and the war, have reminded us of this, forcing us to face our own fragilities).
Thus, reflecting on Leonardo da Vinci’s focus on the centrality of human beings in both the arts and sciences can inspire, even today, some very relevant thoughts.