Intelligenza artificiale e futuro del lavoro: cosa ci insegna la storia dei grandi sistemi tecnici

Lezione di Albert Schram, PhD

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Abstract

Questa lezione esamina l'impatto dell'intelligenza artificiale (IA) sul lavoro e sulle imprese dal punto di vista della storia economica dei grandi sistemi tecnici. Parte da un paradosso. Le organizzazioni hanno buone ragioni per essere prudenti: secondo la RAND Corporation oltre l'80% dei progetti di IA fallisce, e la rapidità dei progressi tecnologici rende presto superati gli investimenti. Le persone, invece, non possono permettersi di aspettare, perché le competenze richieste dai datori di lavoro stanno già cambiando. 

La storia offre tre chiavi di lettura: le ferrovie italiane dell'Ottocento, i cui benefici arrivarono con decenni di ritardo per carenze istituzionali; l'elettrificazione delle fabbriche americane, che divenne produttiva solo quando l'organizzazione fu ridisegnata; e il concetto di "saliente rovesciato" di Thomas P. Hughes. I dati del World Economic Forum, di Eurostat, dell'Istat e del Politecnico di Milano mostrano che in Italia l'uso dell'IA è raddoppiato in un anno. Resta però sotto la media europea, è poco strutturato e il divario tra grandi e piccole imprese è in crescita. Il principale ostacolo all'adozione non è la tecnologia, ma la mancanza di competenze adeguate. 

La lezione confronta il modello della sostituzione con quello del potenziamento e discute la "frontiera tecnologica frastagliata" e il passaggio agli agenti di IA. Propone inoltre un metodo per valutare gli investimenti basato su due filtri e tre lenti (efficienza, crescita e valore strategico). Conclude che oggi il saliente rovesciato dell'IA sono le competenze e l'organizzazione. Per gli studenti questo vuoto è un'occasione: unire una solida competenza disciplinare alla capacità di usare, verificare e governare l'IA.

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Executive summary in 15 punti

1. Il paradosso centrale. Le organizzazioni possono permettersi di aspettare sull'infrastruttura. Nessuno può permettersi di aspettare sulle competenze.

2. La lezione delle ferrovie. Nell'Ottocento le ferrovie italiane contribuirono poco all'unificazione economica, e i loro benefici arrivarono soprattutto nel Novecento. Il limite non era tecnico ma istituzionale.

Rebuild, Don't Restore: The World Order After the Storm Warnings

Margaret MacMillan on the end of the rules-based order, and where I disagree

This is a conversation with Margaret MacMillan, a historian and emeritus professor at the University of Oxford. Her latest work focuses on the collapse of the rules-based order we lived in until recently, and its replacement with something much more chaotic, unstable, and dangerous. They discuss why today is as significant as the biggest milestones of the 20th century, whether current American foreign policy is here to stay, and what the long-term consequences of the war in Ukraine might be. [Link to the full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOyW_XgEvpI&t=1239s]

From the Moon Landing to AI: A Boomer's Front-Row Seat to Change.

The Last Boomers

I was born in 1964, the last year of the baby boom, a latecomer to my own generation. My parents were the Silent Generation, the war children, who looked up to the Greatest Generation, the people who had won the war. They were loving parents, and my youth was as good as I could have imagined. 

They taught me three things I still live by: how to look after myself, how to live by my core values and stand up for them, and how to find real joy in people and in simple things. The first shows in my life. I have never been unemployed or dependent on others, and I have no debts. Soon most of the boomers will be gone, and I want to say what it was like before the story goes quiet.

China's Education Miracle — and Its Blind Spot: Rankings, Robots, and the Missing Humanities

Two recent analyses — one dissecting the THE 2027 World University Rankings [1] and another reporting from the ground at WorldDidac Asia 2026 in Hangzhou [2] — document the extraordinary rise of Chinese education. But read together, and against a broader critical lens, they also raise a harder question: what kind of graduate is this system designed to produce, and what is being left out?

Don’t Ban the Bot, Protect the Pedagogy: A Practical AI Governance Framework for Secondary Schools

Adapting Higher Education Validity Models to Meet the Realities of Secondary Classrooms

When Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) overhauled its assessment strategy around generative AI, it demonstrated that governance is not about catching cheaters—it is about validity protection: ensuring that assessments measure real student understanding (Sadowski & Oliveira, 2026).

However, secondary schools operate under vastly different constraints than universities. While higher education institutions enjoy institutional autonomy and research budgets, secondary schools deal with rigid exam board syllabi, strict safeguarding duties for minors, severe teacher workload constraints, and an environment that a recent report described as "chaotic" and "crying out" for national guidance (Clarke, 2026; Seldon & Bunting, 2026).

In Memoriam Jeffrey Williamson: The Greatest Teacher I Never Had

Remembering Jeffrey G. Williamson (1935–29 August 2026), and what he taught me about humility, honesty and showing up for students

The News

I was teaching economics to a class of final-year high school students and spoke about Jeffrey Williamsons work in economic history, when one of them found that Jeffrey Williamson had died a few weeks earlier.

I stopped for a moment. Most people would call Jeffrey a famous economic historian: a Harvard professor and the author of dozens of books. To me he was something rarer. He was one of the few teachers who really changed me, even though he never taught me a single class.

The Californian Ideology: Why AI Companies Think the Way They Do, and What Education Can Do About It

 If you want to understand why today's leading AI companies behave the way they do, prioritizing scale and monopoly over caution, treating "intelligence" as a single measurable, ownable quantity, you have to go back further than the founding of OpenAI or DeepMind. You have to go back to a horse farm in 1876.

A fusion of two contradictory instincts

In 1995, media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron coined the term "Californian Ideology" to describe a strange fusion running through Silicon Valley: the anti-establishment, information-wants-to-be-free idealism of 1960s counterculture, fused with an uncompromising, winner-take-all capitalism. You can see both strands throughout the region's history, sometimes in the same company, sometimes in open conflict.

The open, communal strand shows up in the "hacker ethic" born at MIT and carried to the Bay Area's Homebrew Computer Club: the belief that knowledge should be shared freely, that you learn by taking things apart, that centralized authority (corporate or governmental) should be distrusted. It's the spirit behind the open architecture of the early Apple II, and it's the direct ancestor of today's open-source software movement.