About Gianni Degli Antoni's audio on the computer revolution in education (1981)

It’s a public talk (in Italian, turn on the english subtitles) about the information technology revolution given by Gianni Degli Antoni in Milan in 1981, when networks were in their infancy and the implications for everyday life were merely hypothetical.

Gianni Degli Antoni, Italian computer scientist 1981

The focus of the speech is the role of information technology in education, and therefore in communication and learning, but it also covers some collateral topics that had great interest at the time and maybe even more so today with the advent of AI, which would seem to represent an equally significant transformation of human organization.

He explains what a programmer was, what an interface was, how humans have communicated with machines throughout history and how he expected them to communicate in the future. He also talks about how relationship with machines would influence the human brain, altering its response times.

It’s very funny because, although listening to him today may seem prehistoric, his imagination isn’t so far from the reality we know today.

Despite being a computer scientist, Degli Antoni embraces a deeply political vision of technological analysis, which was typical in the early 1980s. This includes the implications for the world of work, the alienation of hyperspecialization (a plague from which AI may have finally freed us, but I wouldn’t bet my life on it), and, a crucial yet under-discussed topic, the relationship between technology and power: who can control, and possibly censor, as information became more and more centralized?

These were times when the “positivist” science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s was giving way to the darker Cyberpunk, which embodied all the fears of the time regarding these issues, and Artificial Intelligence itself was one of the greatest bogeymen.

Kurt Russell in Escape from New York, John Carpenter 1981