Il Turin Polytechnic University in Tashkent: l’eccellenza universitaria uzbeka che guarda all’Italia/Turin Polytechnic University in Tashkent: Uzbek university excellence that looks to Italy

Il Turin Polytechnic University in Tashkent è un'importante università uzbeka creata nel 2009 dalla collaborazione tra il Politecnico di Torino, UZAVTOSANOAT (l'importantissimo gruppo automobilistico statale uzbeko), il colosso General Motors (GM) e il Ministero dell'Università Uzbeko. Le finalità della pianificazione dei vari partner sono la formazione in Uzbekistan di ingegneri qualificati con gli stessi standard del Politecnico in Italia, la creazione di un'istituzione in grado di fare formazione e ricerca a livello mondiale, il sostegno allo sviluppo industriale dell'Uzbekistan attraverso la creazione di capacità imprenditoriale e nuove e innovative strutture per lo sviluppo dell'innovazione industriale. Il TTPU, un'università indipendente dal Politecnico di Torino ma ad essa intimamente connessa, attualmente ha più di 1500 studenti ed è una delle più rinomate e ambite Università di scienza e tecnologia dell'Uzbekistan. TTPU eroga corsi di laurea Bachelor of science (Bsc) e lauree magistrali Master of science (Msc) legati ai programmi del Politecnico di Torino.

La didattica è erogata in modalità "mista", con una parte dei crediti rilasciata dai docenti del Politecnico di Torino e la restante parte dai docenti del Turin Polytechnic University in Tashkent. Il Politecnico rilascia il proprio titolo di laurea e la laurea magistrale agli studenti di TTPU sulla base di accordi di doppio titolo. Tra gli obiettivi della collaborazione tra le due entità universitarie ritroviamo anche lo sviluppo delle attività di ricerca e di trasferimento tecnologico, con l'avvio presso TTPU di laboratori di ricerca in diverse aree ed il coinvolgimento di aziende e start-up europee. Gli esperti e i docenti del Politecnico di Torino collaborano nella formazione dei ricercatori di TTPU anche nell'ambito di un accordo a livello di dottorato.

Più recentemente, il Politecnico di Torino e l'università uzbeka hanno promosso congiuntamente attività di trasferimento tecnologico che coinvolgono in maniera più organica e strutturale i sistemi della conoscenza imprenditoriale italiana e uzbeka, favorendo ad esempio l'avvio di un progetto sull'Industria 4.0 nella regione di Andijan che coinvolge l'azienda uzbeka UZAVTOSANOAT, in collaborazione con il Competence Center torinese CIM4.0, per la trasformazione digitale e tecnologica del settore industriale del Paese centro asiatico. Grazie al consolidamento di questa collaborazione, e grazie anche al supporto costante dell'Ambasciata d'Italia a Tashkent, il Politecnico di Torino e TTPU svolgono un'azione sempre più ampia e organica in Uzbekistan, stabilendo nuove collaborazioni con altre università del Paese per la mobilità di studenti e ricercatori e promuovendo nuove azioni su temi strategici quali le fonti di energia rinnovabile – in particolare lo sviluppo della catena del valore dell'idrogeno verde - e gli aspetti di valorizzazione e conservazione del patrimonio storico-artistico. I temi della sicurezza e delle risorse naturali, come l'ottimizzazione dell'accesso all'acqua, la pianificazione di infrastrutture civili innovative e sostenibili, le nuove modalità energetiche e digitali moderne, politiche climatiche in sinergia con gli obiettivi della COP29 e uno sviluppo concreto delle catene del valore delle materie prime, rappresentano quindi il cuore della nuova collaborazione dei due atenei a servizio delle più ampie e ormai sistemiche relazioni dell'Italia e dell'Uzbekistan, come testimoniato dalla recente visita del Presidente della Repubblica Italiana Sergio Mattarella in Uzbekistan. Il Presidente Mattarella ì ha visitato TTPU, tra le tappe selezionate della missione istituzionale, proprio per il suo più chiaro esempio di proficua collaborazione tra le due nazioni. L'obiettivo è di incrementare ulteriormente la percentuale di studenti internazionali dell'Ateneo, già oggi tra le più alte d'Italia con il 20% circa degli iscritti provenienti da oltre 100 Paesi, che negli ultimi 5 anni sono cresciuti del 48% arrivando oggi a superare i 7.200 studenti.

Nel corso della mia recente visita presso l'Università dell'Uzbekistan, svoltasi in occasione delle elezioni parlamentari dell'ottobre 2024, ho potuto visionare e comprendere il lavoro che i ricercatori dell'Uzbekistan stanno sviluppando in merito all'implementazione delle opportunità tecnologiche dei droni, che vengono utilizzati sia per le attività civili, pensiamo al monitoraggio dei luoghi, delle aree verdi e per le spedizioni, che per le attività governative, con particolare attenzione al comparto della Difesa. Attraverso lo sviluppo dei droni e dell'Internet of Things, il Paese centro asiatico sta puntando anche alla creazione e all'introduzione di sensori speciali per la determinazione della fertilità del suolo e allo sviluppo di nuove tecnologie di irrigazione più adeguate al contesto geografico e territoriale locale. 

Turin Polytechnic University in Tashkent: Uzbek university excellence that looks to Italy

"Whether one believes in a Creator or simply in Creation, we all know that we reap what we sow." The words of Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, in the introduction to the Italian edition of The Collapse of Western Civilization (p. 18), highlight the permeability between scientific evolution and religious perspective, inevitably imbued with a form of rational eschatology. Never before has our ability to understand the world and interpret its complexity confronted us with the challenge of a new relationship with the invisible. Never before has it been so necessary to radically rethink the meaning of the immaterial, in light of the evident operational and profoundly concrete efficacy of an apparent intangibility. Accustomed as we are, in today's world, to considering as imaginary what cannot be seen, we fall into the misunderstanding of the unreality of what we cannot touch with our hands. Without realizing it, we have regarded the progressive acceleration of digitalization processes as mere technological evolution, surrendering, day by day, control over our information, our thoughts, and our decisions. Without realizing it, we have progressively outsourced our interpretative capacity and our behavioral freedom, allowing that seemingly irrelevant invisibility to render almost superfluous the physicality of our being in the world, in relation to the world, co-determined by the world. We are daily victims of the thinning of our semantic autonomy: from the ambiguity of language to its approximation, from approximation to inefficacy, from inefficacy to irrelevance, from irrelevance to manipulability. In the digitalized world, where reality is seen and experienced through algorithmically determined and recoded filters, words, their expressive value, and their existential relevance acquire new meaning and importance.

"Where there is language, there is life." Chiara Valerio, in her Religion is Technology, encapsulates in a single phrase the true meaning of the need to understand the logic underlying code (p. 13). In an existential experience represented by code, broken down into sequences of code, traced by the evolution of code, and directed by the efficacy of code, we cannot help but experience digitalization as a challenge of meaning and of the senses. We must reclaim the meaning of words, every single word, fully grasping and challenging their complexity, their descriptive reliability, their evocative power, and their operational effectiveness. We need to start paying attention to the senses again, disintermediating our experience of the world, and questioning the supposed representational fullness (often distorting) of systems designed as existential amplifiers. We must begin once more to ask ourselves about the meaning of what we are doing, what we have done, what we want to do, about our future and in our future. A restoration of the meaning of language (the matrix underlying intellectual experience), mediated by a reclamation of the senses (the experiential dimension that embodies sensory knowledge), is needed to seek a new perspective in the construction of meaning. Perhaps we should have reflected more carefully, or more attentively, years ago, when digital technologies began breaking into our lives, to critically analyze, in real time, the profound anthropological transformation taking shape. This transformation, in a short time, radically changed our lives, and today we instinctively consider it irreversible—or perhaps we are simply driven to perceive it as such.

Aimar Grégory, in a recent article published in Futuribles, invokes the specter of messianism in the shaping of the technological imaginary and the rhetoric employed by big tech companies to narrate the omnipotence and inevitability of the technologies they produce: "a techno-religion with its followers, its prophets, and its god: artificial intelligence" (no. 463, p. 6). As distant as these worlds might seem, apparently impermeable to one another, we find ourselves today living in an experiential fluidity between religious dimensions and technological potentials. From foundational mythologies to the sanctification of symbols, from the ritualization of iconic objects to the charismatic representation of leaders, we are witnessing a widespread extension of the characteristic traits of the phenomenology of religions into the collective perception of tech world brands. At the same time, our very experience in relating to the non-human, or the more-than-human, is progressively shifting a new centrality of meaning from transcendence—as we have traditionally understood it—to an unprecedented, intangible immanence. Our communities form, interact, and evolve on platforms, digital spaces created, owned, and managed by private companies that capitalize—beyond immediate monetization—on our attention. The gamification of interaction—the physiological need to collect likes—has increasingly narrowed the mesh of our relational field, fueling mechanisms of individual identity adjustment to the potential expectations of an audience. Unwittingly, we are succumbing to the most insidious and uncontrollable form of depersonalization, with consequences that remain unpredictable even at the level of social articulation and the reformulation of democratic dynamics. Yet, in this upheaval of identities, we have digitized the space of our intimacy, our memory, even our consciousness, relinquishing the voice of our inner self and the tracking of our most private behaviors to external digital spaces. Our search for answers, now more than ever, has severed the pursuit of information from the pursuit of meaning, reducing the fluid nature of life's big questions to notions and sequences of instructions.

On one hand, the rapid evolution of technology increasingly highlights the urgency of a collective reflection on the ethical implications of artificial intelligence. On the other hand, whether consciously or unconsciously, we are confronted with a tendency to hegemonize the very concept of ethics, narrowing it to a socio-economic model and worldview rooted in a predominantly Christian and Eurocentric tradition. Experience, however, clearly shows us how much scientific acceleration, particularly regarding technologies with cognitive implications, requires a strengthened capacity to ask questions—truly to interrogate the essential nature of change rather than merely its functional aspects. This must start from socio-cultural perspectives as diverse as possible. Although it might seem like an anachronistic tension or even an epistemological imposition, there has never been a greater need for a new role for religion—and religions—as a critical engine, a dialoguing community framework, and a cultural system capable of resemantization. Now more than ever, in the face of invisible technologies, we need those who have built their histories on understanding the invisible.

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of studies examining technology as a religious phenomenon on the one hand, and on the other, exploring how religions have incorporated AI into their theological-cultural reflections and in pursuing their missions. Focusing on the latter perspective, numerous contributions have emerged from religious leaders and initiatives driven by the concerns of specific spiritual and religious contexts: from Father Phillip Larrey to Father Paolo Benanti, Rabbi Eliezer Simha Weisz to Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, Buddhist monk Tensho Goto, and even the project incorporating Maori ethics into AI design. This emerging landscape of reflection is only now beginning to open up, albeit tentatively, to the diverse cosmologies characterizing cultural systems globally. Among the various perspectives that contribute—fortunately and necessarily—to fostering a pluralistic debate, it is essential to highlight the book Religion and Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction by Beth Singler, Associate Professor of Digital Religion(s) at the University of Zurich. Singler weaves a nuanced and critically sharp dialogue between religious traditions, transhumanism, posthumanism, and new spiritualities. She offers a particularly effective analytical framework that distinguishes three possible types of reactions and relationships between AI and religions, encompassing their conceptualization, experience, and narratives: rejection, adoption, and adaptation. Through an analysis of numerous episodes, heterogeneous contexts, and ongoing phenomena, Singler paints a multifaceted, fragmented, and at times seemingly contradictory picture. What clearly emerges is an implicit or explicit sense of fear toward a technology whose boundaries of action and horizon of reference are still challenging to define. In some cases, this fear fuels a proactive desire for understanding, or even integration, while in others, it provokes reactions of rejection or outright condemnation. Without revealing its conclusions, the book effectively leaves readers with an opening to multiple possible futures, tied to dynamic variables whose trajectories are difficult to predict—or even to intuit.

We live in a world that demands speed, that has turned performance into an object of worship, and too often considers time for reflection as time wasted in inefficiency. Paradoxically, we are building the new materialism of existence on the intangibility of technology, redefining the very meaning of experiencing the invisible. We live in a world where everything is convertible into data: from the fleeting nature of our attention to the implicit expression of our desires, from the blatant evidence of our consumption to the seemingly irrelevant breadcrumbs of our every smallest behavior. Without asking too many questions, we are exposing our most intimate religious experiences to a new threshold of risk, unimaginable until now. From the digitalization of rituals to the automation of intentions, from the ungovernability of truths to the commodification of spirituality, we are gradually ceding ground to the privatization of intimacy—an intimacy that, until yesterday, represented the most precious, dare I say the most sacred, of spaces available to us. It is the space where, free from the noise of the world and the rigidity of logic, we could find the courage to nurture our capacity to imagine beyond all limits, to hope beyond all pain, to share beyond all fragility, and to surrender beyond all insecurity. Now more than ever, it is crucial to understand the history of religions in our present to reflect on what we want the horizon of our search for meaning to be. It is vital today to examine the impact of new technologies on the evolution of religion in order to protect, amid the fragility of our lives, the essential value of doubt. To grasp and accept the significance of a truth that, in its elusiveness, has always invited us to grow.

Domenico LETIZIA