Mario Morasso was a brilliant singer of the machine and a forerunner of the present

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For the series of brilliant and/or forgotten forerunners of the coming empire of machines in the form of AI, it will not be useless to exhume Mario Morasso, born in Genoa in 1871 and died in Turin in 1938. Morasso is usually listed at the bottom of the page in Italian histories of literature, as a precursor (mostly plundered and silenced) of Marinetti's Futurism. Nonetheless, unlike Filippo Tommaso Marinetti - more of a poet, man of letters, improviser, entrepreneur of genius - Morasso was a positivist (among Enrico Morselli's best students) and therefore infinitely more refined and combative on the scientific side. Morasso was first and foremost a pre-Futurist singer of the machine and its resounding aesthetics, rendered with that typically Belle Époque enthusiasm that the slaughter of the Great War would soon strangle . Well, despite a style that veers here and there into the pompously D'Annunzio-like, and always keeping intact the Guicciardinian "distinction" regarding historical parallels, some of Morassian visions - contained in his best book La nuova arma (The machine) of 1905 - seem to prefigure our present almost better than his own.

Morasso dreamed of an intelligent machine that seems to mimic machine learning more than the old 19th-20th century device (which is why today it would perhaps be necessary to redefine sentient machines with the higher names of “cognitoid” or “noema”). In particular, for Morasso, machines would shape the future, replacing the old, dying Western civilization – with its ethical, aesthetic, epistemological canons still inspired by the Greeks and similar old men – through a new paradigm, a new way of living and thinking, inaugurated first and foremost by electricity: “It seems in truth that a supreme providential law presides over the mysterious story of great human inventions, their appearance when necessity approaches [...]. Well, as coal diminishes, that which can replace it, electricity, is developed and elaborated” . For him, technology is comparable to a “brain”, that is, a nervous system of the world; in some reflections, he almost seems to glimpse those technological interconnections that today make the earth a single great thinking being (a futurological anticipation of today's global networks).

Furthermore, he openly supports the anthropomorphization of the machine, to which he attributes vital qualities and a sort of vis insita that pushes it to evolve, change, even to come to life in superior and transhuman ways. An active entity, although inorganic, capable of guiding the progress of the world even without man and perhaps much better than him. In Morasso, the overcoming of traditional man (a theme dear to Elon Musk) already appears with a sort of inverted ergonomics for which it is not the machine that adapts to man , but rather man who is adapted to the machine, and therefore improved. A further biographical element that brings this Italian Prometheus of yesterday closer to the Yankee Prometheans of today is imperialism, or the belief that only war or some pyroclastic apocalypse can regenerate the world once and for all, almost as a new biblical flood would do, of which technology would be the ark, reserved for those few chosen technocrats or technosophists.

A motif that seems to return in many of these cybertycoons with their palingenesis seen comfortably from eco-sustainable bunkers. In conclusion, Morasso's love for the transformative power of technology, for a world shaped by artificial progress, is a distant echo (but astonishing since it comes from the past) of some of the most disturbing questions that accompany AI today. Needless to say, being Italian, Morasso is completely unknown in the world, while here he is almost forgotten . But perhaps it is the destiny that he himself would have chosen, given that in Uomini e idee di domani (L'Egoarchia) he had prophetically assumed this motto: "Man is all the greater the more alone he is" .

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