“Knowing how to interpret reality with a critical spirit” this, according to Larrey, dean of the Lateran University, would be the characteristic that distinguishes humanistic graduates, especially philosophers.
It is not just a matter of standing out, but in recent years we are witnessing a real search for humanities graduates from Google to Amazon and more generally in the world of technology linked to artificial intelligence.
It is therefore natural to ask: are these the professional profiles of the future?
Artficial Intelligence Specialist and Robotics Specialist are two of the four new professions that will consolidate between now and the near future. This was stated by an official Italian survey: the “Observatory of Digital Skills Online 2019”, created by Aica, Anitec-Assinform, Assntel, Assinter Italia, in collaboration with AgID, the Agency for Digital Italy and the Ministry of Education of ‘University and Research. If the first, reading the description, “guides the process of application and identification of Artificial Intelligence algorithms, supervises the training activities of the algorithms, identifies the qualitative metrics for the evaluation of the accuracy achieved”, the second “defines robotic systems semi-automatic for business production development; documents and integrates the robotic systems developed with the organization’s IT systems “.
Although these descriptions do not fully outline the profile, we can find some elements, both in one and in the other, in the “Botrainer” we have designated.
In reality the term “Botrainer” itself shifts attention to a very specific phase in the cycle of creation and maintenance of a virtual assistant, which is that of training, neglecting the more theoretical design phase of the dialogue, better enhanced by the term, also in this case, perhaps not entirely exhaustive, “Conversational Designer”.
In short, there is a lot of terminological variety, but what these figures have in common is certainly the knowledge of the dynamics and design of conversational man-machine interaction, the ability to manage a process that goes from the design phase to that of evaluation and performance improvement. continuous virtual assistants, elements of machine learning and automatic language processing technologies.
We can therefore conclude that: characterized by strong interdisciplinarity, this type of work can be approached and deepened by people with both a scientific background and, in the case of the treatment of languages applied to technology, humanities and can have solid starting points in Copywriting and Interface Design or in language technology. In relation to the latter specialization, we recall the hybrid degree courses involving computational linguists or digital humanists for example.
We believe that the strength of these new disciplines lies precisely in the heterogeneity and in the total fusion and resolution of the dichotomy between the world of “words” and that of “measures”.
