Michela Magas (CRO)
Michela Magas bridges design and technology, research and industry. She is Chair and Director of Research and Innovation of the Stockholm-based Industry Commons Foundation, advisor to the European Commission and the G7 leaders, Member of President von der Leyen’s High Level Round Table for the New European Bauhaus, and member of the Advisory Board of CERN (ISAB-G). She currently serves as President of the Brussels-based International Knowledge Graph Alliance. She is the Founder of Stockholm-based MTF Labs and has, over the past 12 years, been conducting technology experiments with its global community of 8000 contributors from the arts and sciences with methods that have been selected as best practice of Knowledge Valorisation by the European Commission. For 20 years, she ran Stromatolite Design Lab in London, creating design futures with global clients such as Apple, Nike and Nokia. In 2017, she was awarded European Woman Innovator of the Year by the European Commission, and in 2016, she was presented with an Innovation Luminary Award by the European Commission and Intel Labs Europe.
Keywords: world leader, woman leadership, woman innovation, speaker, visionary, binary thinking, technology and human body innovation, policy, equality, art, tech, ecosystem living, feminism
Morning topic: Machinery Missionaries
The boundary between human and machine activity is increasingly blurred with each technological advancement. What techno-human ecosystems are we creating? Are these ecosystems intentionally designed, or are they merely accidental consequences? What are the opportunities and limitations of collaboration between humans and machines? What are the dynamics of this collaboration in creative and artistic processes? How can interdisciplinary cooperation support innovation in policy?
The parallel world in the form of machine and robot systems generates in society not only ambivalent feelings of oscillation between utility and threat, but also a never-ending series of outstanding works of art in literature, film and visual arts. The tension that arises between the living human and the "animated" machine is one of the most topical lines among the energetic themes in art. At a time when control over many vital resources is being handed over to data centre algorithms, there is an almost parallel increase in the level of anxiety, fear, or feelings of loss of control over the previously valid ecosystem. The works presented in the chapter Machinery Missionaries refer precisely to this ambivalence of autonomous machines and at the same time insistently recall the old Faustian question of the possibilities and limits of human knowledge.
