CAN A MACHINE GO MAD?

Mira Marcinow

Author · Scientist · Poland

A writer and philosopher, born in 1985, a doctor of humanities in the field of psychology from the Jagiellonian University and a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She read the interdisciplinary humanities programme in Kraków and took master's degrees in philosophy and in psychology before defending her doctorate at the Institute of Psychology. At the Academy she works in the Department of Logic and Cognitive Science and heads the Centre for Psychoanalytic Thought, which she co-founded, and she has taught at SWPS University in Warsaw and at the Jagiellonian University.

Her doctoral dissertation won the Prime Minister's Award, and she has held a scholarship from the Ministry of Science, the Adam Krzyżanowski Fund award and the Jerzy Perzanowski Award, along with a national scholarship for outstanding young scholars in 2018. She was a finalist for the Polityka Science Award in 2019 and was nominated for the Poznań Literary Award in the same year. She started Radio Głosy and co-organises the Open Philosophical and Psychiatric Seminars.

She writes on the history of Polish psychiatry, on melancholy, the history of ideas, literary madness, dance and the psychopathology of animals. Her books are On the Edge of Freedom (2012), the first volume of A History of Polish Madness (2017), The Unhealed Wound of Narcissus, written with Bartłomiej Dobroczyński (2018), and Bezmatek (2020), for which she received the Polityka Passport for literature in 2020 and a Nike Literary Award nomination in 2021.

Marcin Cecko

Playwright · Author · Poland

A poet, dramaturg, writer and actor, born in Warsaw in 1981. He was one of the founders of the group known as the neolinguists, alongside Maria Cyranowicz, Joanna Mueller, Michał Kasprzak and Jarosław Lipszyc, and a co-author of their 2002 manifesto. He published three volumes of poems, Rozbiorek (2000), Pląsy (2003) and Mów (2006), and ran a cycle of improvised performances at the Chłodna 25 cafe in Warsaw, where his readings met live music and video projection. In 2007 he headed the 3 Boys Move formation with Piotr Głowacki and Jan Dravnel.

He began in the theatre as an actor at Studium Teatralne in Warsaw, then co-wrote the text of its Parsifal in 2004 and played in it. With Natalia Korczakowska he worked on Solaris. Raport at TR Warszawa, after Stanisław Lem's novel. From 2009 he worked repeatedly with the director Krzysztof Garbaczewski: their Odyssey took the main prize at the m-teatr Confrontations in 2010, Death Star was staged inside a cinema in Wałbrzych with the audience watching a live relay of scenes played elsewhere, and The Sexual Life of Savages at Nowy Teatr, built on Bronisław Malinowski's pioneering anthropology, asked what a savage is in a postmodern world.

Their Ivona, Princess of Burgundia, for which he wrote the dramaturgy and the music, took two awards at the Divine Comedy festival in Kraków and the Grand Prix of the Opole Theatre Confrontations. In 2013 alone the pair made three productions: Balladyna in Poznań, A Gallery of Polish Kings at the Stary Teatr in Kraków and A Stone Sky Instead of Stars, staged for the anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising by the Warsaw Rising Museum and Nowy Teatr. He also wrote the dramaturgy for Marcin Liber's Antigone and Fahrenheit 451.

Bartlomiej Glowacki

Founder · Health Tech · Poland

Founder and Chief AI Officer of aiTherapy.Support, an AI platform for cognitive behavioural and schema therapists. It reads sessions in real time: flagging cognitive distortions and therapeutic techniques, updating the case conceptualisation after every session and cutting notes down to thirty seconds, which hands therapists back around twenty hours of administrative work a month. It runs under GDPR and the EU AI Act, with data held inside the EU only. The team pairs clinical experience with building software at scale, and that is the whole point: a tool written for a room where trust weighs more than throughput.