Nothing will be like it was before 2020. “It was a year that none of us could predict and the effects of which we will continue to suffer for decades,” says Marian Salzman, PMI’s global vice president of communications. The pandemic has accelerated many changes in our society, but probably the most relevant of all of them has been the awareness that, in certain aspects, we have reached the future we hoped for. Now, as human beings that we are, we need a new future in which to put our hopes. It is to glimpse what are the paths that our tomorrow will travel and thus begin to walk those that lead to a better future, that EL PAÍS, through Retina, organized an event, SQL (Surviving the Quantum Leap, surviving the quantum leap in English), with the impulse of Santander and Telefónica and the support of Accenture, Cepsa, PMI and Servicenow.
This human need to have a future in which to project their illusions is a relatively recent phenomenon. “For millennia our ancestors did not know the notion of the future,” says Diego Rubio, director of the National Office for Prospective and Strategy of the Presidency of the Government. “It was the study of the past that allowed us to discover the notion of the future, which we can also model with our action.”
An action that is sustained by technology, something that is impossible without the concept of innovation. “If we had not innovated since prehistoric times, we would not be here,” says Joaquín Abril-Martorell, Cepsa’s Chief Digital Officer. “It would be unheard of for the Secretary General for Innovation to say that innovation is not going to be important,” laughs Teresa Riesgo, General Director of Innovation. “If we do not innovate, we will not make productive changes, and Spain in 2050 would be like that of 2021, a disgrace”. “The pandemic has stressed the system, and forces us to realize that innovation is important,” says Elena Gil, global director of Product and Business Operations at Telefónica IoT & Big Data.
There are several branches of technological development in which innovation has been especially fruitful in recent years. One of them is in the so-called internet of things. “It is already very present in our lives and of which we are not aware. In the wristbands, in robotic vacuum cleaners, in cars, in garbage containers, we are surrounded by connected objects ”, explains Gil. And, unlike other sectors, which are looking for increasingly colorful technologies and objects, the long-term objective of the Internet of Things is to go more and more unnoticed.
Head connectivity
And nothing is more inadvertent than connectivity lives inside our own heads. “If we go from the desktop computer to the laptop and from the laptop to the mobile, a widely accepted idea is that the next technological leap will be from the pocket to the head, devices that will connect us directly from the mind to the Internet”, says Rafael Yuste, neurobiologist and professor at Columbia University (New York, USA). To take that step, one must understand the human brain, an effort that has unleashed gigantic research programs all over the planet, including one in the US in which Yuste himself participates. “We have been studying the brain for 100 years and we still do not have a general theory of how it works,” he says. “Humans are mental creatures par excellence, if we register mental activity and identify it, it gives us the possibility to change it.”
That raises a whole battery of doubts. “There are many very attractive solutions, but you have to combine them with what already exists,” recalls Ventura Miquel Gómez, head of Technology and Operations and CTO (technology director) at PagoNxt, a Santander Group company. But, above all, the biggest problem is ethics. “It is not the same that your vacuum cleaner is hacked as your brain”, Gil points out. “Whoever invents fire can use it to burn their populations,” Yuste acknowledges. “If this is not a human rights issue, I don’t know what could be. If you think about it like that, the ball is in the United Nations’ court ”.
And that is serious, especially when the technologies that we already have in place raise enough doubts. Virginia Eubanks, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Albany, has written a book, The automation of inequality (Captain Swing, 2021), in which he explains several cases in the United States in which the government bureaucracy has been replaced by computer systems that are fed with a vision of an unequal society and, consequently, tend to preserve it. Australia, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have also experienced similar situations. “We deserve better,” he says. “You have to think beyond arbitrarily set limits and push against the fever of austerity.”
One tool, nothing more
But you must always remember that technology is a tool that responds to how we use it. “The algorithm is neither good, nor bad, nor is it neutral,” says Lorena Jaume-Palasí, researcher in ethics and technology and founder of the Ethical Tech Society. “It is a mathematical formulation of the prejudices and perspectives of society: a reflection of our thinking.” “Efficiency and savings are important, but so is equality, justice and law,” Eubanks believes. “It is our moral responsibility to design computer systems in that sense.” For Jaume-Palasí, it is the public powers that have to do their part. “When we introduced the automobile, society had no traffic rules or ways of living with automobiles.” “Institutions are people and it is difficult to overcome cognitive biases and the need for immediate rewards,” says Rubio.
Even human efforts toward innovation fail to shape the future exactly how we want it. “Some of the prophecies have not been fulfilled,” recalls Juan Luis Arsuaga, professor of Paleontology at the Complutense University of Madrid. “Who was going to tell us that the means of locomotion of the future was the scooter instead of the flying car.” Rubio acknowledges that it is almost impossible to accurately forecast the future: “Does that mean we have to go with our eyes closed? No, because we can establish trends that surround plausible scenarios ”. Furthermore, Arsuaga continues, “there is something we know for sure: the human being is not going to change. Their drives, their passions, hatred, love, envy: the works of Shakespeare and Cervantes will continue to be valid ”. “We would be wrong to forget the lessons learned, including the opportunity to reevaluate what we want from life and whether before the pandemic we were on the right track as individuals and as a society. And this applies to individuals and people, ”says Salzman.
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The humans of the future are glimpsed today
Human beings make the world we live in, but it also makes us. The technological changes that have accelerated the pandemic have been noticed in many aspects of our lives, even those that could hardly be seen from a purely technical or technological perspective. That is why Retina SQL has incorporated into its program a series of conversations on topics that would hardly take place in a traditional technology forum. And it is precisely because of their eccentricity that they have received the title of “improbable dialogues.”
Cities are the worst place to experience a pandemic and this has been reflected in fiction for centuries, from the Decameron of Bocaccio to any zombie movie. In addition, cities are home to activities that contribute, more than any other, to climate change. However, the urbanization of the planet continues unstoppable, as Víctor Lapuente, professor of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) recalls, and the trend is towards an even greater concentration. “The small manufacturing cities that the Industrial Revolution fostered have disappeared,” he says. “Growth is taking shape in increasingly wealthy metropolises. And that gap with the rest of the country is behind the majority of populisms and ruptures ”. Lapuente, citing Paul Collier, proposes a solution, although he is aware of its unpopularity and that municipalities are heading in the opposite direction. “When land was the biggest source of wealth, he set out to tax it,” he recalls. “Now the greatest source of wealth is population density.”
“One of the challenges ahead is to recover the compact and dense city model, which has been lost to a suburbanization model that puts the private car at the center,” says Raquel Sánchez, Minister of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda. This insistence on the private sphere is problematic, as the architect Alejandro Aravena, Pritzker Prize winner in 2016, explains: “The most relevant thing for coexistence is trust between people,” he points out. It is necessary to create symbolic environments that allow for the establishment of links that make people part of the solution, not of the problem ”.
Living together is a concept that implies that human beings are different from each other. And in these times in which diversity and identity, who we are and how we relate to each other, has taken a central position on the political map, it seems that all these concepts are novel, but as the writer and philosopher Elisabeth Duval explains, “This debate has already taken place throughout the second half of the 20th century.” For Joan Tardá, member of the National Council of Republican Esquerra de Catalunya, personal identities “are inherited but at the same time they are built. Recognition and legitimation ends up becoming a certain engine of history ”. Quoting Judith Butler, Duval points out that “it is not so much we who build ourselves, but rather the gaze of the other builds us” and points out that the confrontational culture in which we live, fueled especially by social networks, makes “normal” those who there is a retreat towards identities.
It is said many times that art and culture are essential for the human being, but as the artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg explains, you have to be prudent. “Faced with the idea that creating improves the world, it is enough to look at the landfills to realize that this is not necessarily the case.” “Many times culture is a mixed bag in which we put many things”, considers the cantaor Niño de Elche. The scriptwriter, former Minister of Culture and president of the Board of Trustees of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Ángeles González-Sinde, points out that no matter how much more movies and series are being consumed than ever, “we must distinguish between culture and entertainment. Culture must necessarily arise from the intimacy of the artist, independence, freedom, to a different place that needs protection, and that creation must be sustained and stimulated ”. “90% of the people who listen to Spotify only listen to the music they already listened to before,” El Niño de Elche ventures. “The dilemma for culture is that the most important thing is what is not going to give instant returns,” says González -Sinde. “It is easier to go to museums like the Prado and the Thyssen than to the Reina Sofía, or to listen to popular music than a Norwegian artist who nobody knows.”
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