What's Happening to Us

Moisés Naím

Fragmento

Prologue. What Is Happening to Us?

Prologue

What Is Happening to Us?

As we take a collective breath after navigating one pandemic, we now find ourselves on the verge of another: a mental health pandemic. A staggering one-fourth of the global adult population wrestles with various disorders, with only one in three individuals receiving the treatment they need. Every forty seconds, a life is lost to suicide. Three hundred million people struggle with anxiety disorders, highlighting the pervasive nature of this globalized anxiety, a new, silent pandemic.

Fueling this crisis is the perception that earth-changing transformations are on the way. They will affect us all, and we do not know how, where or when we will experience the consequences of the new realities heading our way. What we do know is that they will be massive, and they will manifest themselves everywhere and in all social spheres. Some of them will be welcomed and others cursed.

We are already beginning to see the first signs of some of the most serious transformations: the climate crisis, the fierce polarization that manifests itself in increased social conflict, renewed superpower rivalry, the corruption that has penetrated many societies, and the digital revolution and, specifically, artificial intelligence and its broad menu of impacts on the way we have lived up to now.

The list of threats that will make it difficult to sustain our lives is varied and manifests itself in different ways in different geographies. But everywhere it translates into an anxiety boom that respects no borders and warps our behaviors, aspirations, work, education and communities — in short, it touches each and every one of us.

Where does all this anxiety come from? From not knowing what is happening to us.

In the 1930s, the respected Spanish thinker José Ortega y Gasset, worried about the conflicts shaking Europe to its core, wrote in one of his books: "We do not know what is happening to us, and that is precisely what is happening to us, the fact of not knowing what is happening to us.... That is always the vital sensation that assails man in periods of historic crisis.”

Many of the elements Ortega y Gasset pinpointed in the last century are with us today, laden with threats. That’s why it’s urgent to understand what is happening to us, and what to do about it.

This book is not in any way a proposal for solutions to the great problems of our times. My goal is less ambitious: to identify the hidden elements that configure the threats we face, to name them and shed light on them. It is only a first attempt at deciphering the coming changes and their implications.

This book represents my attempt to understand what is happening to us as countries, societies and individuals. I have had the enormous privilege of developing these reflections in public, through a weekly article that appears in a good number of publications around the world. In your hands is the result of that exercise: a collection of columns written between 2016 and 2023. They are presented here as they were published.

This is the second installment after Rethinking the World. 111 Surprises of the 21st Century, published in 2016. In these columns I unpack, week after week, the events that sow so much anxiety in our times.

My work as an analyst and writer has also led me to publish several books that, in my opinion, help to understand important facets of what is happening to us. In Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy, I explain that criminality is no longer what it once was: it is now global, cybernetic and, above all, political. In the early 21st century, it has taken over entire countries and become a transnational force.

Organized crime has taken over governments and entrenched itself in them, affecting international relations in ways we have not seen before. And those governments that have not been taken over by criminal groups are doing what they can to contain their assaults with little success.

Why are they not succeeding?

That is the question that encouraged me to write The End of Power. From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States: Why Being in Charge Isn't What It Used to Be. The key message of that book is that the weakening of power is a global and widespread phenomenon, and we find it in the Pentagon and the Vatican, as well as in governments, businesses, trade unions, in the world of education, science and culture, in investment banks and non-governmental organizations, among so many other spheres. In all of them, power has become easier to obtain, harder to use and easier to lose.

But this weakening doesn’t just go one way. Those who aspire to exercise unlimited power have adapted to the new conditions of the 21st century. Just as there are centrifugal forces that dissipate power, there are other centripetal forces that concentrate it. They manifest themselves in new tactics and strategies that have been exploited by autocrats and those who aspire to be autocrats. That is why, in The Revenge of the Power, I explain how populism, polarization and posttruth — the 3Ps — have become the go-to tools for a new breed of autocrats that threaten democracy around the world: they ape democrats, but rule like autocrats.

In each of these books I have tried to reveal new trends and realities that will change the world. But I try never to forget the famous phrase of Rose Bertin, Marie Antoinette's dressmaker and pioneer of French haute couture in the 18th century: “There is nothing new but what has been forgotten.” I know, like Bertin, that the world is full of what seems new but is not, as well as of things forgotten as old that suddenly come back to life and shake society.

Sorting out this hall of mirrors between the new, the old, the forgotten and the misremembered is the essence of the work of the columnist.

Why? Because every day news and commentary are published about events that, as we are told, will change the course of history. Rarely is this true.

Sometimes — very seldom — news items appear that touch on issues that seem transitory, but in a few years, turn out to have caused profound and unusual changes. Remote work or distance education are good examples of fundamental human activities whose changes seemed transitory but which, as we now know, are much more permanent than we knew, and the curious thing is that this data goes almost unnoticed. It comes to us buried in the inside pages, often placed toward the end of an article that few will read.

Think, for instance, of the joint communiqué issued by NATO heads of state and government at the end of their summit in Bucharest, Romania, in that distant early April of 2008. A reader would have had to reach paragraph 23 of that dense and bureaucratic text signed by George W. Bush, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, among others, to learn the detail that would end up leading Europe into its worst war in eight decades: the declaration that NATO would open accession talks with Ukraine. Newspapers barely noticed the fact at the time, and none of them interpreted it correctly. On the contrary: a Reuters report on the summit was headlined, simply, “Putin tells NATO: ‘Let’s be friends.’”

What was new at that time was what had been forgotten: that for more than a thousand years the Russians had considered Ukraine a spiritual cornerstone of their empire and, therefore, that remote 23rd paragraph would one day shake history. I always remember this when I ponder what to write in next Sunday's column. I am convinced that somewhere in the world a paragraph 23 of some kind appears almost every day. The challenge is to find it.

Unfortunately, in the world of social media what we get is the opposite, the endless repetition of what is already known. While the public sphere devotes itself to covering a few flashy events, the real forces of history plod along without anyone paying much attention to them. This is how societies form their blind spots, which then leave them defenseless against the vicissitudes of history.

The columns that are combined here are the result of my dissatisfaction with this situation. They respond to my conviction that faced with the din of the front page, what we lose is the most important thing: sensitivity to the weak signals that might tip us off to a tectonic change.

These pages present significant aspects of an alternative history of recent years. My goal is to find the fleeting detail that will end up turning the world upside down, the underlying trend that gradually reverses certainties, the forgotten footnote that in the end transforms everyone's life. Or perhaps to reinterpret what is already known in order to make visible its implications in seemingly unrelated fields.

Sometimes the details may seem trivial. The global shortage of bicycle parts that made itself felt in the wake of the Covid-19 lockdowns looked like an isolated and unimportant fact. The cognitive damage suffered by Italians who grew up watching junk TV produced by Mediaset — Silvio Berlusconi's media company — can be interpreted as a purely Italian problem. The increasing willingness of dictators to organize mock elections is treated as a common practice.

They are not. If this is the data and circumstances to which my analysis returns time and time again, it is because I sense that they carry within them the seeds of great transformations. They demonstrate, at an incipient moment, the issues that will dominate our future: new technologies — from artificial intelligence to the manipulation of genes — conflict within a society or between countries, the deterioration of the public sphere and the rise of new forms of disguised authoritarianism.

Of course, tectonic shifts are not easy to forecast, and that is precisely what we mean by tectonic. The earth's crust moves only once the underground forces that drive continental shelves reach a critical threshold, enough to overcome the resistance generated by inertia. But the forces that set it in motion are there all along, accumulating quietly until one day a catastrophe reveals them in all their might. They are forces that go from invisible to unmissable in an instant. It is no surprise that geologists are obsessed with searching for the slightest hint of them before they cause an earthquake.

The same thing happens to me. I am always on the lookout — with how much success, you will have to be the judge — for the slightest sign, the detail that leads the forgotten to become new once more. And I look for those weak signals because I believe they are the key that opens and unlocks answers to that initial question: what is happening to us?

Because understanding what is happening to us is a vital task, the first step if we’re to push back against the paralyzing anxiety that defines our era.

MOISÉS NAÍM

Washington, D.C.

2023

A World Without Precedents

This is new. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Many of us shared these thoughts last week after first — and correctly — recoiling horror and indignation at the barbarity of Hamas.

Despite the countless tragedies that Israel has suffered in its 75-year history — ranging from full-scale wars to terrorist attacks — it has never experienced a military assault on this scale targeting its civilian population.

The scenes of murderous terrorists calmly roaming the streets and indiscriminately killing or kidnapping their victims are both cruel and unprecedented. Never before has terrorism struck so fiercely at the heart of Israeli society.

The horror that Hamas's brutality produces in us should not, however, cloud our vision to the other unprecedented situations arising in Israeli politics. Even before the attack, the country was mired in an unparalleled political crisis. The polarization in Israel is so deep that in order to form a government, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was willing to accept the radical conditions demanded by fringe political groups.

Before now, he’d never included the most virulent far-right politicians nor the ultra-Orthodox religious groups in his government. These extremist minorities have now managed to impose radical policies that affect the entire population. Until now Israel has never had to go to war with such a divided society.

But it is not only in the Middle East where this feeling of “never before” reigns. The same is happening in the United States. There, too, a tiny group of far-right Republicans managed to remove the head of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, midway through his term — something that had also never happened before. In Spain and other democracies, tyrannical minorities are causing a wave of unprecedented situations.

But we should remember that this wave of unprecedented situations goes beyond politics, war and the economy. The most important of them is, of course, climate change. Never before has the planet's temperature risen at the rate it is climbing today. Scientists are reporting with genuine alarm that things are moving quickly, which will certainly cause more and more novel scenarios.

The list goes on: Never have we experienced a migration crisis of the magnitude that we are seeing on the southern border of the United States nor in Mediterranean Europe. And we are only beginning to understand the ways in which environmental degradation fuels never-before-seen levels of migration.

Fortunately, in the realm of the unprecedented, not everything is bad. Never before have so many people — at least those privileged with easy access to technology — been able to work from home. The number of remote workers is simply enormous and their impact unparalleled. The number of empty offices in London and the United States has reached its highest point in 20 years. The same is happening with distance education and health care. Never before has physical distance been so inconsequential to the lives of so many people.

And in science and technology, never before have breakthroughs come at this pace. Never before has humanity had the ability to precisely edit the genetic code of organisms, as we are doing with cutting-edge technologies such as CRISPR/Cas9, which allows for the precise altering of the DNA of any organism.

And never before has our ability to alter the genetic code been subtle enough to allow the manipulation of messenger RNA for therapeutic purposes. This was achieved by Katalin Karikó, the winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in medicine, for research that allowed the development of modern vaccines against COVID-19. And it is already beginning to be understood that artificial intelligence is not just another piece of software, but rather constitutes in itself a historic “never before” that could end civilization as we know it.

In this unprecedented world, more and more of everything is happening, and faster. Fragmented geopolitics and a battered global ecosystem give rise to existential risks for humanity, while advances in science and technology empower us in unimaginable ways. We tend to celebrate the latter, but it has its dark side: Hamas committed its crimes by combining medieval tactics with cutting-edge technologies.

And for those of us who live through these times, this makes it much more difficult to think about the future. That’s because as human beings our tendency is to always try to predict what is coming based on what has already happened. But when so many of the things that happen are new, our old tactics tend to fail.

As we stare in the rearview mirror, the future overwhelms us.

October 16, 2023

The Stealth Recession

Much has been said about the “democratic recession,” meaning democracy is retreating in many parts of the world. But there is another recession, less well-publicized, that goes hand in hand with the first and could be more damaging: the global rule of law recession.

What exactly is the rule of law? Well, it’s a group of institutions that guarantee that society functions based on explicit rules that are impartially enforced. The concept encompasses many things: limits on government power, transparent government decision-making, checks on corruption, the protection of fundamental civil rights, public order and personal security, compliance with rules and regulations and, in general, the proper functioning of justice.

Democracy without the rule of law is hollow. One can live in a country where the government is chosen by elections, but if that government repeatedly violates the limits on its power, is corrupt, opaque and tramples the fundamental rights of individuals, it can hardly be said that its citizens are free. It is of little use to hold an election every few years in a country where there is no order, laws are not followed and the courts are rigged.

Hence the gravity of the sprawling study recently published as the Rule of Law Index, by the World Justice Project (WJP). This study gathered together the perceptions and experiences about the rule of law in 142 countries based on surveys of some 149,000 households and more than 3,400 experts.

What they discovered is deeply worrying. The rule of law is in decline. “Our data shows that, in the last year, the rule of law has worsened in 82 countries, or 59% of the countries included in the index,” says Daniela Barba, a researcher at the WJP. “In Latin America and the Caribbean, we see that 18 of the 32 countries in the region experienced a degradation in the rule of law,” she adds.

And these are not isolated data points. The decline is a global phenomenon. For the sixth year in a row, more countries are getting worse than better.

It will surprise no one to see that the countries where the rule of law is strongest are the nations that provide an excellent quality of life for their citizens: Scandinavia stands out, with Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden taking the first four places in the index, and countries such as Germany, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Ireland also in the top ten.

At the other end we have a series of countries devastated by conflict and corruption: Cameroon, Egypt, Nicaragua, Haiti and Cambodia are among the ten worst in the world, but all of them achieve a better score than my beloved and ill-fated Venezuela, which appears dead last in the world ranking for having no limits on the power of the government and a weak and often co-opted judiciary.

In Latin America, Uruguay, Costa Rica and Chile lead the index, all of them placing themselves above 60% of the ideal score. (Denmark hits 90%.) But scores are falling across almost the entire region: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Ecuador and Mexico saw sharp declines in the strength of the rule of law this year. Honduras shows the greatest improvement in the region, although its score has only risen to 41% of the ideal score.

The rule of law is not the same as democracy, and the two should not be confused. There are countries like Singapore, where it is almost impossible to change the government through the ballot box, but where the rule of law is respected. Indeed, Singapore ranks 17th in the global index, ahead of consolidated democracies such as France, Spain and even the United States.

But Singapore is an exception. Much more common are cases where, little by little, the rule of law is eroded, and then democracy collapses because — by that point — it no longer has any way to defend itself. And that is why the sustained trend over time confirmed by the World Justice Project is so worrying. Because as the rule of law is weakened across more and more countries, their democracies become increasingly vulnerable.

Cases like Argentina, which went from occupying the 46th place in the world ranking in 2019 to 63rd place this year, should give us pause. As does Colombia, which fell from 71st to 94th in seven years, and Peru, which went from position 60th to 88th, and also Mexico, which fell from position 79th to 116th. In each of these countries the erosion of the basic institutions that defend democracy has been gradual and almost imperceptible. But its long-term consequences are incalculable.

This may explain why we so seldom here of countries transitioning to democracy anymore. Because traveling the path to democracy where the rule of law is not in force is much more difficult than doing so where complying with the rules is already an established custom.

October 31, 2023

Modi: from Prime Minister to King of Bharat

Once upon a time, a king was bathing in the river when a badly wounded deer came down to the water to give birth. Overwhelmed with compassion, the king adopted its newborn fawn as his pet. Over time, he became so attached to it that at his death, his last sensation was his boundless affection for the animal. For this reason, the legendary King Bharata — the first ruler to unite India — was to be reincarnated as a deer. We are here, of course, in the world of myth and legends, but also of reality. King Bharata’s name comes from Bharat, India in Sanskrit, meaning “the lands of King Bharata.”

Bharat is the name that Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, wants to adopt as his country’s official name. There are many ways to practice populism, and this is one of them. It’s a way to demonstrate power, to nourish narratives that demonize the country's recent past and commemorate the glorious days of the distant past. It also serves to create debates that distract public opinion from the government’s mounting list of daily failures. Persia became Iran, Burma became Myanmar, Venezuela became the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and so on.

Modi's political party is the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Bharat People's Party, or in other words, the Hindu People's Party. And this whole family of words — Bharata, Bharat, Bharatiya — have the same religious origin: they all come from the sacred writings of Hinduism, starting with the Mahabharata, something like the Old Testament of that religion, which is essentially the epic of the Bharat kingdom.

And here's the problem: today's India, the most populous country in the world, is a much more diverse nation than it was in the times of legend. It contains a staggering 950 million Hindus who form the support base of Modi's Hindu Nationalism. But it is also home to 170 million Muslims — more than in Iran and Saudi Arabia combined — as well as 28 million Christians, 20 million Sikhs, eight million Buddhists, and many smaller groups. Trying to impose a purely religious term like Bharat to designate the entire country is an aggressive act of chauvinist populism. In short, ignoring the national identity of the more than 200 million non-Hindu citizens of India is a dangerous provocation.

None of this is surprising because religious chauvinism has been Modi’s stock in trade since his career began. In 2002, when a series of riots between religious communities shook the state of Gujarat, then-governor Modi stood by while more than 1,000 Muslims were murdered by hordes of angry Hindus. The lesson that Modi took from this tragedy was manifested in his political behavior: the more cruelty he showed toward the Muslim minority, the more electoral victories he was able to rack up.

Modi’s BJP government has never stopped inflaming religious tensions because it knows it’s a tried-and-true method of clinging to power. Through a gigantic social media machine, the BJP and its sister organizations fuel tensions between religious communities every time an election looms. WhatsApp chains spread explosive rumors about sexual abuse perpetrated by Muslim pedophiles against Hindu girls, and of course they underline Muslims’ voracious appetite for beef, since cows are considered sacred in Hinduism.

And Hindu vindictiveness doesn’t just target Muslims. In June, Indian secret agents allegedly murdered Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a wellknown Sikh community leader, in broad daylight in a quiet suburb of Vancouver, Canada. The Canadian government's outrage and the ongoing volley of accusations between the two countries have created a diplomatic incident that is expanding across the globe, introducing unprecedented tensions between India and Western partners that, until recently, were friends.

Modi has perfected the techniques of populism, polarization, and post-truth, and continues to use them to hold on to power. Trying to change the name of India to a purely Hindu term like Bharat fits perfectly into this pattern of behavior that is endangering Gandhi’s democratic legacy. And all this in the name of King Bharata, who just wanted to take care of an orphaned fawn.

September 30, 2023

Dictators Without an Exit

One of the critical debates of our time is how to deal with dictators. In dozens of countries there is a fierce clash between those who will only accept the unconditional defeat and the eventual prosecution of a dictator and his cronies and those who are willing to accept horrible concessions in order to establish a democracy.

It is an issue whose urgency has become impossible to ignore. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of his democratic neighbor, Ukraine, amplified the world’s attention to this difficult problem. But it is not just a problem in Russia: from Chinese President Xi Jinping’s concentration camps in Xinjiang to the tight control over dissent that Teodoro Obiang has maintained in Equatorial Guinea since 1979, the world today is governed by no less than 39 dictators (and that’s without counting the eight kings, emirs and sultans who rule single-handedly).

Of those 39 dictators currently in power, 20 of them rule with impunity in Africa, 14 more in Asia, three in Latin America and two in Europe. Three command nuclear arsenals — Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un. Others are the despots of countries with significant international influence, such as Egypt, Cuba and Vietnam. Several rule the poorest countries in the world: Burundi, Laos, Nicaragua and many others whose misery stems in many cases from the dictator’s incompetence and corrupt leadership.

Getting rid of a dictator today is far more difficult than it was a couple of generations ago. Back then, a common solution was exile. Tyrants like Idi Amin of Uganda or Baby Doc Duvalier of Haiti knew that, if push came to shove, they could discreetly board a plane with suitcases full of money and retire in a luxurious mansion, preferably in the south of France. Those days are over.

On October 10th, 1998, General Augusto Pinochet was arrested in the name of universal jurisdiction during a stay in London, on charges of genocide and torture during his regime (1973-1990). Although he was finally released for health reasons and returned to Chile, his arrest marked the beginning of the end of exile as a solution to removing entrenched dictators from power. Years later, in 2006, former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic died in a cell in The Hague while awaiting the verdict in his international trial for crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes.

The intentions of these international prosecutions were undoubtedly good, but their unintended consequences continue to shape politics worldwide. By substantially increasing the cost a dictator faces for relinquishing power, these cases have paradoxically hampered all subsequent attempts at removing entrenched despots.

When the alternative offered to dictators is a long prison sentence and the loss of the vast fortunes they and their cronies have amassed, it is not surprising that they will do whatever it takes to avoid losing power. For dictators, staying in government is no longer about politics: it becomes an existential requirement. Partly because of this deeper entrenchment, the process that took place in past decades, when dictators left power and were replaced by democratic leaders and their followers, is now infrequent.

Of the last five countries which ousted their dictators, only one — Armenia — seems to have had any success in its transition to democracy. The others have seen their democratization process regress (Tunisia), collapse (Myanmar, Egypt), or degenerate into civil war (Sudan). In the latter case, there is an open war between military factions while the former dictator, Omar al-Bashir, sits in prison awaiting a trial that will likely carry the death penalty.

There are few cases in which massive street protests, combined with the support of the armed forces and parts of the international community, succeed in ousting a dictator. But this is happening less frequently. Much more common is the experience of countries such as Belarus, Cameroon, Cuba, Hong Kong, Iran, Thailand, Nicaragua or Venezuela, where large protest movements have been repressed by their dictators, in most cases brutally.

The world has lost the ability to remove dictators from power. The lack of attractive options and tolerable risks that result from losing power has led autocrats to redouble their efforts to repel the attempts to remove them. Dictators today are overthrown less frequently than in the past. And when they leave, what is often left is a country that is difficult to democratize or even govern.

The world needs to relearn the art and science of ousting dictators. Or get used to the dismal reality that tyranny and anarchy, not democracy, are the world’s most common form of government.

June 13, 2023

A Gold Rush In Space

While the world is preoccupied with climate change, war and artificial intelligence, another profoundly transformative phenomenon is in full swing: space exploration. And getting to where we are today is just part of a long and fascinating history. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched a rocket into space. It carried a polished 23-inch metal sphere that weighed 185 pounds and had four antennas. This first artificial satellite, Sputnik, sparked a fierce race between the United States and the Soviet Union to achieve technological dominance in space. A lot has changed since then.

Just last week, for example, SpaceX, Elon Musk’s aerospace company, carried four private passengers to the International Space Station on one of its rockets. As this was happening, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s company, finalized a $3.4 billion contract with NASA to develop a spacecraft capable of taking people to the Moon. And Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic sent its “space plane” to the edge of space, carrying two pilots and four company employees.

These are just three of the audacious — and expensive — ongoing efforts to explore the universe in what is shaping up to be a renaissance for space travel. Superpowers — the United States and the USSR— used to be virtually the only players. Today, several other countries — like China and India, for example — have launched their own space programs and private investment is booming.

In addition to privatization and commercialization, there are other forces that will influence and shape the new space race, including militarization, managing the space pollution caused by thousands of inoperative satellites still floating in orbit, as well as the insuppressible human passion to explore.

Private companies are taking the lead and developing the new technologies needed to conquer this growing market. The space industry was valued at $469 billion in 2021. SpaceX and Blue Origin are the top competitors. But these giants are not alone: they are supported by a vast ecosystem of some 10,000 small- and medium-sized companies in what is known as the New Space economy. This network of providers ranges from the producers of components for satellites and ground control systems to the designers and manufacturers of rockets, as well as those who want to profit from the rise of space tourism.

Another significant trend is the militarization of space. The major powers are developing orbital weapons and, simultaneously, defense systems against this type of attack. Anti-satellite weapons and surveillance systems are just a few examples of how space is becoming a theater of geopolitical conflict. In an incipient way, some of this is already happening.

The surprising success of the Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invasion owes much to its access to satellite technologies that allow it to dominate the battlefield, aim its weapons with pinpoint accuracy and attack enemy supply lines. We have yet to witness the first war where an adversary’s orbital infrastructure is directly attacked, but that day will inevitably come. And when it does, the international system could be seriously destabilized.

A third aspect of the new space boom is space junk. It is made up of debris from previous satellite launches that no longer serve any function but continues to float haphazardly through space. This has created a thick layer of flotsam that no one knows how to remove. It is a growing problem because many of the new technologies require a large number of satellites to function. Proposals such as that of entrepreneur Greg Weiler of OneWeb — a company that intends to launch 100,000 satellites into space by 2030 — have raised serious concerns. As OneWeb has acknowledged, there are already almost a million pieces of orbital junk moving around the Earth at over 16,000 miles per hour, and the technologies to recover this debris are still in their infancy. Although these satellites are small, their numbers are enormous, and when they go out of service, they will still be in orbit, putting at risk all the systems that are still operational.

Why is all this happening? Two motives: profit and curiosity. Many technologies, such as global positioning systems (GPS) and projects like Elon Musk’s Starlink, can only be commercialized with a vast space presence.

In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs and technologists sense that there are great fortunes to be made in the cosmos, fueling the gold rush into space. On the other hand, human beings are innately curious. Space represents an unknown horizon, an irresistible challenge for our species. Our desire to discover and explore new frontiers will continue to drive interest in space as a market and as a battlefield.

When the great British explorer George Mallory was asked in 1924 why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, he replied, “because it’s there.” It sounds silly, but the challenge of what is there that we have not yet managed to conquer will always have a special attraction for humans. The thirst to be the first to conquer a challenge is one of the main factors that defines our species. We want to know what’s out there. And space... is there.

May 31, 2023

How Our Language Got Disrupted

Changing times infuse new importance into some words, while marginalizing or completely transforming others. “Platform” is a good example of this. The word used to refer primarily to — according to Merriam-Webster — “a flat horizontal surface that is usually higher than the adjoining area.” Not anymore.

Now Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook (now Meta) are called “platforms.” They aren’t alone. Thousands of entrepreneurs have begun calling their companies “platforms.”

That’s right, “platforms” are in, and “companies” are out. It turns out that platforms often are companies that want to dress up — or erase — the perception that they are corporations. But the reality is that behind the vast majority of platforms is a for-profit company.

Many platforms make money by drastically altering the way we work — changing existing products, introducing new ones,or making others more efficient. Cellphones are an example of this type of “disruptive innovation” because they have drastically altered the communication industry and many other “adjacent spaces.” Of course, for every success of this magnitude, there are hundreds of thousands of platforms (based on some alleged or real disruptive innovation) that fail.

Another concept that has become very popular is “disruptive innovation.” This is a term found in just about any presentation that seeks to promote an investment, restructure an organization, adopt a new technology, lay off employees or launch a new product — which nowadays is no longer called that but rather commonly referred to as a “solution.” These solutions are preferably “green” and “sustainable” and operate within a “space” (formerly known as a “market”).

The success of companies that, through a “digital transformation,” seek to boost their competitiveness is commonly explained as the result of “organic” growth. This usually means increased sales or decreased costs that originate from efforts and initiatives that happen within the organization. All of this, of course, occurs thanks to the “team,” the group of people formerly known as “employees.” News about how things are going on the platform — both good and bad — are usually communicated on behalf of the “team.” In some organizations, the role of the team leader is no longer to command but to evangelize, educate, persuade and encourage the team so that its members are “aligned” with the platform.

In fact, there are business executives who have changed the name of their position to “Chief Evangelist.” According to indeed.com, an online company that seeks to connect job seekers with employers, a Chief Evangelist is “an active ambassador of a business, product or service. They spread a positive message about a brand to advocate for others to use a service or buy a product. […] While customers can be decent brand evangelists, hiring someone to do the job full-time might bring in more sales. That is why it might be better for brands to hire evangelists that are dedicated to promoting their products.”

All these activities must “generate synergies,” “catalyze change” and “align” the size and culture of the organization to its mission and the financial realities of the platform. It should also foster the “resilience” of the platform and those who work on it. Resilience, of course, is the ability to recover from a misfortune and to adjust to the new situation. Some trees that survive strong gusts of wind are good examples of resilience. They bend, but they don’t break. For some time now, there has been a proliferation in the use of resilience to refer to the ability of organizations and human beings to recover from negative events.

The new phraseology is strongly imbued with the cult of change. It follows, then, that the magnitude of change which inspires and justifies this plethora of new words must be unprecedented, or at least is promoted as such. We know, however, that unprecedented changes are rare. Rose Bertin, Queen Marie Antoinette’s seamstress, famously explained in the 1770s that: “There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.”

Our language continues to evolve, as it always has, and this serves to help people express new values with every phrase, sentence and paragraph. This, of course, is nothing new. But today we are seeing how our allergic reaction to authority and hierarchy leads us to hide power relations behind a series of euphemisms that obscure more than they illuminate. And it will continue to be so, until we are saved by some new disruptive platform in the language space, catalyzed by a resilient team that manages to achieve organic synergies!

May 17, 2023

This Time It’s Different

New scientific discoveries and technological innovations are often exalted as harbingers of sweeping change. However, few of these “breakthroughs” live up to the hype. Instead, they are overtaken by other discoveries or technologies that go beyond what had initially been seen as a life-altering historic contribution.

That’s why it’s always a good idea to be skeptical of any new technology that, we’re told, will “change everything.” Typically, it’s just a lot of hyperbole and exaggeration, and the world doesn’t really change much after all. But sometimes — rarely — a new technology comes along that does set off profound and permanent changes in the lives of billions of people. Today, humanity finds itself facing one such moment. This time everything really will be different.

Recent innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) are not a passing fad whose consequences are being exaggerated. These are transformative technologies that will be with us for a long time. Indeed, the wave of innovation sparked by AI will change the world. It will affect rich and poor, democrats and autocrats, politicians and business leaders, scientists and dropouts, as well as singers, writers and journalists. It will also impact all kinds of activities, professions and lifestyles.

The so-called “large language models” — which are not limited to the high-profile ChatGPT from OpenAI — are a type of artificial intelligence that can understand and generate human language, as well as automate functions that until now have required human beings. Other forms of AI have learned to identify and turn huge volumes of text, images, sounds, voices and videos into perfect imitations. They can produce complete sentences, answer any type of question, and perfectly reproduce voices that cannot be detected as imitations. They are also able to learn a person’s voice and use it in a conversation with another individual who does not know they are talking to an AI-powered computer.

These models have an infinite number of practical applications. The fight against climate change and the diagnosis and treatment of serious health problems are being tackled more effectively thanks to the use of AI.

All of this is happening very fast. A report from UBS Bank reports that ChatGPT reached more than 100 million active users just two months after its launch. It took TikTok nine months to reach that number, while Instagram needed two and a half years. ChatGPT is the fastest adopted technology in history.

Like all new technologies, AI is a double-edged sword: it will have a positive and a negative impact. All technology is dual: Gutenberg’s printing press was used to print both the Bible and Mein Kampf.

In a short time, dictators, terrorists, scammers and criminals will be putting all their creativity to work exploiting AI, with dire consequences for humanity. Trying to stop them will not be easy.

Those who try these technologies are surprised by their immense possibilities. But those who know them intimately and understand the risks they carry can easily see the global chaos they could engender. Scientists, businesses and security agencies that are heavily involved in the development of AI are raising the alarm about the rapid spread of the new technology. In a recent interview conducted by Fortune’s Alan Murray, Tom Siebel, the head of a major AI group, repeatedly called the risk associated with these technologies “terrifying.” Elon Musk has said that AI could cause “civilization destruction.”

History shows that efforts to contain the spread and misuse of new technologies don’t work. Nuclear weapons, for example, continue to spread around the world despite the enormous efforts that have been made to limit their proliferation.

Once such a powerful new technology enters our species’ toolbox, there is no getting rid of it. The recent initiative by a notable group of experts to put in place a moratorium on the research and development of artificial intelligence demonstrates that even leading experts share the same intuition as many of us: we’re not ready.

Certainly, our society is not ready for what is about to be thrust upon us as a result of the birth of artificial intelligence. Our only alternative appears to be to adapt as quickly as we can, because now that the Pandora’s box is open, there is likely no going back.

May 3, 2023

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