The accelerated speed with which political and economic events have unfolded during the first week of December serves as a reference to understand what those of us who are in the accelerated evolution of Artificial Intelligence have been feeling in recent years.
I venture to suggest that you get a strange feeling when you hear Artificial Intelligence. Yes, when in an article, talk, debate, or news, you read or hear the term AI. I’m not telling you this because of the author’s drum roll, to highlight the great importance of the story that will follow. Nor because of the increasing fatigue caused by the excessive repetition of AI throughout the entire exhibition. Although I confess that I do a little too. In addition to both sensations that I share with you, this time I am going to refer to that quick vision of how interesting it is going to be or not, and I observe it as soon as I see the warnings.
You see, the traffic light begins to change color when the dangers, the risks that await us, are named. Does anyone guess? The bias, the black box, the hallucinations, the end of the human. Don’t get me wrong, I believe as much as you do in risks, but we already have them defined in the repository of more than 700 risks from the MIT team led by Neil Thompson, from this same year 2024. We can do a security test like in a box of safe sand to test them. Debate. Should there be a debate then? Of course, but systematic repetition bores me as much as it bores you. It appears as an established cliché to talk about something that needs to be named but that we really don’t want to study much further, no matter that the methodology is available. That’s why I prefer to talk to you today about the characteristics, and above all of them, the speed of events, which is what this article is about. How can we explain it to those who share so many things with us, except the conviction that this AI thing is serious.
And in this month of December 2024 we have witnessed a succession of events that is not easy to understand from our rational dimension. That’s why I think this time we have an opportunity to explain “what happens to us.”
A week of vertigo
I tell you, a regime of more than sixty years, that of Hafez el-Assad’s Baath until just over yesterday led by his son Bashar. Well, as I told you, this only surviving regime of the Arab springs, those of 2010, fell on December 8. That something of more than sixty years and twelve of resistance above all others, falls in eleven days, just eleven days, at least impresses me.
Although perhaps not as much as coinciding with multiple simultaneous relevant events. You see, two days earlier the Romanian elections were annulled. Which has nothing to do with it, but since this article is about speed, it is relevant especially after having already voted under the announced shadow of manipulation in electoral campaigns throughout 2024, almost half of the world’s population in this planet. Well, as I told you, the fact that on December 6 in Romania the first elections were invalidated, reveals something striking to assimilate.
The accelerated speed with which political and economic events have unfolded during the first week of December serves as a reference to understand what those of us who are in the accelerated evolution of Artificial Intelligence in recent years have been feeling.
That a day before, on December 5th, bitcoin had reached one hundred thousand dollars may prove right to some, but that on the same day the 6th and subsequent days, it would have continued to rise, that already disproves the reason of the rest who predicted it but that they never thought that it would not stop in that resistance.
That a little before these three events, on December 3, one of the most prosperous states on the planet, South Korea, has a crisis that in no way envies Venezuela, its prime minister decreeing martial law for a private matter, Does it tell you anything about Korea, about December or about speed? What recently happened in decades, today are days.
Are you still not noticing your heartbeat? Well, add to it the decisions on the economic policy of the People’s Republic of China to reactivate domestic consumption, the election of the people who are going to carry the greatest accumulation of power of this decade by an administration in the United States, or the accelerated changes in the affairs exteriors at a global level that we see these days. Regardless of your convictions, you cannot deny that the month of December 2024 is not a busy month. Its first week even a paradigm of speed of events. And the sand in the clock seems to fall too quickly. Difficult for us humans to understand. Some will call it “complicated.” It is worse than that, it is an unleashing of events in a volatile world subject to uncertainty, the definition of complex. Similar, yes, although it is not the same.
What does this have to do with the Artificial Intelligence you started this article with? Did I tell you at some point that this was not just about AI but about speed? Speed like the one we “the people of the bubble” are experiencing. Yes, although everyone mentions it and seems to care about it, the vast majority of your neighbors do not share its decisive impact. What I was telling you, I’m serious.
Bubble is for the vast majority the image of what they want to happen, to explode into nothing. Quite the contrary, “those in the bubble”, those of us who live it every day, who have been experiencing the same sensation of acceleration for more than two years that the rest of our neighbors have felt during that first week of December. I tell you two years for not telling you during various phases of the decade. And I tell you two years so as not to include what we are feeling these last days of mid-December, much more. Yes, believe me much more with the release of tools that we thought would not happen this year. The truth is that six months ago we didn’t think they would ever happen. Last month they wouldn’t happen in December. That we get used to this speed is nothing that begins to surprise us. That we have not been able to explain it until now, perhaps yes.
Perhaps the example of events in politics and economics in the general media has given us the possibility of explaining it. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what events would have to occur on the planet to explain the sensation of speed that we “those in the bubble” are experiencing at this moment. For the moment I am content with you seeing that we can continue in this whirlwind, yes, but without too much vertigo. Continue with our normal lives, for example, writing the article of the week.
