A few years ago, personal shoppers, people who act as assistants for shopping, became fashionable. Now there is a Catalan start-up that has taken a step further. Do you need a person to accompany you shopping, or is it no longer necessary with artificial intelligence (AI) technology? The system exists and has already been launched experimentally in some shopping centers, and the first results are quite promising, if we are to believe the feedback from those who have used it.

The beginning of the mechanization of war, beyond firearms, took place in the second half of the 19th century with the use of railways for troop transport during the American Civil War and European conflicts of the 1860s and 1870s, especially the Franco-Prussian War. World War I represented a major leap forward in the use of self-propelled vehicles, including airplanes, armored cars, tanks, automobiles, and motorcycles. The conflicts that followed throughout the 20th century greatly refined warfare mechanization, adding flying bombs, missiles, and nuclear weapons. All of this allowed killing and destruction on an unprecedented scale.In our century, armies have been equipping themselves with weapons that allow soldiers to avoid the front line, and to fight from the second line or even further back. Drones have been the star innovation, as they replace manned aviation at a much lower cost and without putting at risk the life of a soldier as specialized as the pilot. These devices are remotely controlled by a pilot and have proven very effective in the wars in Ukraine and Iran.The latest addition to conventional warfare is artificial intelligence (AI). It involves automating something that until now seemed impossible without human intervention: fighting each other. There are now autonomous military drones, which do not need any pilot to remotely control them, but can fly all by themselves thanks to AI. They are equipped with a multitude of sensors that allow them to navigate without human intervention, including inertia sensors, GPS, altimeters, air sensors, lidar, ultrasound sensors, stereoscopic cameras, electro-optical cameras for daytime operation, infrared and heat sensors for nighttime operation, radars, etc. All the information obtained is fused and processed in real time with AI techniques, including computer vision. This gives them a reliable and real perception of the battlefield, which feeds other AI algorithms that decide what to do in unexpected and unpredictable emergency situations, and choose targets in complex environments.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, will carry out a new round of layoffs affecting approximately 10% of its workforce, which is about 8,000 employees. The measure will be applied on May 20, according to an internal memorandum leaked by Bloomberg this Thursday. In the communication addressed to employees, the company's chief people officer, Janelle Gale, confirms that the decision will also involve the closure of about 6,000 unfilled vacancies.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, will carry out a new round of layoffs affecting approximately 10% of its workforce, which is about 8,000 employees. The measure will be applied on May 20, according to an internal memorandum leaked by Bloomberg this Thursday. In the communication addressed to employees, the company's chief people officer, Janelle Gale, confirms that the decision will also involve the closure of about 6,000 unfilled vacancies.

On Monday evening, during the break of Telenotícies, TV3 announced the premiere of La gran cita on the 3Cat platform for Tuesday. But Toni Cruanyes reminded us, on two occasions, that we could already watch the program that same Monday. A lack of coordination within the channel that caused confusion for the viewer.Dulceida, “an expert at organizing parties”, joins the cast ofinfluencers who create content in Spanish but have been awarded a program on public Catalan television. To conceal their fragilities in front of the camera, they have opted for the walk and talk formula, walking and talking at the same time, to reinforce their authority.The big date is a dating show with elements of reality. The one hundred participants who want to hook up have previously been paired through artificial intelligence. They know there is someone highly compatible and will look for them based on the relational dynamics proposed by the show. “It’s an experiment that will change their lives,” assures Dulceida. The format is much more powerful than last season's stale Love Cost. It seems more like a logical evolution of that Thirty Years' Love at First Sight with all the influences of private television and technology.The program has a tacky sheen typical of a graduation party with glamorous pretensions, but it makes up for it with an excellent cast, good direction, and impeccable sound design. It has merit, considering the complexities of the format. The big event is inclusive: it incorporates sexual options and gender diversity without establishing categories, with the virtue of not objectifying or sexualizing the participants. So far, three episodes have been released corresponding to the first stage of the game: the construction of the finalist couples, who will be tested in the following episodes to check their evolution.The big event hooks thanks to the confluence of different factors. On the one hand, the contestants' temperament. Absolutely normal young people, who convey authenticity and are part of our most everyday reality. They thus distance themselves from the artificial and histrionic stereotypes typical of this television genre. On the other hand, the game stimulates the audience, who, from home, becomes a predictor and a judge. It is impossible not to comment or value the contestants' decisions and choices. Any program that provokes a smile from the viewer while watching it has a lot won. The idea of a mirror is also key: seduction exposes the protagonists to a vulnerability and fragility in which, more or less, everyone feels reflected. Excitement, ridicule, shame, disappointment... are emotions that provoke easy identification. And that is why the program becomes appetizing. However, as the program progresses, interest wanes, because the ensemble game is diluted. The conflict becomes individualized, the drama becomes personalized, and the elements of reality are accentuated. It will be interesting to see how it evolves and how it all fits into public television. The most obvious proof is the fear of premiering it on TV3 and limiting it, for now, to the digital platform.

It seems that artificial intelligence has arrived to stay. As happened with other technological revolutions, the fear has set in that it will end up destroying jobs massively. Nothing new. When the internet appeared, the end of many professions was also announced.Beyond opinions, recent studies point in another direction: AI increases worker productivity by around 4% and, in the short term, no significant job destruction has been detected. This does not mean, however, that there will be no changes. There will be, and many.AI will transform tasks, redefine professional profiles, and force adaptation. Just fifteen years ago, almost no one imagined the current demand for artificial intelligence experts. Similarly, today we don't know what the key jobs will be in fifteen years. And this is not an anomaly: it is the usual functioning of technological progress. However, this impact will not be uniform. Medium and large companies start with an advantage, as they can better afford the initial implementation costs. The question is not whether AI will change the labor market, but how and who it will benefit most.The core issue, however, is whether this increase in productivity will translate into better wages. Recent experience suggests skepticism. In other technological revolutions, gains have been unevenly distributed: more qualified profiles have emerged stronger, while workers with more routine tasks have seen their bargaining power reduced.The challenge, therefore, is not only technological, but also social and political. If the benefits of AI are concentrated in a few companies or profiles, the result will be a more unequal labor market. If, on the other hand, it is accompanied by training, adaptation, and certain guarantees, it can become a tool for shared progress.

I read, with a mixture of astonishment and disbelief, a study that claimed that many people prefer artificial intelligence-generated poetry because they find it more pleasant, clear, and emotive than human poetry. Researchers Brian Porter and Édouard Machery argued in Scientific Reports that, for many readers, these texts even surpassed those of Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, or Emily Dickinson.

Artificial intelligence is already part of the daily life of primary care in Catalonia. In fact, ChatGPT is the most used tool by family doctors, far ahead of other options, according to a study published in The Lancet Primary Care. The work, promoted by the Societat Catalana de Medicina Familiar i Comunitària (CAMFiC) and led by Antoni Sisó, shows that AI has become a regular support in tasks such as medical literature research, text drafting, or clinical session preparation.

I will tell you a real anecdote.A close relative submitted their final master's thesis a month ago. The center ran the thesis through Turnitin, a program that calculates the probability that a thesis was generated by AI. If it's very high, they reject it and require it to be redone. It came out at 8%.The thing is that when we received the correction from the tutor, it seemed a bit strange to us. It was too impeccable and with somewhat baroque expressions. Strangely precise points to correct. How strange, we said to ourselves! We uploaded it to a detector. Result: 80% probability of being AI. I promise it's true.It's no reproach! I think what the tutor did is perfect, as long as he had read the work and polished the AI's correction. But the anecdote shows us that it is absurd to try to expel artificial intelligence from the educational system.It happened with the calculator, and with the internet. And with Google! Do you remember when it was forbidden to use search engines for schoolwork? Little by little we saw that the issue was not spending three hours looking for a piece of data that could be found in thirty seconds. The important thing, from an educational point of view, was to know what to do with that data.Introducing AI into the educational system is quite a challenge. We must differentiate between using a tool and using thought. A student can use AI and force themselves to order ideas, compare approaches, correct an argument, imagine examples, or improve a complex theory. To think!The problem is the student who doesn't think, only copies or pretends a competence and delivers an empty text.So before he will have to learn to write, of course. You cannot put a child in front of an AI before they learn to write well, to read, to order ideas, to sustain arguments... Just as you don't teach to use a calculator before knowing the times tables, we will have to introduce AI after the student has achieved these skills.Once this threshold is overcome, introducing AI will allow us to develop in our young people the skills that are already most in demand in the labor market: judging, refining, correcting, reinterpreting, contrasting, personalizing…Therefore, this is not about whether the student can use AI. The question is at what age they start using it, how they should use it, and to develop which skills. We will have to design exercises in which AI raises new skills: asking for processes, demanding intermediate versions, introducing oral debate, having a student explain why they have accepted a suggestion and why they have rejected another.This is the future. And it will require great masters... in person!

This week Anthropic has presented an AI that it has decided not to sell because it considers it too dangerous; Meta has launched the first closed model in its history and has abandoned the commitment to open source that it had preached as a moral obligation, and OpenAI is preparing GPT-6 while a journalistic report uncovers very questionable practices by the director. All three together paint the portrait of an industry in a race without brakes, incapable of self-governance or not interested in doing so.

1. “It’s a 3D view accompanied by personal experience, which gives us a much better interpretation than many images obtained by robotic probes”. I found it gratifying that a NASA administrator, Lori Glaze, recognized the human gaze, at a time when AI seems poised to overwhelm natural intelligence, risking domination over collective experience, ridiculing our condition. Victor Glover, one of the four astronauts who orbited the Moon, said during the eclipse: “It’s the strangest and most surreal sight we’ve had today, with the Earth’s glow illuminating the Moon”. And the spacecraft continues its adventure, which no one can explain better than the four people who have lived it. Without them, there would have been events but not an experience. That is, a lived reality transmitted by beings of flesh, bone, blood, and natural intelligence, who will be able to explain it to us (with the limitations imposed by the relevant authorities, it must be said, which is also a human condition) with the intensity of the lived experience. That is, a perception, from reason, accompanied by sensations, feelings, strengths, and weaknesses, that shape our species and that AI, capable of generating infinite accumulation and combination of data, will never be able to transmit with the singularity and sensitivity that, for better or worse, constitutes the human condition.

In 2019, a Chinese developer created a GitHub repository, the most important social network for programmers worldwide, called “996.ICU”. The codename denounced the exploitative labor conditions of Chinese tech companies: if you work 996, from 9 AM to 9 PM, 6 days a week, you’ll end up in the ICU. The repository went viral, with more and more Chinese programmers supporting it and creating blacklists of companies that applied the 996, such as Alibaba, Huawei, or Tencent. Chinese tech companies and the government were alerted, but the wave was difficult to stop: GitHub, a large open-source library, is the only major Western social network that is not censored in China. The 996 became a major national debate. Two years later, this spontaneous labor movement managed to get the Chinese government and courts to declare these working conditions illegal.In recent years, there has been much talk about open Chinese AI models. The most famous was Deepseek, but Qwen, Manus, or Kimi are also well-known in the programming community. Unlike the closed and private AI of American tech companies, Chinese companies have opted for open, free, and highly modifiable models. This has made them popular among startups or developing countries. Right now, open Chinese AI models are the only ones that can rival American ones. They have become one of China's most cutting-edge technological sectors, and a great source of national pride.China's technological success is often explained through state subsidies or long-term plans of the Communist Party. But, as analyst Kevin Xu explains, the Chinese AI models that are now so successful have not emerged from government initiatives, but from a spontaneous movement from below: the social mass of Chinese open-source programmers who launched the campaign against 996 is the same one that has created the AI models that fascinate the world.

Escalation is usually understood as a simple increase in violence, but it is actually a more complex phenomenon: a crisis escalates when it intensifies, expands to other geographical areas or domains (land, naval, aerospace, or cyber), or affects increasingly sensitive targets, thus becoming more difficult to control. Today, this risk is greater because war increasingly depends on a set of technologies that change its logic: the use of precision and long-range weapons, the proliferation of drones –and, above all, the possibility of using them in swarms–, artificial intelligence, cyberspace, electronic warfare, satellites, and, in some cases, hypersonic weapons. But also because many of these capabilities are more accessible and spread beyond major powers. Not all have the same weight, but they share a common underlying effect: they accelerate events, increase ambiguity, and make it more likely that a limited action will be perceived as a more serious step than perhaps intended. The first problem is speed. Precision capabilities –the combination of guided weapons, sensors, command and control networks, and navigation tools that allow for the precise location, tracking, and engagement of targets– can produce profound effects in a very short time. The novelty is that the time between observation, decision, and action has been radically shortened, between the sensors that detect, the command centers that process information, and the vectors that execute the attack. Technology compresses decision cycles and favors premature reactions or those based on an incomplete reading of the situation. A well-coordinated attack can not only destroy physical targets: it can degrade command and control, disrupt communications, degrade radar coverage, or hinder target detection and tracking. To all this must be added AI, which accelerates data fusion, target prioritization, and the pace of decision-making, as well as hypersonic weapons, which, due to their speed, maneuverability, and shorter warning times, can further reduce the margin for interpreting signals and calibrating responses. The strategic problem is evident: as time shortens, the risk of reacting not so much to what is known as to what is feared increases.

Beth Noveck (New Jersey, USA, 1971) makes it clear in each of her answers that she refuses to fall into defeatism. She offers solutions, gives examples of success, and argues that AI can help improve the functioning of institutions. And she knows what she's talking about, not only because she is an expert in how to use technology to make governments more open, but because she knows institutions from the inside: she was the first Chief Technology Officer of the United States during the administration of Barack Obama. She visits Barcelona to sponsor the presentation of the Pompeu Fabra University's 2026-2037 Strategy.

Over the last decade, the technology sector has experienced a boom in Software as a Service (SaaS), which became one of the leaders of digital transformation in the business world. This cloud-based software, with user subscription programs and employee interfaces, largely defined how SMEs should approach their digital transformation. Traditional SaaS marked a turning point, especially for business cost management, particularly in the area of ​​human resources. However, the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), and especially AI-powered autonomous agents, has changed the rules of the game and led to a situation that the ecosystem has dubbed as SaaSpocalypseOr the SaaS apocalypse. It's not so much the end of SaaS as a reinvention of the sector, which is realizing that it won't thrive unless it shifts towards an agentive version—that is, integrating agentive AI. The model now requires autonomous agents capable of executing end-to-end workflows with human oversight, but with a degree of autonomy. An example of this shift is the Catalan company Nodus, an operational architecture that allows for the structural deployment, governance, and scaling of digital workers within a company, preventing the fragmentation that arises when AI is implemented in a scattered way. Founded in Catalonia, the company began developing its technology two years ago and will be working with clients by 2025, aiming to integrate AI into the operations of SMEs to help them grow in an integrated manner.

Factorial, the platform dedicated to AI-powered business operations, announced on Tuesday the launch of the AI ​​Acceleration Fund, a €10 million fund to boost the adoption of these technologies and the digitalization of business operations in European companies. According to CEO Jordi Romero, "the goal is to lower the barrier to entry for AI adoption for SMEs" and facilitate companies' transition from pilot programs to real-world deployments of automation and data usage in areas such as human resources, finance, technology, and operations throughout the entire employee lifecycle: performance, workforce analytics, and planning. The program, operational from Tuesday and with applications open until April 30, has a budget of €10 million structured in two equivalent components. The first tranche, worth €5 million, is allocated as direct cost reductions applied immediately upon signing the contract, without impacting the commitment to the platform. The second tranche, also worth €5 million, is offered as AI credits within the Factorial platform itself, so that companies have additional resources as their transformation program matures. Furthermore, participating companies will have access to a transformation support program that includes training and development webinars, access to events, and thought leadership reports.

It has been ten years since a phenomenon that revolutionized the streets and phones of thousands of people around the world. The Pokémon Go app, an augmented reality game in which players have to go outside and search for creatures with their mobile camera, became a huge success. But the mobile cameras of users have served the game's creator, the company Niantic, to achieve a more ambitious goal. It has used the photos, without players knowing, to create a three-dimensional map of the world that autonomous robots will now use to move through the streets, especially when delivering packages and orders.

For years, sociologist Elisa García-Mingo has immersed herself in the study of the machosphere, online communities that spread misogynistic content, whether through ridiculing comments and messages or by asking artificial intelligence to reinvent photographs of women to undress them.

Did you know that algorithms decide what ads we see on social media? It might seem insignificant, but it's not. "If you're a young person about to decide on a university degree, it's very likely that if you're a guy, social media will show you degrees in engineering and computer science, and if you're a girl, degrees in education, nursing, and caregiving," says Liliana Arroyo Moliner, PhD in sociology and director of the Chair for Socially Responsible Digital Innovation. Milagros Sainz, a researcher and professor at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), explains that the popular Google Maps app "uses a man's pace to calculate walking distances, which often makes women or people with mobility issues take longer." There's also discrimination when looking for work, in healthcare, and with the algorithms used by banks to decide whether or not to grant a loan, because the mathematical models of these algorithms are applied in very different fields, and many decisions are made taking them into account.

It seems increasingly urgent to provide our students with tools that allow them to differentiate rigorous information from falsehood and to foster critical thinking. The problem is that we do not have infallible tools that save us the effort of thinking. This is why I want to talk about the tree pop of the Pacific Northwest (Pacific Northwest tree octopus).