A few days ago, Nobel laureate in literature Olga Tokarczuk commented that she had used artificial intelligence for the research for her new book. Shortly after, a story that won the Commonwealth Prize received numerous accusations of having been produced with AI. Now the issue is closer to home: after being accused of plagiarism on X, Antoni Gelonch has had to admit that he has used AI to write an article.The Turing test has never been on everyone's lips so much: was this written by a human mind or a digital mind? It is not surprising, however, that it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to distinguish between one type of mind and another. After all, digital minds are built from everything that humans have created over the millennia. In recent decades, we have placed an excessive emphasis on productivity and have increasingly prioritized systematization and structure, even in spheres considered most creative. There are countless guides and manuals in English on how to write articles, essays, poetry, narratives, novels, or doctoral theses, on how to conduct research or give talks that captivate the audience. We have measured and limited time and characters, we have designed the most suitable strategies to execute each task, we have created courses for absolutely everything. AI highlights that much of what we do is –or has become– remarkably mechanical: that's why machines can pass themselves off, with some ease, as us. As I was pondering all this in recent days, an article written by Víctor Català in 1927 came to mind. In the text in question, Català comments that criticism had considered that Drames rurals (1903) had shattered “a multitude of conventions, which, accepted through inertia and respected out of inertia, become a canon, a formula obeyed by the general public, who end up finding in them a kind of mattress on which to rest and mold their own taste”. Well, now it seems that what they praised about Víctor Català – the ability to identify and avoid inertia – will surely be one of the skills that humans will have to cling to the most.

Albert Einstein said that “if the Moon had consciousness, it would be convinced that its rotation around the Earth is free”. And humans? We have elevated our condition above that of the other inhabitants of the planet, consecrating as a reference for our way of being in the world the ideal of the Enlightenment: the ability to think and decide for ourselves. But day-to-day life makes it evident that we are far from meeting this standard; we are a species articulated around power – the difference in potential contained in any relationship – and the abuses that derive from it. And, if Voltaire is right when he says that “humans have no remorse for the things they are accustomed to doing”, there is still a lot of ground to cover. We must be very careful. Reinhart Koselleck put it more sophisticatedly, in the story of a German doctor's dream: “After the consultation, around nine in the evening, I lie down on the sofa with a book about Matthias Grünewald, and suddenly my room, my whole house, is left without walls. I hear the loudspeaker noise: by decree, the walls are removed until the 17th of this month.” The paradoxes of the human condition: without walls there is no freedom, even though walls are the most common instrument for isolating the citizen and leaving them without space to make their own. Translated to the present day, Ulrich Beck put it more prosaically: “We are heading towards a state authoritarianism that, on the outside, will adapt to global markets and, on the inside, will behave authoritatively.” We see it day by day. And the proof is that every day there are fewer democracies and those that remain are ossified, in societies that do not even have the impetus to stop the penetration of the far-right.

AI already accounts for more than 60% of global investment in startups, according to a report by PwC and South Summit collected by ARA a few days ago. In 2022 it was 30%. By 2025, two out of every three dollars in global venture capital will go to artificial intelligence companies. As always when money runs faster than caution, the magic word appears: bubble.Well, I don't see it that way. The fact that many AI companies have to disappear doesn't mean AI is a bubble: it means we are facing a technological race. And in a technological race, not everyone wins. Few win. Very few. The rest are left behind.It happened with the internet. It happened with mobile applications. It happened with social networks. It happened with electronic commerce. From each wave, two, three, or four giants emerge. Behind them remain thousands of dead projects, burnt investors, exaggerated promises, and PowerPoint presentations. In the case of the dot-com bubble, the problem is that there were approaches that never generated any value nor were they a business.But no one would say today that the internet did not generate value. No one would say that the mobile phone did not change the economy. No one would say that e-commerce was smoke. There was excess. There was naivety. There were losses. But there was also real transformation.With artificial intelligence, something similar happens. 95% of start-ups will lose their investors' money. Perhaps even more. Many applications will have no market. But this does not turn the phenomenon into fiction.A bubble appears when the price completely separates from value. When it is bought only because tomorrow someone will buy it at a higher price. When there isn't enough business below to justify the investment. In AI there will indeed be business. A lot. The question is who will capture it.Venture capital funds know this perfectly. They don't invest thinking they will get it right: they invest accepting that they will lose in almost all investments. They look for one. The one that multiplies by a hundred, by two hundred, or by a thousand. This single investment pays for the entire previous graveyard.It's the logic of the gold rush. There are thousands running to the mountain. Most find nothing. Some sell shovels. A few find a vein. And these, who are few, explain the stampede. But there is gold. What happens is that there isn't enough for everyone.That's why it's important not to confuse two different things: that a technology generates value and that everyone who invests in it makes money. AI will be a brutal concentration of profits in a few hands. AI is not smoke. It is a technology that is already entering companies, offices, factories, hospitals, banks, and administrations. Another thing is that many are paying the entrance fee for a party where there will be neither drinks nor food for everyone.

The trickle of bad news about the evolution of the Catalan labor market has set off some alarms. On the one hand, the EROs announced by Nissan, Nestlé, and Mediapro. On the other, the slowdown in job growth according to data from the Active Population Survey.

It was the thirties. Robert Moses, the most powerful urban planner in New York's history, ordered the construction of bridges so low that buses could not pass. Buses were the transport of the poor and the black population. No law was needed: the bridge was exclusionary by design and by default.

The Minister for Digital Transformation, Óscar López, has defended the Spanish government's strategy for regulating AI and digital tools. In an intervention at the first Meeting for Digital Rights, held this Thursday at the Llotja de Mar in Barcelona, López assured that the executive's proposals in this regard, such as the prohibition of minors' access to social networks, are "common sense".

77% of citizens demand more regulations on the development of artificial intelligence. This is what emerges from the first Survey on the social perception of digital rights in Spain. The poll was conducted by the La Caixa Foundation, Red.es –the entity associated with the Spanish government dedicated to promoting the digital agenda– and the Hermes Foundation, in collaboration with the University of Barcelona. The document details that the majority of Spaniards want more public oversight of AI and its effects on the economy and society. In fact, more than half of respondents would prefer that the development of applications based on this technology 'slow down'. However, 49% expect it to eventually have "positive effects" for the general population.

Palantir Technologies is, let's say, a technology company with an ideology (other technology companies also have an ideology, but they hide it more). Ultraconservative, naturally. Palantir is dedicated to the analysis of massive data, or big data. It provides services to governments and also to large companies such as Airbus, Panasonic, Merck, and others. It is valued at 380 billion dollars, was founded in 2004, and its name refers to the magic stones that appear in the novel The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien (which you can read in Catalan, by the way, in the excellent translation by Francesc Parcerisas). Its two most visible leaders are Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, two singular gentlemen. Thiel, a German citizen naturalized American who was also a co-founder of PayPal, is an ultracapitalist shark, specializing in venture capital funds. His theory is that democracy is incompatible with freedom; if not with economic freedom. Thiel is a money supremacist above all other values.Alex Karp, for his part, comes from the humanities: he is the son of a progressive Californian family, studied philosophy in Germany, and was a disciple of Jürgen Habermas, the philosopher defender of democracy. He is fascinated by literature and adores The Lord of the Rings: despite these characteristics, or precisely because of them, Thiel saw in Karp (they had met, when young, at Stanford University) someone who understood Palantir's idea better than anyone, and that is why he pushed him to become the company's CEO. Palantir's idea: to dominate the world through the data generated on the internet (about 400 million terabytes a day) and artificial intelligence. Karp explains it in a book he published last year, The Technological Republic, which is considered the company's manifesto. Karp says that the era of atomic deterrence is ending and a new era is emerging, that of deterrence based on artificial intelligence. Karp considers this deterrence essential to protect Western values (he no longer speaks of democracy, but of a "lifestyle" that must be safeguarded). Palantir is dedicated to this.Karp does not hide, rather the opposite, his company's close collaboration with the governments of the USA and Israel. Palantir's programs are behind operations such as the detention of Maduro or the start of the ongoing war in Iran and the Middle East. He does not believe it is Palantir's place to define the limits of the use of its programs. He leaves that to the clients: the CIA, the FBI, the Mossad, or even the American ICE. Palantir also works with other governments such as those of Canada, France, Germany, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, or Saudi Arabia. Or Spain, which in 2023 awarded it a contract from the Ministry of Defense for 16.5 million euros, with the task of implementing military intelligence software named Gotham. Yes, it is the name of the city where Batman lived. Yes, the future is in the hands of highly dysfunctional people.

The artificial intelligence has conquered the main global investment portfolios. This is identified by a report published by the consultancy PwC in collaboration with the technology congress South Summit, which states that AI tools concentrated more than 60% of the planet's venture capital in 2025. In just three years, according to the document, the ratio has more than doubled: in 2022, only 30% of the money mobilized for business initiatives ended up in AI. "AI is already positioning itself as the main driver of global venture capital fundraising," the authors observe.

In December 2025, Sam Altman, founder and CEO of OpenAI, sent out a "red alert" to all his employees. After years of dominating the narrative of user-scale artificial intelligence, the creator of ChatGPT saw competition, for the first time, begin to overtake him. The relaunch of Gemini, Google's competitor to its flagship product, was perceived as an existential threat. Just three months later, Anthropic, founded by engineers originally from his company, launched Claude Code – dedicated to programmers – and Claude CoWork – for all professional tools – two applications that have taken a "quantum leap" for both consumer and corporate-scale AI, assures the founder and general director of WeArtificial, Aleix Valls.

The full season of La gran cita, the dating show that has tested artificial intelligence's ability to predict compatibility between people, is now available on 3Cat. The first three episodes promoted the initial pairings. The following three were used to test these bonds with the intrigue of whether they were the result of human intuition or the algorithm's determination. In this phase, the initial excitement was lost and a heavier inertia, typical of these television psychodramas, set in, where dialogues drift to the boring "I don't know if I'm ready for a relationship", "I've been hurt a lot", "I'm at a point where I want something else", "I don't want to suffer again", "I need an open relationship" and these tiresome vicissitudes, especially when you don't feel a special interest in the protagonists' lives.The game's dynamic, however, is very effective. The AI's verdict tests the bonds. Some couples receive the technology's approval. Others discover they have defied the algorithm and worry about proving that intuition is above what a machine can predict. The strategy shows an interesting phenomenon: the enormous power attributed to AI as an almost infallible guarantee when choosing a partner. The will to contradict it becomes epic, a daring act. Even the loss of an opportunity that you might only have once in a lifetime.The last two chapters regain the delicious intrigue of the start. The third people recommended by the algorithm appear. Also the risk of deciding if the relationships will continue beyond the cameras.Fortunately, the program has protected Dulceida by dispensing her presence drop by drop. The need to condense the stories of so many people into eight chapters causes the viewer a certain disorientation when it comes to understanding how much time has passed for the contestants and, above all, details of their relationship with other participants. But these ellipses are also appreciated, because they save us a lot of emotional junk that would turn La gran cita into a soap opera. The great virtue and good tolerance of the reality lie in the capacity for synthesis when managing dramas and tensions.The protagonists are well trained in displaying their faith in the game's dynamics. They issue pronouncements of hope and gratitude in the exact measure the show requires. In the final messages between couples, the writers' hand is sensed. The visual dynamic to explain the outcome of each relationship is visually exciting. And the result reveals a suspicious balance between the power of AI and romantic love. The big date works because it stimulates the enjoyment of the most elemental voyeurism without causing secondhand embarrassment.

The article published in ARA last Friday about a UPF dean's circular complaining about students' absence from university garnered an impressive number of comments, which, taken together, probably already state the bulk of what I will expound on next. I cannot help but react because a lifetime of work at the university compels me to, even more so knowing and appreciating the Faculty of the dean who complained, and considering how many times we professors have spoken.

In the last 300 years, technology has increased productivity exponentially. In 2020, one hour of work produced 24 times more goods and services than in 1870. The reason is innovation: converting knowledge into solutions through technology. As economist Paul Romer says, the dark matter of growth is ideas.In OECD countries, growth –measured in GDP per capita– was 4% annually from 1950 to 1973, 2% from 1976 to 2007, and 1% from 2010 to 2021. This slowdown may be due to a lack of disruptive and innovative ideas for various reasons: the loss of acceleration in technological growth produced by World War II, the withdrawal of the private sector from basic science, the aging of the scientific workforce, the transformation into a more comfortable and risk-averse society…Juan Antonio Zufiria, former director of IBM, has written an excellent report on the issue, on which this article is based. Zufiria, like Daniel Susskind, is optimistic and believes that it is possible to recover the pace of growth with innovation and technology. Both Zufiria and Susskind believe that technological change must be directed and prioritized. The biggest drawback to achieving this is the decoupling of capital and labor incomes: lower growth in labor incomes in developed nations – the EU and the USA – has led to increased inequality, measured by the Gini index. It is in these societies that innovation and technology are concentrated, and internal inequality is a brake on the improvement of their productivity. There is a relationship between efficiency and inequality.In the 20th century, production was linked to a workforce. When General Motors had a stock market capitalization of $300,000M, it had 300,000 employees. Today, Google or Microsoft, with double the capitalization, have 30,000. The workforce has lost power entrepreneurially and only maintains it as "quality", with few highly qualified workers. The battle between capital and labor that the Industrial Revolution brought – and that Marxism theorized based on Hegel's principle of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis – does not exist today: it is beginning to be testimonial, except in public service. At the same time, the ability of companies to outsource activities has contributed to increasing the decoupling between labor and capital.The equality between poor and rich countries has increased thanks to globalization. Absolute equality reduces economic efficiency, but inequality above a Gini index of 0.4-0.5 also does, and this is what will end up happening within developed countries if the current trend is not corrected. Ten people currently concentrate 0.52% of world wealth.Development occurs in the world, and the world has limited resources. Economic growth is entropic, meaning it reduces the quality of energy in a way that the second law of thermodynamics makes irreversible: burning wood and running train machinery makes it impossible to return to the origin and recover the burnt wood. Fundamentally, this reality can be synthesized into the warming of the world and the progressive destruction of its reserves.

Incredible. Taylor Swift has patented her voice and an image from her concerts as a trademark. The singer wants to protect two phrases spoken by her and a specific image from her The Eras Tour in front of unauthorized uses of artificial intelligence. Matthew McConaughey has done something similar with his voice, his gestures, and some recognizable elements of his public identity. It is incredible that we have reached this point. For years we have registered trademarks, logos, compositions, literary works, graphic and industrial designs, inventions, characters, products... That is to say, we have registered what we produced, what we invented, what we generated from our skills and intelligence. Now we take a step further to confront AI. We patent our voice. Not what we do, but what we are. A voice acquires the rank of an industrial asset. A way of looking, of speaking, of appearing on stage or greeting the public can become legally protected material. The human enters the commercial register. The United States Patent and Trademark Office has granted several of Swift's applications, as well as those of other singers in recent months.Artificial intelligence has changed the nature of copying. A voice can be cloned. A face can be reconstructed. A performance can be reused to create another. An unknown singer may discover that their timbre has been used to fuel a song they did not sing. Any artist can end up as raw material for a creation they neither know, nor authorize, nor are paid for. Registering voices is like trying to catch the moon in a basket. AI does not need to copy a voice exactly. It can evade it with another formulation. It can approximate it without touching the protected perimeter. It can learn from millions of anonymous voices uploaded to musical applications, social networks, home videos, contests, tutorials, or any platform where, when we download it, we press “accept the legal conditions” without reading them. Let's get realistic. It will be impossible to stop the use of humans to create digitally.The path will have to be different. It will be necessary to identify. Distinguish. Certify. Just as there is an ISO for certain processes or a designation of origin for a wine, we will need a clear signal that says: made by a person. I call it: "human designation of origin." Sung, written, or performed by a person. It is information that the consumer has the right to know. Here will be the true value. In a market flooded with synthetic content, humans will need guarantees, traceability, and a seal.The future of creation will not consist in competing against the machine, but in preserving the origin. Like good wines. Not only the result will matter. It will matter to know which land it comes from.

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. Is a person needed to accompany you shopping, or with artificial intelligence (AI) technology, is it no longer necessary? 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.