The Disruptive Era

We are moving from an era of changes to a change of era, the Disruptive Era; a new “tempus” Guttemberg, which establishes its privileges due to the irruption of artificial intelligence, new communication technologies and bioengineering, exponentially producing goods and services that are touched and impacted by everything.

I understand by disruption the abrupt, vertiginous and decisive change of a set of paradigms and rules that support one or several systems.

Werner Weisenberg, a young Nobel Prize winner in Physics, considered a “pater” of quantum physics, stated more than 80 years ago: “everything has to do with everything at all points and at all times, everything is a relationship and nothing exists outside of that relationship.” relationship”.

In the last 30 years there have been more changes than in the previous thousand. With more actors, the Cold War mutated from ideological to geoeconomic, ceding sovereignty and piercing borders. The traditional areas of land, sea and air combat added primacy and omnipresence to outer space, expanding the new multi-domain doctrine. Combining intelligent networks, military supremacy is ensured. Suffice it to recall Washington’s surgical bombardment of the Iranian convoy from 15,000 meters above sea level three years ago.

The United States, still the first power, has two neighbors and 24 thousand kilometers of navigable rivers and, proportionally, it is the most integrated country in the world, but China patents more than 60% of new inventions, it is a trend.

The Asian archipelago, equally immense, is the most continuous state in history. 6000 years with 106 years of “British presence” it has 14 neighbors: North Korea, Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam and off its coasts are Korea South, Japan, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Indonesia.

In 1968, Den Xiaoping began the great reform, progressively replacing the ideological gerontocracy with the technocratic elite that leveraged its development on labor and monetary “dumping”. Without ratifying fundamental ILO conventions, he ignores freedom of association and collective bargaining. Empowered China creates 40,000 ventures a day and, with factory ships out of all international control, competes unfairly by flooding us with goods and services at irresistible prices.

In the last century it consumed more cement than the first economy, today it manufactures more computers than the European Union and leads international trade, promoting the paradigm that to survive and grow is to produce more and better with less money and people.

We live submerged in the videocracy, in the digital platforms, in the new terminologies and graphologies, the novelties copulate taking away our privacy, because we are all cloudnauts, geolocatable, ergo, data.

The nascent era leaves us absorbed. Every 18 months the capacity of the computers doubles and the robots are paid for in 24 months. To tube-navigation, subcutaneous smart devices taking care of our health, the evolution of augmented reality, the enhanced sensory brain, the ubiquity of all sensors and now we add Chabot.

According to Andrés Oppenheimer, Chabot “writes emails, academic papers, school essays, business plans, marketing strategies, news, movie plots, and answers questions.” Imagine, if there are already as many cell phones as there are forks on our tables, Chabot will compete with our beloved and loyal partner, he will steal time from our home while he agonizes the social gathering everywhere.

Forty or more million people look for work annually, also 40% of current jobs will be replaced by robots in 15 years and 60% of “American” children will look for jobs in 15 years, whose job profiles have not been created, ergo, the training and education is dangerously dysfunctional to markets.

Devoid of values, the disruptive trend strengthens the concubinage between informality and global precariousness of 60% of adults, directly impacting the social gaps between countries, social strata and people, generating new social pockets, millions of neo-illiterates and neo-excluded and new affectations: work waste, social stigmatization, disruptive anxiety syndrome and the pathology of existential emptiness, mainly.

Thus, I understand the global expansion of the crisis of confidence that, binary like the brain, expands with more surnames: humanitarian, political, economic, social, food, labor and health.

The global dream of well-being is in an induced coma in the face of obvious human frailty, because we are not witnessing a technological debate, rather we are facing profound and unprecedented moral and existential dilemmas devoid of cyberethics, cyberphilosophers, and meta-thinkers.

A moral dilemma is to provide dignity to the new and growing social pockets and the main existential dilemma questions our origin.

About our existence, for the first time, since “sapiens”, human beings -specifically the “coronials”- will lack astonishment, when, before 20 years, artificial intelligence autonomously creates human life in the Year of the Singularity.

Based on these incipient reflections on the impact of the Disruptive Era, we must preserve our dignity, regenerate our civilization, ensuring its social and political governance.

The holy books stressed love, solidarity and cooperation. The Hebrews extended them to the chosen people of Israel from their blood and race, and Christianity assembled these precepts, piercing faith and consciences from the catacombs.

Plato having postulated an equal education for all and Aristotle having distinguished arithmetic from geometric justice, the basis of redistribution, answers emerge; slow life, refuge in villages, home education, some digital disconnection, new taxes on companies that lead disruptive changes, etc.

I observe that the new asymmetries pile up on the inherited ones. Also that more favelas, greater poverty and other social scourges are part of the new traditional landscape. Stubborn, I end by sheltering myself in a profound, beautiful and hopeful reflection by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht: “Do not accept the usual as natural, because in times of disorder, confusion, and dehumanized humanity, nothing should seem natural, nothing should seem impossible to change. ”.