The world is ugly. This place, which is our home, is turning into a playground where some bad kids stop by and ruin other people’s lives
Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)
Jorge Bruno
From the window that shows the world, it becomes clear that artificial intelligence and the shift in the world order are sustaining a new human condition: the ability to understand life through other paradigms and new references. Welcome to the new reality… stimulating, challenging, worrying.
The world is ugly. This place, which is our home, is turning into a playground where some bad kids stop by and ruin other people’s lives. And the guardians, powerless, seem unable to do anything. Those we relied on for so many years for our balance and security, institutions such as NATO, the UN and the European Union, appear powerless in the face of some world leaders who no longer see power as a space with rules and boundaries.
On its own, the rhetoric of war, which has multiplied across much political discourse, would already be a cause for concern. But the red line is being crossed and war, which destroys and kills (it is worth remembering), becomes the froth of everyday life. It is hard to understand the attitude of those in positions of global responsibility when they assume the imminence of war. What is imminent cannot be imminent—let alone eminent… it must be the beginning of a process to deny that war or conflict. It should be a warning sign. In any situation, the flight into the abyss, which is a form of suicide, must be avoided at all costs. It is strange to hear that we must be prepared for war, when this type of conflict is a variable with a capacity for control, unlike other forces such as those of nature.
A new world order is coming that will demand much from each of us. What will it be like? What frameworks will prevail? Where must we look? Will the foundations be strong enough to support each of us? The only known answer is that things will change. Adaptation to a new way of life is required, in which the known pillars will be destroyed and others, which may be more fragile, will sustain our existence.
The human journey has been marked by great advances. The increase in life expectancy, one of the main indicators of human development, despite regional differences, reflects how much we have evolved as dominant beings endowed with unique capacities. The scenario of a new world order based on conflict and war does not align with all that humanity has already achieved—humanity that now even creates intelligence and massifies it through generative AI.
With different characteristics, the mass adoption of AI in daily life, and the advances that will result in the near future, is the other challenge in which the need for a new human is taking shape. It is true that we have lived with artificial intelligence for some years. But conscious awareness of its use only began with the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. The coming years—not decades, but just a handful of years—will be unimaginable by today’s standards. 6G will propel AI technology to levels we associate with that hard-to-grasp word: unimaginable. Not even our imagination can create it. A revolution is coming. It will not be long before we can request, via our smartphone, the code to print the pizza we will eat for dinner, instead of ordering it from a delivery restaurant. May there be energy to power so much technology!
We are at the beginning of a revolution, and all revolutions are profound transformations. However, not all transformations are revolutions. A revolution requires a point of no return and, in the context of AI, this is achieved by altering three elements: our understanding of the planet, how the world is structured and organised, and the notion of space and time. In the history of humanity, there have been few events capable of simultaneously changing all of these elements.
The two challenges highlighted here justify the announcement presented in the title of this column. It is a new context of existence that is opening up to humanity. It is not an adaptation to a new way of doing something or to a context that evolves over time. It is a new way of living, with new paradigms that will alter our notion of existence and of what surrounds us, due to entirely new points of reference. Reinterpretation will no longer be enough, because humanity’s ability to face the new times will have to be based on a new interpretation, completely free from the past. It is a new opportunity that God gives us.
Jorge Bruno Ventura
Director of the Master’s Degree in Communication in Organisations
Source: Jornal SOL
