“Maybe Nihilism Is Written into Our Genes?”
Ivaylo Kunev tells inspiring stories from the Bulgarian past in a magical way… So how did we end up with the words in the headline? Leaders, the people who know how to change the world, to lead, to build, to persuade. They are the big theme of today's guest, who has spent more than a decade designing and running leadership programs. Ivaylo has impressive managerial and entrepreneurial experience that spans decades. At the same time, he knows how to tell a story—his tales of strong personalities draw a huge number of fans. He is the author of the book Liderite: zabravenite istorii na Balgaria (The Leaders: Bulgaria's Forgotten Stories). Leadership. The subject is so heavy in our part of the world, and in the times we live in generally. So it is time to look for the hard answers. Is it worth collecting the stories of politicians, entrepreneurs and… khans? Why do we find it so hard to form a political elite and to have authentic leaders as a nation? What would Tolkien have written if he had been Bulgarian? How can Bulgarian history become a personal adventure and offer inspiring examples that help us make our dreams come true?
282The Genius Who Poisoned the World Twice
Technology changes our lives at breakneck speed, and its creators—inventors, programmers—are the heroes of our day… At least until it turns out that an innovation the world greeted with wild enthusiasm is lethally dangerous. Yet one inventor rode a wave of fame for years, revered as a genius, while creating not one but two technologies that later proved to have cost human lives, and whose damage to the whole planet will outlast generations. The story of Thomas Midgley Jr. is worth recalling every time we cheer the latest huge breakthrough in artificial intelligence or any other technology—a reminder of how important it is to weigh the risks before we take flight on the wings of enthusiasm, and to think about and discuss the big questions technology puts before us, the ones we never seem to have time for…
283Digital Stories Wins Another Web Report Award
Digital Stories has earned impressive recognition at the sixth edition of the Web Report journalism awards, which in recent years has established itself as the leading and most prestigious journalism competition in Bulgaria. This year, Georgi Karamanev and Digital Stories won in the Art and Culture category, among 185 journalists competing across six categories, for the experiment “‘Sometimes I’ll Come…’: How AI Painted 10 Classic Poems.” The award means all the more because it makes Digital Stories a winner for the third year running!
284Dr. Raychev, the Man Who Gave Google Koprivshtitsa
Dr. Veselin Raychev is the only Bulgarian whose doctoral thesis ranked among the world's top three of the year across all of computer science, and with it he launched a field now booming: AI that writes code. A former Google engineer whose algorithms still route us through Google Maps and the founder of DeepCode, he talks about the AI hype, the decisions that matter and why he still cares so much about Bulgaria.
285Father and Son: The Relay of Life
A father and his grown son, holding hands. Behind them is what defines them; in front of them, the lens in all its merciless candor. Important photographs need no words. This Digital Story is as big as life itself. Because it takes us back to the most natural of cycles and offers its piercing gaze into meaning. The photographer Valeriy Poshtarov has two sons, aged 12 and 9. One morning, as he walks them to school, he starts thinking about how, before he knows it, the moment will come when they no longer want him to hold their hands. That is how the idea is born: to capture fathers and their grown sons in his lens, surrounded by the setting that represents them best. The result: photographs that don't just tell stories, they paint universes…
286“It’s Not Loanwords That Erode the Foundations of a Language”
Kak se pishe? (How Do You Spell It?) is a website that has become hugely important to life online, where its creator, Pavlina Varbanova, gives volunteer advice on spelling, grammar and punctuation in all their nuances. Our first conversation is still the most-read story on Digital Stories, so on the eve of May 24, the day Bulgaria celebrates its alphabet and culture, we meet again to continue it. We talk about the words that shape us and how we treat them, about the holiday and its sometimes false pomp, about words turned into weapons and the technologies that give them enormous power to destroy.
287“Money Is a Poor Master. It Has to Serve Higher Purposes”
“Happiness is a state, but not a goal. It is a conscious choice.” Atanas Simeonov is a proven entrepreneur in many unexpected directions, who has gradually added the digital world to his traditional offline ventures. Digital Stories has hosted engineers, writers, even a priest and a conductor, but this is the first time the guest is someone who has made entrepreneurship itself his calling, and, through the Endeavor platform, a means of changing the world around him. Where would he start if he were starting today? Can entrepreneurship be learned, or is it a matter of luck or talent? Is artificial intelligence a good direction for investment, and is it the field that will let Bulgaria achieve real success? Where is happiness, and why are billionaires so often missing it? When will we learn to value our health and take care of it?
288“Armed with Art, We Are More Vigilant and Less Deceived”
Not the politician or the soldier but the artist is the one who should paint tomorrow. That is the great theme of a little-known British historian who, a decade ago, gathered a rare historical genre of text into one ambitious book: the manifesto. Alex Danchev had a distant Bulgarian connection, and with a fine eye and wide-ranging knowledge he assembled a puzzle of 100 twentieth-century manifestos. What might the manifesto of the future look like in the age of artificial intelligence? We'll get there, of course…
289LatticeFlow: Making Artificial Intelligence Reliable and Safe
LatticeFlow is impressive not only because it solves fundamental problems in artificial intelligence systems, but because it makes them more secure and safe, issues that grow more urgent with every big headline on the subject. It is also the first high-tech company to position itself next to the INSAIT institute and work closely with it. Even without an official funding round, the startup raised $12 million, part of which will go toward hiring specialists in Sofia. We meet AI expert Dr. Petar Tsankov to talk about building a startup in a field that is only just taking shape, how the team's algorithms help create a new generation of reliable AI across many applications, and the vast prospects opening up for the team that is already working in Sofia.
290Nothing, Forever: How The Bold and the Beautiful Lives On in the Age of AI
Nothing, Forever is a venture as wacky as its title. At first glance it is rather fun: a series, a sort of sequel to the cult sitcom Seinfeld, that runs without pause and without the plot ever repeating itself. Yet it gives us plenty of reasons to think about the future of art and entertainment in the age of artificial intelligence. Could personalized art be a dream, a new paradigm, or the end of human creativity as we have known it?
291“Our Children Often Turn Out Well Not Because of Us, but in Spite of Us”
How has the online world changed parenting? Should we protect children from technology? Why is it still important to be careful and picky about the advice we get online? And… what should a person never, ever say to their children? Who hasn't heard of Mama Ninja? Maria Peeva is a blogger and irrefutable proof that meaningful influencers exist. Influencers who know how to entertain their followers and also help them with knowledge and experience. A mother of four sons spread across two decades, she is also a grandmother and the keeper of a colorful list of pets. A translator by training, Mama Ninja slipped almost unnoticed into the role of blogger, and then of writer.
292On the Tenth Day, Brendan Created JavaScript…
You know, one mythical figure created the world in a week. Brendan Eich took a little longer—10 days—to create another new world we all live in… JavaScript. Here is the cautionary tale of how a man who landed almost by accident at the epicenter of events built something enormous, and how, in fast-moving technological times, fate can turn a hero into an outsider in the blink of an eye. console.log(“Here we go!”);
293Universal Basic Income: Is It Time We Got Paid Not to Work?
By all appearances, technology is going to free up a lot of our time, but how will society change? What exactly is the much-discussed universal basic income? What are the big arguments for and against the idea that everyone should receive guaranteed money? Or might the answer to the new challenges turn out to be the four-day work week? Artificial intelligence has the power to change the daily lives of all of us. Today we are split into extreme camps over how advanced the technology really is. And yet there is hardly any dispute that it already has the potential to turn almost every industry and field upside down. Will it take the bread out of many of our mouths? It certainly has the power to relieve us of yet another batch of tasks, taking a great many new activities over to its side. New roles are appearing too, as they always have, but what will we do if the pace at which that happens falls behind? Will the societies of the developed world manage to respond to the new challenge, and how? May 1 is coming, Labor Day. Labor is certainly something worth thinking about more often, especially in our part of the world, where we have always taken a somewhat more philosophical view of the subject. So much so that we celebrate labor with a day off…
294“Artificial Intelligence Will Simply Make Our Work More Pleasant”
Will ChatGPT's successors write the news for each of us, exactly the way we'd like it? Hristo Tomov, head of AI at the software company Dreamix and one of its founders, talks about personalized news, filter bubbles, fake news and the limits of large language models. How far has artificial intelligence come, and what does the future look like if it keeps developing at the same pace?
295Technology Can Already Read Minds. Is This the End of Freedom?
Technology can already “translate” brain signals into readable data, and the first breakthroughs are here. Swept up in the progress of artificial intelligence and the notorious GPT, we may miss a huge leap when it comes to the natural kind. Prof. Nita Farahany, a scientist and legal scholar with vast experience, is drawing attention to it. “Today there are already companies capable of decoding brainwaves,” she told the world forum in Davos at the start of the year. Are we ready for the moment when someone reads our thoughts? Will it lead to total control, or make our lives more comfortable and meaningful?
296“Within 10 Years, We’ll Be Transplanting Printed Hearts and Kidneys”
How far off is the 3D printing of more complex human organs? Will we one day manage to replicate the structure and functions of the brain? What comes after that? Is technology changing us as a species, and what do the next steps in evolution look like? Dr. Vanyo Vezirov’s story is as colorful as the man himself. Driven by curiosity since childhood, he graduated from a mathematics high school and, for unusual reasons, turned to medicine. Before he had even finished his second year, he and a friend founded a startup focused on bioprinting—the three-dimensional printing of living structures. A young entrepreneur, a doctor, a science communicator, a man with a broad worldview and an unexpected take on the world: we meet Dr. Vezirov to talk about the big questions of medicine and the big answers each of us is looking for today. About fear, and about the decisions we should make not with our brains, but with our hearts…
297Jordan Peterson: The Man Who Gave Life Its Meaning Back… or Did He?
A Canadian psychology professor is about to take the stage of Hall 1 at Sofia's National Palace of Culture to advise a mostly young audience on how to put their lives in order, and the tickets have sold out twice despite steep prices. Praised and contested, Jordan Peterson has won cult status as a most unusual online influencer. Are we rediscovering forgotten values through him, or returning to outdated ideas that no longer fit our time?
298Hating, Outsourcing, Branding… Must We Always Parrot English?
“We need to talk and think about our language, about what it will look like and the state in which we will leave it to our children!” How is our language changing, and are we growing careless with it? Why do we now accept foreign words uncritically instead of trying to explain them? Are all languages doomed to be gradually influenced and “swallowed” by English? Rada Gankova works as a conference interpreter in Brussels. She has a particularly interesting view of the word and of our attitude toward it. In the capital of the EU she teaches Bulgarian to people who translate from our language into other European languages. For her own satisfaction, she also translates literature. One article on her blog brought together the pepper roaster and the air fryer. What could they possibly have in common? The subject is very important: how our own attitude toward language is changing. We used to have imagination and, when needed, we “built” words, while today we take them ready-made, and so we leave them without logic or context. And what hope, then, for the world of AI, IT and high tech…
299Tang Ping: Lying Down in Order to Stand Up
Several generations of Chinese grew up with the “ideal” of “9-9-6”: you work without a break from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. It is the only way to survive the fierce competition and keep climbing the ladder. But the end of endless grinding may be in sight. “Tang ping” and “bai lan” are the two names of a movement gaining strength among young Chinese: lie down and think about life; relax instead of throwing all your strength into meaningless toil. Are the beatniks of our time coming from China? Will people in the East learn to idle? When can laziness become a constructive force? And shouldn't we all follow their example and prepare for our own future this way? The Chinese are learning to be lazy, and so inspiringly that you want to grab the quilt at once… Let's lie down!
300Where Is AI Taking Us? Five Key Points of View
Is AI the beginning of the end for humanity—or are we simply witnessing a giant marketing trick? Whose jobs will it take, and will it destroy us or grant us immortality? Here is what Elon Musk and Bill Gates, Sam Altman and Jaron Lanier, Noam Chomsky and Yuval Noah Harari have to say.
