“Without a Little Madness, It Just Won't Work”
In this life you shouldn't, and can't, only take. If you don't give—in return or entirely for free—you have lived in vain, as the popular hit song goes. Even if we know it, it is worth reminding ourselves often. I hope this Digital Story reaches more people. I believe that if more people recognize its lessons, we are all capable of reclaiming the conversation and helping our country flourish. Of fulfilling the great dream of the protagonist and narrator here—that our children will WANT to stay in Bulgaria. Tenko Nikolov is not only one of Bulgaria's most successful tech entrepreneurs. He is a visionary who believes in the power of a close-knit team, shared values and a little “healthy” madness.
42Experiment: How Many People Will Click the Dangerous Link?
A very important and revealing experiment. Together with cybersecurity specialists, we send emails to 393 randomly chosen Bulgarian addresses. We simulate a cyberattack to see how many people will fall for it. And the results are astonishing…
43“A Complex and Difficult Year Lies Ahead”
No, there's no astrology here, just pure science. How many scientists do you know who can predict the future with 85 percent accuracy? I know just one, and the verdict isn't only mine, but ChatGPT's too, from a particularly telling experiment. Assoc. Prof. Mariana Todorova returns for what has become a traditional Digital Stories interview at the start of each year. The futurologist always gives us important things to think about, so there's no need for a long introduction. Let's peek into the future together!
44Did We Get the Future Right? (An Experiment)
It is a Digital Stories tradition that every year begins with a visit from futurologist Assoc. Prof. Mariana Todorova. First, though, just hours after we rang in the new year, I have an especially interesting experiment for you. Have her predictions from our conversations so far come true, and to what extent? Can we check what has happened in the meantime, and whether it confirmed or refuted the futurologist’s words? How can we do it impartially? I will pick 20 specific quotes from the interviews and find an unemotional analyst to grade them. The results are astonishingly interesting!
45Slipping Out of the Net
The internet keeps connecting us, and the internet keeps dividing us. But how many parts of our lives have we handed over to technology? This Christmas Digital Story follows a woman who found love online, built a family in England, and then decided to escape a society where everything happens on a screen.
4610+4 Things to Keep in Mind When Shopping Online This Christmas
E-commerce offers plenty of convenience, but it also comes with a number of dangers. On the eve of the holidays, I invited Viktor Rachev, a cybersecurity specialist at the specialized company SoCyber, to help us with practical advice on what to watch out for. Read it, think it over, and show it to your family and friends—it could well help you avoid an unpleasant mistake.
47How Henry Kissinger Foresaw the Future
“There are two ways to make sense of the present situation. The first is by projecting from the familiar. Until now, the most transformative technologies created by humanity have served to refine or amplify our bodily capabilities. (…) Is AI simply one more extension of human capabilities? The second way of making sense of it assumes that this time the situation is different—that AI possesses unique qualities that cannot be reduced to an upgrade of human abilities. Within a few decades, through engineering, an analogue will be created of what evolution has been building over millennia—namely the human brain: the last organ left to be reproduced or reimagined inorganically.” We are not simply living in dynamic times in which we humans fail to keep up with technological progress. We have reached a moment when technology itself is making us start over. We have to redefine many of the concepts and systems that make up our lives—from democracy and capitalism to art and creativity. That's not me telling you this, but good old Henry Kissinger, who, on top of everything, is sending his messages about the future and artificial intelligence… from the beyond. The final work of one of the defining figures of the 20th century has recently come out in Bulgarian—the work of the man to whom we largely owe the fact that the Cold War stayed cold instead of turning into World War III. Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit gathers Kissinger's crucial views on the future we are already living in. Here are 14 of its highlights; may they finally spark the overdue public conversation about the future of humanity in the age of advanced technology and artificial intelligence.
48Look at That! When Seeing Becomes an Art
Seeing and recognizing are no longer an objective skill or a science. Neither technology nor people can prove to us, with enough certainty to matter, which work is human and which is not. So isn't it time we started treating looking, the search for truth and fact-checking… as an art?
49AI: Revolution or Marketing Hype? Your Opinion Matters! (Survey)
Is artificial intelligence unjustified media hype or the great force that will change our future as a species? Will it open incredible opportunities for people, or turn the world into a digital concentration camp? Your opinion is extremely important, and I will be grateful from the bottom of my heart if you share it in a short survey! Prizes await too: selected books! Responses are collected until December 31. You can choose which questions to answer. The survey is anonymous. Every response, every share is invaluable help in seeing how we relate today to the great technological subject of our time!
50Petko Dinev, the Man Who Gives NASA Its Eyes
A Bulgarian and his team build the cameras that helped NASA turn its gaze to the Moon, and then to Mars. His designs are used by all the biggest aviation companies, and besides having already “set foot” on our satellite, they fly aboard thousands of satellites in orbit. In the 1990s Petko Dinev left for Florida, where he started working at NASA. He then founded his own company, which stands out worldwide for its expertise in building industrial cameras. His path began in Kazanlak—he is Bulgaria’s first gold medalist in physics and a student of the legendary Teodosiy Teodosiev, known as Teo. Our guest is also among the main characters of the new documentary Sotsialno silnite (The Socially Strong), which gives the floor to the gold medalists of Teo’s school. How does a person end up at NASA by chance? How does a scientist build a company that becomes the world benchmark in its industry? How can we change the fact that today half the students at the high school he graduated from fail to scrape even a pass on the math matura? How do we make science fashionable and give technology a chance? How do we, as human beings, catch up with its enormous growth? We have huge questions to discuss with this exceptional guest. “Yes, we live in interesting times. Maybe even too interesting. I don’t think we’ve reached the limits of technology. I think we’re still in the overture…”
51“If It’s Beautiful, Does It Matter That AI Wrote It?”
Is there room for poetry in the age of TikTok and artificial intelligence? How do we return this art to the pedestal it deserves? Can today’s poets be influencers, and should they? Is the time when artificial intelligence can no longer be separated from poetry frightening, or a dream come true? Apollo ex machina is the name of Bulgaria’s first competition for poetry created with the help of artificial intelligence, and now is the moment to join in! The venture’s special name was coined by today’s guest. Besides sitting on the competition jury, he runs the publishing house Scribens, which will publish the best poems from it in a collection. Georgi Gavrilov is a poet and… a physicist. He founded Scribens to give young Bulgarian authors a chance to reach their readers.
52Will There Be a Bulgarian Author? Book Picks from IT Leaders, Part III
Would you have guessed that Bulgarian IT leaders read Harry Potter, or even Dostoevsky? I wouldn't have, at least until a week ago, when I asked them and it turned out they do. On the eve of the Day of the Buditeli, I invited 30 remarkable people to recommend three favorite books to the readers of Digital Stories, and today I present the second half of their answers.
53“Engineers Will Always Be in Demand. But Our Skills Have to Change”
Work in the software world has already changed fundamentally with the arrival of artificial intelligence. On November 29, at the conf.ai workshop, Djemal Ahmedov will harness AI agents and make them work as an entire software team. Before that, we talk about the chaotic present and uncertain future of software in the age of advanced AI, and about whether there will always be a human in the loop.
54From Dostoevsky to Harry Potter: What Bulgaria's IT Leaders Read
I sent a short invitation to 30 IT figures I find remarkable: recommend three of your favorite books to the readers of Digital Stories. I tried to make the lineup of guests as varied as possible, from people in leadership roles to well-known speakers, from those working across the ocean to foreigners the industry has brought to Bulgaria, representing the widest range of technologies and different generations. Get ready for some stereotypes to blow up! I received no fewer than 20 replies, and I have the pleasure of presenting them to you! Once again they amazed me with their variety, their range and their depth, and they gave me plenty of ideas for future reads to add to my Goodreads list. Today I present the recommendations of the first ten guests; the rest will follow in a week. They aren't grouped by any particular logic—they simply turned out too varied and unexpected for that—so I offer them in the order I received them. Happy reading!
55Don't Miss the Bus! What Open Data Can Do for a City
Every autumn, Sofia starts choking on the traffic of hundreds of thousands of cars it was never built for, and we all ask whether it really has to be this way. Google Maps helps us plan a route, but it rarely knows when the next bus will actually come, or whether it will be packed to the doors. Open data could help the city breathe again, as the fascinating story of my fellow programmers at Codexio shows.
56“No, Now Is Not the Time for Poetry!”
What is poetry written with the help of artificial intelligence? Does AI write it alone, does it depend on the task the human sets, or can the two find a way to create something different together?
57Apollo ex machina: Enter Our Contest for AI-Generated Poetry!
Enter Apollo ex machina, the first Bulgarian contest for generated poetry, organized by Digital Stories and Scribens Publishing! There are no limits on theme or length. The only requirement is that you submit verse you have created with the help of AI. You may send up to 3 works, and the deadline is December 1, 2025. The winner will receive a prize of 300 leva (about $175), selected books await the well-deserved second and third places, and the best poems will be published by Scribens in a poetry collection! They will be chosen by a distinguished jury: the poets Petar Chuhov, Boyko Lambovski and Violeta Kuneva, Scribens managing director Georgi Gavrilov, and the creator of Digital Stories, Georgi Karamanev.
58What Kind of “Person” Is AI? A Psychological Experiment
We invite four of the most popular AI models into the psychologist’s office to find out what kind of “personalities” they turn out to have! Domineering or easily swayed, sensitive or pragmatic? What are GPT-5, Claude Opus 4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro and o3 like by “character”?
59Living Your Imagination
You can hardly have missed this modern debate, and you probably have your own opinion on it: now that artificial intelligence produces results indistinguishable from human creativity, will we go on creating? Is the great hero of our day taking over the human role of author, or is it just another link in history's long chain, the new tool that will give birth to the next arts, genres and forms? Welcome to the world of David Szauder. For the Hungarian multimedia artist, reality is only a starting point—life unfolds in the boundless space of the imagination, where technology is the artist's new brush and the absurd and the beautiful meet and complete each other.
60The EdAItor Test: Can Artificial Intelligence Edit a Text?
While we debate whether artificial intelligence will ever write indistinguishably from a human (and it already can!), everything quietly changed. Whether we realize it or not, we now read algorithm-generated texts every day. The latest undeniable proof surfaced on social media a month ago: some of the most respected Bulgarian media outlets uncritically published texts riddled with the telltale sentences that unmistakably show they were written by ChatGPT or its kin, and that were not even read by their “author” before going online. So can't we invite AI to save us… as an editor? Not long ago we tested how some of the most advanced AI models perform as proofreaders, and now it is time to raise the bar. In our next major experiment, we put AI's skills as an editor to the test.
