– When I invited you to talk, you suggested communication as the topic… Pretty unexpected, I admit—after all, we're both technology people—although of course the subject excites me enormously. Why did you choose it?

– I noticed a long time ago, and artificial intelligence has made it even clearer, that technologies change, but the thing that doesn't change about them is the people who use them.

A few years ago I gave a talk at a conference, and they introduced me: “Kaloyan is a programmer with 20 years of experience.” So what? Those 20 years are not relevant at all right now. Twenty years of experience means Lili Ivanova, the seemingly ageless queen of Bulgarian pop, and I were building sandcastles in the sandbox next to the pyramids. It just doesn't mean anything. But

what is the skill you actually develop over the years? It's working with other people.

And how do you work well with other people? When you start to understand them. We're not talking about tolerating, we're not talking about sympathy. Once you understand how something works, you sense more quickly that if there's a conflict, it isn't personal, and if someone does something, it's driven by insecurities or fears.

A lot of things can be explained that way. And that's the useful part. That's why I ended my talk like this: “people first,” and one more thing—the logic of emotions. Because look how the two are set against each other—logic and emotions.

But in fact emotions explain the logic behind a great many actions.

– I'm a journalist who became a programmer after thirty. And this skill—communicating with people and trying to understand them, without which I couldn't do my job as a journalist—turns out to be extremely useful to me as a programmer too, which I would never have expected while I was outside IT.

– In IT, in the tech world, the English term is “introvert”; in Bulgarian someone used to translate it as задръстеняк (zadrastenyak, roughly “clogged-up dork”). We, the people in our trade, are more closed off on the whole, because the work is cognitive, mental, all in your head. You have to concentrate to get it done. This kind of work attracts more people who are like that—they withdraw into themselves, think more—and communication is generally harder for them.

And since communication is harder for them, they have less experience at it and, I'd say, less emotional maturity, at least in the early stages of their careers.

Once you've worked at a company for even five or six months, you see that you're not working alone on some branch or in some room—there are other people, you talk, you do things, someone promises you something and doesn't deliver, you promise something and can't get it done. Those things finish building you, they develop you.

It's not that the IT world lacks this; people just learn it from experience, not from a book. It's not something you can read or have someone tell you: do this, this and this. An acquaintance of mine used to joke that there's no “Communication for Dummies”—it's all done through practice.

You have to have gone through these things, to have felt them. As programmers we learn it whether we like it or not, because there's no other way.

– But as a society, if we scale up a little, there's no way to learn it. Hate has been a very big topic for me ever since I started this site. Communicating on social media has turned us into embittered people who constantly split over the latest “big issue” and don't listen to each other.

– Why? As Hari and Vasi say—let's explore it. What makes people hate? First, I want to mention Mark Manson's book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. One of its main points is that people get angry and irritated by things that are important to them. We're not saying those things are right or objectively important, just that people feel them that way. People hate when a topic that matters to them is touched, when they feel unheard, when they think their side isn't represented in the argument, or when they carry some old trauma—someone didn't listen to them, didn't pay attention to them. Now that you have the platform of the internet in front of everyone who reads your posts and comments, why not use it and say what you think?

Filter bubbles help here too, because they amplify it: you surround yourself with people who think like you, and everyone else is an idiot. You make

much less effort to try to understand the other point of view, or at least to respect it.

I'm of the opinion that I'm not smarter than anyone else. Sometimes people look like idiots to me too. But if I know I'm not smarter, I ought to ask myself: what don't I know that they know? What don't I see that they see? Because I'm convinced they're not idiots. In the end, it's again a question of how you perceive the other people you communicate with.

It isn't easy, because we're all selfish to varying degrees. For example, when you're a parent and you remember what it was like to be a child, what the turning point is: when you become a father, suddenly you're responsible for someone else. Maybe to some extent if you had a younger brother or sister, but children are selfish in a very instinctive way, because they're at the center of the world—of their parents, their grandparents, their school. And maybe only when a parent finds himself in that situation does he realize the world doesn't revolve around him and start looking at things differently. At least that's my analysis. It may seem flippant, but…

– Not at all, I really like the comparison. I'm living it right now: I'm watching Malcolm in the Middle for the second time, after a 25-year break, and this time I'm watching it with my sons. Back then it was funny to me from the kids' point of view; now it's funny from the parents' point of view.

– Alexander Kondov has been your guest. Not long ago, on his YouTube channel about books, he made a video in which he says that

it makes no sense for school to make you read books describing feelings you've never experienced.

The nostalgia of Nemili-nedragi (Unloved and Unwanted), Ivan Vazov's novella about homesick Bulgarian revolutionaries in exile, means nothing to you when you're in school. But when you graduate, go off to study, separate from your family and friends, feel those feelings—and then read it years later, you understand why these classics are classics. You understand what's valuable in them. You simply can't appreciate them when you don't have the experience.

And that's the most important thing: at 15, say, you have the brains and you're physically developed like a mature 30-year-old. What's the difference? Fifteen years of experience, fifteen years of life. Your brain has the capacity, but it doesn't have the experience to fill it with, so you can make good judgments about what's valuable and what's important. How hard things in life are—or, on the other hand, that other things that look terribly hard aren't so frightening at all.

– But what can we do so that more people have this attitude—that they're not the smartest and everyone else isn't an idiot? With parenthood, you gradually grow into these things. How can we make it more widespread among people who communicate online—learning to listen to the other person and respect them?

– I don't know. On the whole I'm not a fan of mass approaches, because everyone wants to save the world somehow. How do we reach as many people as possible with the effort and resources we have? In many cases you only need to save one person. To pay attention to just one person. Or simply to be an example for others. The fact that

you don't act like a hater toward the haters, but instead try to have the two basic qualities of every parent—curiosity and patience.

You treat everyone you meet and talk with that way. They may fray your nerves, you may reach the end of your patience, but when you treat someone with respect, they very rarely have a reason to behave the opposite way toward you. You may start out without respect, because you're arguing and he's on the opposite side. But explore and understand why he holds that opinion.

Whether we like it or not, we all have plenty of stereotypes and assumptions about the other side, simply because that's how we've judged them—by their looks, by the avatar on their social profile, by something else.

– Is there any situation at all in which we don't have such stereotypes?

– Let me give you just one example. Charles Duhigg put out a book, Supercommunicators. He recycled a few things, but one of the chapters talks about the gun debate in the United States. It's a very polarizing topic: there's no one in the middle, everyone is either “yes” or “no.” And he describes an experiment there. You have to understand that many of the people who support guns aren't the bloodthirsty types they're made out to be. For many people, owning a gun gives them security—in their home, for themselves. They themselves were traumatized by some earlier story in which they felt helpless, and they believe a gun can help them. That's why they hold on so stubbornly and don't want to give it up. Maybe not all of them, but some have a quite rational explanation. Again, there's a logic of emotions.

And for the people who are against guns, things are pretty obvious: if they've suffered the painful loss of someone close to a gun that seemingly ended up in the wrong hands and was misused. Again, there's logic, there's an explanation. You don't have to agree with either side. Just

understand why they think the way they do, where their opinion comes from. And only then try to find some kind of solution.

– Very often, including with guns, it turns out that people group together and fight over fifteen different things on which they're on opposite sides. It somehow becomes natural: in this case, Republicans and Democrats are roughly for and against guns. Or in the Bulgarian context we see it even more clearly—the two extreme camps; I don't even need to name them. How does that happen if the motivation lies in personal experience?

– I believe the camps aren't the same; it only looks that way from the outside. For every person, experience is based on what they've lived through. If you look from a distance, you see they overlap to some degree, but not 100%—there are discrepancies.

And in Bulgaria, whichever party you approach, you'll find people who have a rational explanation for themselves of why they're there. Most often the explanation is that they either want or don't want a change from everything so far, and the first group is usually larger. Everyone has an explanation for why they support one party or politician or another. Very often it's not “for” but “against”: “I don't like the old, I want to choose something different, something new.”

– Yes, from some other angle almost all of us are for some form of change. We even explain it in roughly the same words, even though we're on different sides of the “barricade.” We don't want corruption, we want a working justice system. I've never heard anyone say they don't want that.

– And that's where the conversation breaks apart. I don't want corruption either. Why does corruption happen? Because we humans are weak-willed creatures who, when temptation comes, give in very easily, or have some other reason. It's certainly not just one reason—there are many. But again: why? It happens, it's not pleasant—why does it happen? I'm convinced that even people who take bribes, who are corrupt, don't feel like the villains of the story. They justify themselves: “Look, I'm in a tough situation, I've lived so badly, everybody does it, why shouldn't I?” They find an inner explanation, they rationalize it somehow.

And again we come back to the idea that there are no villains. You shouldn't approach people with the assumption that someone is bad and has done something bad.

Yes, outside the moral and ethical standards—stealing, hitting, killing someone—which were formulated long ago. But for everything else you have to try to understand the other person, to look for their motivation.

An acquaintance once wrote on Facebook: no villain thinks he's a villain. Everyone thinks they're doing something in the name of something else, and if sacrifices are needed, they're ready to make them. Very often those sacrifices aren't theirs but at someone else's expense. But their inner dialogue says: “I'm doing something, why don't they understand me? Why are they against the things I want to do?”

That's where the rest of the hate comes from. If you're not for one of the political parties, you're a paid troll. Because people can't imagine someone rationally holding the opinion they're expressing, and the only explanation they have is that the person is being paid. Well, what if they sincerely believe it? Is that so complicated or hard? People believe all sorts of things. Why shouldn't political orientation be one of them?

– I agree, especially now that the foundations of what political conversation even contains have been washed away. We're far from the ideas of left and right, conservative and liberal; in many ways they've even swapped places.

– You and I are among the children of democracy, the generation that grew up after 1989, and we were raised on this left and right. The traditional division is liberal and conservative; today it's populist and conservative. The word “populist” goes back to ancient Rome: people who carry out what the masses want, and those who believe there are rules that, however hard they are to follow, must be respected, because our values rest on them and not on what the crowd wants. In recent years conservatism has perhaps been successful because it has become more populist, which is such a huge irony.

– Yes, it's a paradox, because it makes the whole paradigm meaningless. When was the last time you caught yourself being prejudiced against someone or some idea and demonizing them, and then realized you'd been wrong?

– It happens regularly. Unfortunately, instinct is very fast. Instinct is something you do without thinking. Especially in person, if someone says something I consider stupid. Over the years I've been trying not to, but some caustic, ironic comment will come out immediately. And then I come to my senses: “Wait, I don't know this person.” Or the opposite: “I've known this person so long, we've talked, I know him. The way he's saying it seems strange and stupid to me, but there must be a reason.” “Sorry, my mouth is faster than my head. Tell me anyway what you mean. Let's see what you were trying to say.”

For me it's easier on the internet, because you have control. There's no need to write right away; you can think it over while you're typing and tell yourself: “Hold on, hold on, I'm writing complete nonsense. This person is different—ask him whether your assumptions are right.”

It happens all the time. I'm not a robot. We're all human, we have our own fears and emotions, we have all the baggage we carry from before, and there's no way not to react emotionally sometimes.

Let me give an example. It was a few years ago, but I remember it because it made a very bad impression on me. When you're younger, you care about how you look, who likes you, things like that. When you get older, you see that those things are trifles; the most important thing is for the kids and the family to be healthy, everything else is secondary. But I have a speech impediment—I've had it all my life. Over the years I've been trying to control it a little better, but every now and then it kicks in again. Nothing I can do; I'm used to it.

Years ago a man came to us for a job. We didn't hire him because he wasn't prepared. I didn't tell him, “You're dumb, you don't understand anything.” I told him, “You have gaps to fill; prepare and come back if you want; at this stage you can't do it.” Years later, in a LinkedIn comment thread where we were discussing that back when there weren't enough people for the IT industry, the best bet was to train them yourself, this man wrote something along the lines of “wwwelll, wwwhen thththere…” He was imitating my speech. “When there were programmers, why didn't you hire them?”

You see red, you go crazy. I'd treated this man absolutely decently ten years before. We were classmates at university, we know each other. And he writes this thing, which is super childish and gets under my skin. Now I know I should have outgrown it, but in that moment I got angry and blocked him everywhere.

Once more time passed and I calmed down, I understood that this man had been hurt in some way. It's obvious. People have to be psychopaths to hurt others for no reason. There's a saying:

hurt people hurt people.

– All right, and how do you think AI will change communication? It always agrees, it always adapts to your point of view, unless you work some magic to make it evil. I think it will deepen the problem of difficult communication and of understanding the other person even further.

– I've thought a lot about this—where the two things overlap, AI and the fact that you have to know people better, be emotionally mature and understand what's happening on the other side. I came to the conclusion that soft skills, the skills of working with other people, will become the hard skills of the future. Because

most of the work will be done by AI, and then all that's left for you will be this—working with other people.

AI, or whatever other technologies come along with it in the future, will solve a large part of the technical problems we've had so far. And then communicating with other people will become even more important; there will be more of it. There'll be nowhere to run except to talk to others. We're talking about work, about life, everywhere.

As for AI constantly agreeing with us, the companies themselves have started to realize it's not good. But it's not something they could have foreseen when the first such models came out. I doubt anyone said: I absolutely must make it agree with people. That same Mark Manson released something like that in his own app, an AI assistant, but set up so that it doesn't agree—the opposite, it constantly challenges you. And still, it's a tool. People will find ways to use it better.

One of the ways I use it is by giving it personas. For example: “Imagine you're Georgi Karamanev, we're going to have an interview in which we'll talk about ‘there are no villains’ and ‘the logic of emotions.’ What questions would you ask me?” Its analysis was brilliant.

– That doesn't surprise me; I made myself a digital double too, and I'm lucky enough to have more than 500 of my own articles online for it to go by. Now time will tell whether that's an advantage or a drawback.

– We have to have faith in the younger generation: whatever problems there are, they'll solve them themselves, just as perhaps someone once believed in us.

No one knew, when the internet was starting, or later social media, what challenges there would be.

Both with the way people express themselves and with online bullying. We didn't know these things in advance. Not that they're solved, but we're trying to do what we can. And if we've come this far as humanity, there's no reason—at least I'm an optimist—for the future not to be bright, and our children will cope with whatever they encounter and do there. That's why I'm not afraid of these things. In general—whether it's a minus or a plus, something will happen. Most of us will be fine; some people will keep their heads down, and others will be bolder and experiment, to see where the limits of the possible are.

Two things in life are certain: we'll make mistakes and we'll die.

And that, maybe, is part of the logic of emotions. It's something inherited from school—that mistakes mean punishment gets built into you as an instinct, starting in kindergarten. There they test you: if you don't know—a bad grade. And again, as we grow up, we understand: making mistakes isn't scary. In fact, let's make more mistakes. As long as they're not fatal—losing your health, hurting another person. If you offend someone, you'll apologize. There's always something you can do.

To understand each other better, we have to be braver. Fear of mistakes is fear. To defeat it, you have to be brave.

Also, to have trust, to hand out trust. Not only to receive it, but to give it. I'll let you do something without knowing you'll manage it. I'm not reckless, I'm brave. And I trust you that even if you don't manage, you'll put in the effort, or if not—you'll ask for help. This works tremendously well when applied at work. Trust makes people feel good, like a team.

– And the next step, I think, is learning somehow to rejoice in other people's successes—sincerely. It's quite fulfilling when you finally manage it. Thank you from the bottom of my heart; ten years ago I wouldn't have believed two programmers could have a conversation like this. It was truly thought-provoking, and someday we'll continue it.

– And Our Bed Is Green made a strong impression on me—its characters, its language, and its stories, which felt very close to me personally. Do we all need a little more greenery?

– I hope so. I hope the thought of greenery, in every possible sense of the word, matters to many other people too.

– When do stories from the past give our lives meaning, and when do they harm us?

– The harm comes from substitution—

when one point of view declares itself the true one, seizes a narrative and makes it its own so it can use it for manipulation.

When we read stories from the past, we have to do it critically and keep asking questions. And, of course, not rely on a single point of view. That's about big History. But what interests me are the small stories—preserving a person's memory, not letting them be forgotten. That is an individual responsibility, a voluntary one. My wish is for people to be remembered, mentioned, talked about.

– I think that even today the “small” stories are what give the big ones meaning—that's why this site is called what it is. But while we're still on the past: in recent years I've read four remarkable new books by Bulgarian authors that take us back to the 1910s. Why do you think that period turns out to be so interesting?

– I have no idea about the others, but that period has always interested me, and I've spent a long time with it, including in literature. It's when literary modernism was born, for me the most interesting movement in the modern cultural history of humankind. It was a time of breaking with tradition, of experiment in literature and art, but also of looking deep into the human soul.

The years before the First World War were also a time of optimism, thanks to technological progress, achievements in science, and people from the back rows of society stepping forward. Besides electricity, cars and cinema, we have Einstein and Planck, Freud and Jung, and the feminist movement is being born.

Man stands at the center of a utopian euphoria.

Naturally, the great war blows it apart. The period is especially interesting here, in the Balkans, in Bulgaria, where many narratives are layered on top of one another—refugee, entrepreneurial, peasant, bourgeois, enlightening, bloodthirsty. In just a few years we lived through three wars, persecutions, a host of shattering events. It's natural for a writer to be drawn to that. But what occupies me is still the personal story unfolding against the backdrop of the big one. If the personal story I care about had happened in another historical period, then my book would have been set in another time.

– Could it be that today we're looking for, or finding, parallels with that time? You mentioned it, but I hope it isn't… hmm, the association with a big war on the horizon?

– Periods of (apparent) stability are preceded by crisis. Crisis is inevitable;

the bubble has to burst sooner or later. That is always tied to suffering, both individual and shared by all of humanity,

the scale is what differs. But crisis and suffering are part of our existence as living beings; they “marinate” us and make us more resilient. Some people may well look for parallels with that time, maybe even call for it to come back, but I feel no nostalgia for it—I simply imagine it, because that serves my story. I'm not nostalgic about any past era, but past eras fascinate me, far more than the present, because I haven't lived them, I wasn't there, and I'm so curious; I want to know what it was like, how it was.

One of literature's greatest gifts is the chance to travel in time and inhabit lost or nonexistent worlds.

And for me in particular—the chance to talk with the dead.

– Today that seems “easier” than ever—we can create virtual doubles. Wouldn't it be easier?

– I talk with my ancestors and other people who are already on the other side all the time, not necessarily through literature, but quite literally—I look at their photos, or imagine them, and talk with them. They talk to me too, and I try to hear them. I don't know how I could create virtual doubles of them, or what use they would be to me.

– Does history repeat itself? Why is it so exciting even online, and yet unable to keep us from repeating the same mistakes?

– History repeats itself, and I think that's common knowledge. It can't protect us because it isn't supposed to; that's not its job.

It can only remind us; whether we protect ourselves, and how, is our business.

But nothing can stop a human being from wanting to see how far their will can reach. And that leads to crisis, because that desire has to be stopped somewhere, and then everything starts over. These are natural cycles; I don't think we can control them, but it's good to be aware of them and prepared.

– You wrote the book over seven years, and it reads slowly, too. What are the pros and cons of slow writing and slow reading?

– You're the first person to tell me it reads slowly—I'm quite surprised, because I very deliberately tried to write it so it would read fast. I'd be glad if it's a book you'd want to reread, mostly because I played around a lot encoding things in it, and I'm delighted when someone finds them.

As for the seven years, it quickly became clear to me that this was a process I couldn't control and that didn't depend entirely on me. I had to submit a great deal to reality and to what was given to me or, as the case may be, not given. If it had been up to me, I'd have written it in much less time, but that's how it went. On the whole I'm not a slow person—quite the opposite, I do everything quickly—and the fact that outside circumstances kept slamming on my brakes upset me a lot at first, but in the end it changed and tempered me a great deal.

I learned a lot from that long process, above all that I can write anytime and anywhere.

I wrote most of the book in the Google Keep app on my phone,

while doing something else or being somewhere—riding the metro to work or standing in line at the store. I'd just take out my phone and write down whatever was speaking to me at that moment, no matter where I was, who I was with or what was happening around me. Later I'd transfer what I'd written to the computer and edit it there if I thought it needed it. Most of the scenes stayed just as I wrote them on the phone, and you can still see them there; they're just sitting there.

I have no recipe for reading. I read two or three books at once and somehow manage to be in two or three places at the same time. Sometimes I read fast, sometimes slowly, I take notes—it depends on where I am and how much time and space I have. I read always and everywhere; if I don't have a book or an e-reader with me, I read on my phone (which, by the way, is small and no good for reading), and

if I don't have a phone either, I'll read whatever I find, labels and packaging included.

– Will we manage to get our attention back, the skill of being bored well? Shouldn't it become a value precisely now, when technology frees up more and more of our time?

– I'm a huge fan of being bored. Without it there is no creativity,

no urge to play. I adore playing and try to do it constantly and in every possible way. Writing is a game for me—while I write, I play, but at the same time I create a game for readers, because I want them to play with me too. And technology ought to free up our time for exactly that—for play. The thing is that,

while supposedly freeing up our time, technology keeps us captive in other ways.

That freeing of time is, for now, imaginary. But here too we'll hit a crisis, and something will happen.

– My thoughts run the same way, but what will it be? In the novel, the main character's relatives go for years without knowing whether he's alive. Not so long ago, finding out a football score could take days or weeks, and today if we don't learn everything that very second, we get frustrated, edgy, angry. Is that good? Is it reversible?

– We get angry if we don't get instant gratification, because now we have the chance to see most of our wishes fulfilled instantly.

Besides losing the ability to be bored, we've also lost the ability to wait, to be patient.

But I still think that just as a baby is weaned and learns to wait for food without crying, humanity will be weaned off quick gratification and learn to live without it. “Човек знае две и двеста” (chovek znae dve i dvesta, literally “a person knows two and two hundred”) is a lovely saying that reminds us we are flexible creatures: whatever fate serves us, we'll be able to take it and cope.

– Unless we've lost that skill for good, drugged by the easy life. What do you think: was it harder a little over a century ago, or is it harder today, to be brave enough to pursue your dreams, your love? To be different, to have your own opinion?

– I think it's equally hard. Today we have more material comforts that were missing in the past.

My grandmother's family of nine had a single spoon,

which everyone at the table took turns eating with. Now we have a hundred spoons, but so what? I'm not braver than my grandmother—quite the contrary.

A settled life is no precondition for courage or for dreaming more broadly.

Just the opposite—scarcity breeds resourcefulness, lack breeds inventiveness. I dream, but I know my grandmother dreamed too, that she loved, and how! The fact that she only went to school through fourth grade and worked in the fields doesn't mean she wasn't different or didn't have her own opinion.

Today we have more words for these things, we read more, we're better educated, we can check our knowledge against other people's, and talking about feelings is considered normal. Back then, the surroundings imposed limits; the impossibility came from outside. Now it comes from inside, from limiting beliefs, from inner fears. We

care far more about how we look in other people's eyes and censor ourselves at every step, because our lives are on display.

So how can we be free?

– Your great-grandmother wrote her memories in a grocer's ledger, and you said you used your phone. If the story happened today, she would most likely post them as stories that vanish after 24 hours. Can these eras and these ways of telling stories meet?

– They probably can, but I don't see the point. It would be good for humanity to write and read outside the digital scroll, too.

– What does technology change in storytelling, and what will it never touch?

– Honestly, I don't think much about it—about technology, I mean. In fact, I don't think about it at all. It probably changes everything, because, as far as I understand, it's replacing us more and more successfully in writing anything at all. But technology doesn't love to play, and humans do. So I suppose it won't take from us the joy of creating, of playing.

– After letters came telegrams, telephones, messengers, and even TikTok. What faster and more ephemeral thing is left to invent?

– I have no idea, because I don't think about it. Maybe I should, but I don't; it doesn't even occur to me. I think more about living things, about nature, about water. I'm very interested in the future of water, for example. Those things interest me much more, because we can't do without them. But

we could do without technology, and we still will be able to.

– Is there a technology you can't wait to see? And which one would genuinely frighten you?

– I don't get excited about any technology. What interests me is whether there will be drinking water for everyone on the planet. What genuinely frightens me is an AI-generated voice, and the possibility of technology deciding humanity's reproductive rights.

– For me, the experiment that showed readers can't tell my text from a generated one was disheartening. How do we find the positive sides and the opportunities here?

– Let humanity have its fill of playing with technology and come back to itself—if not on this planet, then maybe somewhere else. There are probably positive sides, but, as I said, I don't think about it. I don't play with AI, I don't use it for every little thing, I don't deal with it.

– What will the last book written by a human say?

– I hope it's a lullaby, though I wouldn't mind if it were a recipe for stuffed peppers.

– How can we tell that your novel wasn't written by AI?

– I have no idea. Maybe AI would smooth things out so there'd be no snags and no dross, it would fix my mistakes (whatever that means to it). I suppose it would edit out whatever seemed too unusual to it, too potentially unsettling. So

you'll know me by my rough edges.

– When will it be time to stop writing?

– Never, I hope. I hope it won't be within my lifetime.

– What is the first thing to be lost in a language written mostly by machines?

– The sense of humanness, of an emotional being behind the words.

– You say that when you write… you code. How so? Isn't writing computer code a boring, monotonous, repetitive task, unlike real art?

– But doesn't coding demand creative solutions and inventiveness? Just as a programmer can slip something of their own into the code they write, I love planting Easter eggs and hidden levels in what I write. In that sense,

yes, I code, because I think through how this code of mine will work, where it will go, how it will have different degrees of concealment and difficulty to decode.

I code because, as I said a moment ago, while I write, I play. For me this book is also a game book. It has encoded messages for whoever finds them. One translator found a linguistic code at the very end of the novel's third part; a writer decoded the whole game with the Bible for me. Those things make me very happy, because it means those readers, like me, were playing.

Of course, there are things no one will ever discover, but that still makes me happy—I know I put them there.

– You translate and edit translations. Hasn't the end come for that skill and art?

– I don't think it will come. It's the art of close reading and of making connections. AI tends to make obvious, predictable connections, while a human being is unpredictable, impenetrable, and so the connections they make can be quite unexpected. Editing a translation requires deep knowledge of both languages, of registers, of emotional nuance. AI is well trained in English, but the same can't be said for Bulgarian, at least at this stage. It doesn't catch registers either, let alone the emotional charge of words. Besides,

it tends to even out, to level, to smooth over, to erase the oddities, while fiction is a wild, strange plant

that can't be neatly shaped to a mold.

– Is there a text a machine can write better than a human?

– It depends on what you mean by “better.” AI writes correct, well-structured poems, but that doesn't make it a poet. It can only imitate. It can use meter and know what a metaphor is. But that doesn't make it a poet either.

A poem is an emotional picture in motion. AI has no feelings; it can only imitate the motion. Instead of being afraid, we should be aware of that. We can be amazed, even admire its abilities, but

we mustn't forget that this is not a being that feels, and behind what it writes there is no sincere, raw emotion.

– What is the most important thing for AI to read before it moves on to the next level?

– What is the next level?

– I doubt there's one single possible answer; I, at least, will keep searching for it on this site. Thank you for helping me look for it together, and I hope it will be less than seven years until your next book, because I'd love to “play” with it too!

– You say we keep repeating the same clichés—that technologies are neutral, independent, and that we humans use them in good or bad ways—while the truth is something else entirely. Why do you think so?

– Technologies are never neutral. By definition they depend very heavily on resources. Today only the big corporations and big capital can build truly large-scale solutions. From that point of view, technologies change the way we think, too.

Supposedly technologies are like a knife—you can use it to kill, but also to slice your bread. But they are far more complex, multilayered and manipulative than that.

For instance, right now there is a very serious clash between the United States and China in the field of technology—over satellites, energy, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence; there are constant battles on many levels. We can see that this could lead to a very serious war if we don’t find a way to regulate technology and this struggle between the two great powers.

– I don’t believe technologies themselves are neutral either; they quietly turn into weapons. It’s no accident that the subject of nuclear weapons and the subject of what AI can do somehow keep converging. But what can we do to change the direction?

– Günther Anders, a philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School, coined the term “apocalyptic blindness,” or “blindness to the apocalypse.” What he meant by it was that modern society does not grasp the danger of self-destruction. That

we already have the potential to destroy our civilization, all of humanity, a thousand times over.

Anders says technology is never neutral because it changes not only our actions but also the way we reason, the way we think and see the world, the way we perceive it, the way we organize society. Often we don’t even realize on what scale technology is already developing, let alone the consequences.

Back in the 1960s this philosopher was one of the first to analyze what nuclear weapons mean, and he said that we, as humanity, were entering a completely different era, a time in which everything had already changed.

For the first time in human history we have the ability to destroy ourselves, and it is happening thanks to technology, which keeps advancing.

From the perspective of peace research, technology is crucial; you can see it very easily in the war in Ukraine, or now between Iran and the United States and Israel, in the contest for global hegemony between China and the U.S. How these great powers would use nuclear weapons is always a key factor, and artificial intelligence is showing up more and more.

– I think that, more or less, as a society we all realize this—that technologies really are changing us, including by having wrecked the entire public conversation, everything Heidegger wrote about, too. And yet we can’t manage to start a new public conversation that includes exactly this: how do we make sure technology is perceived adequately, thoughtfully, with a vision for the future?

– Anu Bradford, the Finnish-American author of the book “Digital Empires,” defines three different models for the United States, China and Europe precisely on the basis of their attitude to technology. China is a power in which power is concentrated at the level of the state—it is the state that directs where society will go and where technology will be steered. In the U.S. it’s the opposite: there, individual corporations, led by very powerful people, direct the future, technology, society and almost everything in society. Her thesis is that Europe is one of a kind—a continent, a political entity, that tries to regulate according to moral and legal rules. “But,” she writes, “unfortunately, Europe is also the weakest of these players. And it has become so precisely because of this.”

If every society reached a consensus that technology must be strictly regulated, that we must find a new form of social contract, that would be the ideal future.

But the problem we see from the perspective of peace and conflict is that everyone hopes they are the stronger one, that they are above the law. We see the same thing with the mafia inside states, with corruption; apparently it is an unchanging feature of power.

If we take a step back: after the Second World War, institutions were created that benefited the Global North the most. It is typical in history for the victor, after a war, to build a system in which it can be sure of keeping the losers, and everyone smaller than itself, on a short leash—and it does so until a new war breaks out.

– And that logic seems to have continued after the Cold War, which wasn’t exactly a war, but the consequences are similar.

– That’s right. After the fall of the USSR, the other superpower grew more arrogant, more and more aggressive. You can see it in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria.

Today India, for example, has a higher GDP and a larger population than countries like France or Britain, yet they are the ones with permanent seats on the UN Security Council. By what measure are they bigger or more significant than India? The reasons are purely and solely historical: they were among the victors of the Second World War.

But that is no longer reality. We are living in an old system that, in my view, is bound to change soon. That is the aim of BRICS, for instance. Yes, most of those countries are not democratic; they are authoritarian. But whether we like it or not,

it is important to find some kind of international agreement in which we find a new balance of power.

– And here lies the biggest problem. You said it yourself: in history this always happens after a war. Can we really do it without going through that? Or at least through some new “cold war” in which people don’t die, as they do in Ukraine, Gaza or Iran?

– Something is needed to set the transformative processes in motion, and it has to be very powerful. History shows that until now that something has been war. Unfortunately, you’re right about that, and, again unfortunately,

we humans always realize only after the war that we should have done something differently.

That is what history shows us, but I hope I’m wrong and it doesn’t happen again. I hope that this time we reform the global system without a major clash.

Fortunately, there are examples of that too. For instance, the Cold War treaties limiting nuclear weapons, strategic arms and long-range systems. Or the Treaty on Open Skies—the great powers flying over each other’s territory to observe one another’s military developments. Back then the great powers somehow managed to sit down at the table and find a way to jointly contain potentially huge problems.

It is a very bad sign that none of these agreements are valid anymore; they expired and were not renewed.

We’re seeing it again. The great powers—the United States, Russia and China—are modernizing their nuclear triads.

– What’s more, we hear world leaders talking about nuclear weapons as a real option, and society isn’t even particularly impressed. You say, though, that if it’s not to be war, something very powerful has to happen to rearrange the forces. What could that be?

– In my view, either societies sense that there is a problem and put pressure on their politicians, or we first change our relationship with technology.

I hope scientists are still capable of doing it. That’s why I write books; many researchers work on peace, and it is right that we should see more serious pressure coming from them.

Our other chance is civil society. We have to protest, to never tire of saying that things must not come to war. In this way, slowly, slowly, with petitions, with protests, with scientific research, we simply have to push politicians into taking decisions and measures.

The problem is that today even politicians don’t have power. It may sound like a conspiracy theory, but it’s a fact that all the technologies we’re talking about require enormous capital, enormous infrastructure and access to rare raw materials. That’s how they end up in the hands of huge corporations that take advantage of this privilege.

A few states, and even fewer people at the top of those corporations, control the import and export of raw materials, control nuclear energy, and as a result control technology. Compared with states, companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook have long been even stronger.

That is exactly why my thesis is that

technologies create vast hierarchical structures, and as a result it isn’t even clear whether politicians are in power at all.

To me that is the big problem—finding a mechanism by which these corporations and their leaders can be regulated, so that part of their unlimited power is taken from them and returned to society.

– I don’t think there’s a way. Because what matters most to me here is that the public conversation is in their hands today. The media no longer exist as gatekeepers, and it’s social networks that determine how public moods shift. Is it even possible to protest today?

– That’s true, and a typical example is what happened in Spain, where 80,000 refugees crossed over from Morocco in a single day. Researchers still don’t have enough evidence, but many traces lead to Israeli tech companies that provoked this crisis. They got into a social bubble, convinced a lot of people that now was the moment to emigrate, and explained exactly how to do it. Once again we were shown how powerful social media are. Clearly someone very professionally created and targeted a piece of fake news.

Why Israel? It hasn’t been proven, but we know that Spain is one of the biggest critics of the war in Gaza, and there were diplomatic disputes, too. More important, though, is that we saw the power of social media once again.

All the power today is in their hands, but how can we take it away from them?

Clearly, control alone won’t do it. Look—this is happening precisely in Europe, which prides itself on its oversight, constantly puts pressure on social networks, introduces new regulations, and still remains so vulnerable.

– Shouldn’t there be new platforms where we can communicate and get informed in some more independent and sensible way?

– Absolutely. That’s one of the biggest problems. But how is it supposed to happen? As we said, developing technology takes resources. Many countries in Europe don’t want nuclear energy—Austria, for example.

Europe is caught in a very hard moral dilemma—we want to be green, we want to be peaceful, and we want everything to follow our rules.

At the same time we need enormous resources—cobalt, nickel, lithium, gallium, germanium, rare raw materials that are in the Global South, in China and in Africa. We don’t have access to these resources, we don’t have that infrastructure, and if we want it, we have to pursue what I would call a colonial policy.

So we come back to my first thesis: technology is never neutral. That is, it is always the product of resource plunder and hierarchical structures.

The same goes for your question. To have neutral, meaningful social media, we would also have to make use of resources and means that we consider to be outside the rules, deeply undemocratic and dirty.

– When we get to artificial intelligence, is it settled now that there are two great powers in this field? I follow it quite closely, and I don’t see how anyone could challenge the dominance of the U.S. and China anymore; we trip over the same paradox as with everything we’ve discussed.

– This is certainly the battle of the future. Absolutely. And I also think it’s only the U.S. and China. Russia is far behind, and so is Europe.

– AI, just like computers, the internet and many other technologies, arrived with the promise that it would democratize, balance, regulate—and yet, as your thesis also suggests, it is once again showing a tendency toward monopolies, imbalances, power by force. Why? Did we take up these technologies haphazardly, or were we simply working with mechanisms that were valid for other, different times? From the 1950s and 1960s, when the world was different and all the definitions of the social contract and human creativity, of humans and technology, were completely different.

– In my view it has always been this way. With any technology.

Take, for example, how Britain became one of the largest empires, ruling almost the entire world. That happened because of the steam engine—again, because of technology.

To achieve it, they needed one raw material—coal. The entire industrial revolution could only be built on coal and electricity, and it was precisely these that created the empire.

We see the same in other eras. Only the resources change—coal isn’t so important today; we even want to get rid of it.

The mechanisms remain; only the technologies and the resources that feed them change. But the structure, the idea behind them, has always been imperialist, colonial, driven by the idea of power.

People who want power understand that they must have the most advanced technology. On the one hand internally, to control their own people, and on the other externally, to be the dominant force.

It’s simply the very old human idea of power. In my opinion, that’s where we should look for the cause, not in technology or in resources.

– But couldn’t technology somehow help us break out of this vicious circle of war and the struggle for power? What if artificial intelligence, for example, turned out to be such a factor?

– In peace and war studies there is the thesis of “alien peace.” Aliens arrive, they threaten us, and for the first time humanity is united—the age-old dream. We become brothers and sisters and finally have a common goal; we’re united by the threat.

It’s hypothetical, it sounds a little funny, even cynical—

why do we need aliens in order to unite?

But the same could be supposed of artificial intelligence—that it unites us as a threat. Maybe it is precisely AI that will push us to look for some new architecture of world security; maybe it could calculate a balance between the great powers. Could that be the solution?

– Or could the opposite happen—could the failure of the technology turn out to be useful? Huge sums are being poured into advancing AI right now, even though we are still far from knowing exactly how to make it truly useful and effective. If this enormous bubble bursts, could that be the breaking point we’re talking about?

– It depends on the states, especially the big ones. ChatGPT was a commercial model, but the Chinese showed us that open AI models can also be extremely successful. A lot also depends on the major countries and which direction they steer these processes. But maybe that’s why I’m a bit more pessimistic: I mainly look at the military aspects of artificial intelligence and technology.

Perhaps the civilian side is gentler or nicer, but in war there are things like systems of drones and missiles that choose on their own where to strike. That’s how the tragedy in Iran happened, where around 200 schoolgirls were killed because twenty years earlier the school had been a military base. Even artificial intelligence evidently makes mistakes if its data is outdated.

The other thing, as we can see, is training on manipulated data. AI depends on what information we feed it. It matters enormously, for example, whether you say there is a war in Gaza, whether it is solely the fault of Hamas as terrorists, or whether it is genocide. That’s exactly what frightens me so much—that the great powers are training artificial intelligence to steer the entire discourse the way they want.

– Yes, let’s hope we don’t turn it into just another tool of manipulation; I believe it can be avoided.

– It is very important to be informed. It is very important to exchange information in times when you don’t know whether a text, a picture, a video is true.

It is very important to communicate. It is very important to have social exchange. Through protests, through a strong civil society, there has to be pushback, and we have to press politicians, especially in the EU, to take firmer measures so that we regulate technology.

– Thank you for the conversation—you’ve given me a lot to think about!

– You were the youngest anchor in the history of Po sveta i u nas, you became one of the most recognizable and longest-serving faces on the air. Then suddenly you “disappeared” and went off into the world of technology. Why such an abrupt change of direction?

– I decided to try something new. After investing half my life in journalism, and in television in particular, I think I gave plenty of chances both to myself and to television itself. At some point I decided our relationship had run its course—we took what we could from each other, we gave what we could, and I moved on.

The interesting thing is that only after I gave up this thing I had poured my entire youth into, all my dreams, all my love and strength, did it turn out that I hadn’t been making television at all, but something much more, something much bigger.

It wasn’t just television, and it wasn’t just journalism either—it was exploring people and telling stories.

Since I left, people often ask me whether I miss it. No, because that’s what I’m still doing.

For me, the definition of television is “I connect people.” And “I tell stories.”

– Stories are what survives—from the days of the caves all the way to the age of artificial intelligence. It’s no accident this site is called what it is.

– Looking back, and now afterward too, I keep doing the same thing I’ve done all my life. I’m driven by the same interests that have driven me all my life.

My mother tells a story from when I was just a few years old. Times were freer then, and she had let me out to play in front of our apartment block. I vanish, she goes looking for me and finds me on a bench with Stoyancho. Stoyancho is an 80-year-old grandpa, and the two of us are sitting there talking, telling each other stories.

Somehow that makes me realize I’ve been doing this my whole life, and television is just a platform. I changed the platform, but I keep doing the same thing.

– Then again, it’s quite an addictive platform. A lot of people find it hard to tear themselves away.

– The truth is that television changed a great deal over the 20 years I was in it.

I understood that largely when I went into the tech business, which no longer watches television, because the entrepreneurs are young.

And many of the successful entrepreneurs were abroad during my professional peak. When I started working with them, I always seemed familiar to them from somewhere, but they couldn’t quite say where. When it came up and I told them, they apologized for not watching television. And they immediately asked me why I had worked there—“it’s not really needed anymore, nobody watches TV.”

I had to explain to them that when I fell in love with television and pledged myself to it, it was something prestigious, relatively well paid and, most importantly, everybody watched you. You had everyone’s attention. These days that’s nowhere near as true.

– It depends. If we look at the statistics, a lot of people still watch it after all, though not always the traditional way—online, selectively. Yes, fewer people switch on the TV at 8 p.m. to watch the news, but the news from there reverberates, we discuss it, and it’s at the center, whether we’re talking about reality shows or politics.

– That’s true, but the way television is consumed and distributed has changed a lot since then. Before, you had to find the right topic, the right person, put them on at the right time, when the right viewers would be watching. It was a small miracle to get the best product, but also the best impact, to get a quality product. A lot of planets had to line up in space.

Now good things exist on their own, and they find you. Pieces of quality television find you, even though the ritual of everyone sitting down at 8 p.m. to watch the main news is gone.

Yes, people watch television, quality things keep spreading, but television doesn’t have the power it once had.

– I watched something similar from the front row with the decline of newspapers. When I was starting out as a journalist, 24 Chasa, one of Bulgaria’s biggest dailies, had a circulation of 200,000, and whatever was on its front page set society’s agenda.

– Yes, a lot depends on the function of television and the mass media too, because they used to exist as the main channel of communication—first for information, then for analysis. In my view, part of the reason television stations lost their viewers and their public influence is that for too long they kept, and perhaps to some extent still keep, playing the role of information suppliers.

But these days information is everywhere. It’s in your pocket, in your phone. You don’t need to watch an hour of news to hear the four minutes that interest you.

You no longer watch television so much to get informed—you’ve known the news since the morning, since your first coffee, because you open your email and there it is waiting for you. Rather, you watch the way it’s presented, “which way the wind is blowing,” what the interpretation is and on which outlet, because however murky media ownership is in Bulgaria, it’s clear to you which outlet plays for which team. In that sense,

what interests you is how the news is presented, not so much the news itself.

– But that, and I repeat it often on this site, is in my view the source of a huge share of our problems as a society today—that we have no central platforms, no gatekeepers of the kind the media used to be. So that balanced, quality information reaches you, and you don’t lock yourself in your own bubble and live in a world completely different from your neighbor’s.

– That’s right,

for me, commentary matters far more these days than news reporting.

In fact, national television stations were created after World War II for the purpose of channeling information. To rebuild society, to control information. And so that everyone would have one common platform bringing them together. Today that is very different.

In one interview I was asked: “What era would you like to live in?” My answer was precisely the moment of the television pioneers, when you invent things. Every step you take to the side is something new, a discovery. And second, it’s the moment when you have the audience’s full attention.

When I took it up, it was still largely like that. But

these days everything in television has already been invented.

The other problem, if we follow the thread of audience attention, is that these days everyone creates content and nobody consumes content.

Can we survive sustainably in a model like that?

– I don’t think we can. That’s how public conversation breaks down—when everyone creates and nobody consumes in volumes big enough to make it worthwhile for anyone to create something better.

– Right now we live in the kingdom of copying, of the shallow, of the fast. Our content is “junk.”

With all the assistive systems we have, including AI, anyone can fool themselves into thinking they understand something.

Or do you not need to understand something to get a job done? Fine, but only up to a point.

Nobody becomes a master that way. To become a master, you know, you have to put in 10,000 hours, 10 years, time and effort. These days we’re always looking for shortcuts, the direct route.

But shortcuts don’t create masters. It’s the other way around. Masters create shortcuts.

My problem is with the audience’s attention, that nobody can concentrate anymore. I can feel myself changing, and all of us changing, because of the whole rhythm of content creation, the whole assault our minds are getting from every direction.

We’re losing patience. We’re losing the ability and the desire to stay somewhere, to stop, to read a longer text. Not just to hear the wise sentences of the person we’re talking to, but to understand the context behind them. I believe that what we did on BNT Taxi is still the most important thing today.

Not so much what you think, but rather why you think it, and also who you are. What’s the context of your position? Who are you, and what do you represent as a piece of the social puzzle, so that we can have some kind of dialogue?

If you try something like that now, you get irritated. You want to know the what and the how right away. And the real mastery of narrative, of a story, a film, a book, is to create context.

What does every good story do? It takes something insignificant at the beginning and gives you something deeply significant at the end. Only, to build up meaning around something insignificant, you need context. And here I like to give the example of Titanic, which is already archaic. At first glance it’s a film about a ship sinking. At second glance it’s a film about love. At third glance…, and this is the interesting part for me, Titanic is a film about a pendant that means nothing in the first shot and everything in the last.

Why? Because of the context. That is exactly what we’re losing these days—both in telling and in taking in.

– Strong stories struggle to break through, because of everything you’re describing. Context and detail, depth, the ability to build a picture, to get out of the cliché. At the same time there are podcasters, internet influencers, people with huge audiences. Who, however, are rarely held responsible for their content.

– That’s exactly the paradox. People from my new circle say they don’t watch television. While at the same time everyone is trying to produce television at home, from their room, from their phone. Everyone makes podcasts.

We don’t value journalism. We have no respect for it, and at the same time everyone is trying to be a journalist.

It’s a very interesting paradox. One problem is that this only feeds the echo chambers, and the other is that to capture attention you have to be extreme, whatever the topic, and distort.

I’ve thought a lot about why podcasts succeeded, and still largely succeed, as an alternative to television. Considering that, if you look at it professionally, it’s the opposite of television. A podcast is “talking heads,” something television has spent years trying to avoid. It’s long, specialized. So why do people seek it out?

Because it’s specialized content for a specialized audience that can consume it whenever it’s convenient. When you’re on television, when you’re making BNT Taxi and you have to show nine minutes to the whole of Bulgaria, that’s an enormous commitment.

On the air of the traditional media, the more numerous and diverse the viewers you’re creating content for at once, the more objective and balanced you have to be. That deprives you of the “at any cost” flashiness of the internet and podcasts. That’s precisely the difference, and it’s why it’s much harder to manage to be interesting and watched on national television than in a podcast.

– I really like the metaphor about food, that what you choose to read is what you feed your soul. That’s why this question, which dates back to the 1990s, matters to me—when the level of the media drops, how can the process be reversed? Should we follow the audience, or should we educate it and bring it together? Can we somehow break out of this circle?

– I have friends at the Association of Bulgarian Animation Producers… Together with BESCO, the Bulgarian Startup Association, we tried to help one of their causes—changing the laws so that better films could be made. One of their leaders is convinced that

the moment will come when we return to calm conversation, to reason, to attention, to the person in front of us.

Because these days everyone wants to have their own say and doesn’t want our opinion. They listen to the other side only to see where they can jump in and say: “But wait, let me tell you.” That’s social media.

It’s the mirror on the wall, literally! “Tell me, who’s the fairest of them all?” That’s the world we live in.

We’re blinded by ourselves and have no regard for the other person. And the algorithms of social media exploit that. They sell us self-satisfaction. And we are self-satisfied; the other person isn’t needed.

Years ago I had to help a girl with an essay about what the Berlin Wall was. We built it like this: if there were an art installation depicting it, I would put up a piece of wall with mirrors on both sides, back to back. For three reasons—first, because a mirror doesn’t let you look through it, to see what’s hidden behind. Second, because a mirror shows only your own truth. And third, because a mirror shows you exactly where the wall itself is.

When the internet appeared, the hope it brought was that it would be a window onto the world. Instead it turned into a mirror.

– In my view all these processes are happening precisely because of technology and the haphazard way we embrace it. Both you and I in some sense went over “to the enemy’s side,” moving from journalism to technology. Why did you choose that particular direction?

– I’m a humanities type; I look for the future of humanity in the past, if anything. That’s what we do, those of us from the Classical High School, Sofia’s school of ancient languages and cultures. We look for values, the world of Plato and his ideas, the things that never change, regardless of conditions and conventions, regardless of platforms.

In the end, technology is whatever we want from it. We want to serve our vanity, our flaws, our human and animal needs, to find something that delivers them to us in the best possible way.

Why did I go into the tech world specifically? Here’s the story: BNT gave me the task of making a documentary about the Bulgarian tech sector. During the interviews I was extremely and sincerely impressed by the people I met. I had no idea such people were still around, which was strange to me—I worked with people every day. I’m a journalist.

I’ve met thousands of people in my work, year after year. And suddenly personalities appear whom I thought had left Bulgaria long ago.

People who believe they can be world-class. People who believe tomorrow can be better. People who won’t give up.

That impressed me a great deal, and that’s why I followed the people. They’re the kind who have worked on themselves; they’re educated, capable, they’ve tried things and they don’t give up, however hard it gets.

I like that idea, that cause—to tell everyone what I had just discovered and what had surprised me so pleasantly. Success stories, instead of the story of yet another truck crash.

– For me, too, it’s a great cause and mission to tell stories about technology, to provoke some kind of public dialogue. Alas, to be honest, I don’t think we’re succeeding. This sector remains cut off from the rest, and its stories don’t reach everyone else—at least that’s how it seems to me.

– I do think there’s been a huge change over the past five years, since I’ve been watching society from this side too. The media have changed as well; they’ve started paying more attention to these kinds of people. There’s good news, there’s inspiration, and many young people decide they should take this path, because it’s worth it, because it’s possible.

You can be a normal person, you can be a successful businessman without being a thief, a killer, a dealer, without walking around with 20 bodyguards.

– And still, it’s not enough. Take artificial intelligence: supposedly it’s talked about constantly and everywhere, yet we don’t arrive at any more meaningful public conversation. The reasons, in my view, lie in everything we’ve discussed so far. Somehow technology feels cozy staying apart. That’s my sense of it; it may not be true.

– If you have that sense, it may be because these are, after all, global companies. Bulgarian politics still isn’t interested in this sector and doesn’t understand it—unfortunately, and fortunately. Our politicians haven’t reached the world-class level that, thank God, the Bulgarian tech sector has managed to reach. I’ve tried to motivate successful entrepreneurs to talk in the media about success, about meaning, about technology. One person told me: “Whether I tell my story in Bulgaria doesn’t interest me, I work with the whole world.” Yet a few sentences later the very same person said: “But if one child hears me, gets inspired and believes, then it makes sense, and I’ll do it.” Many of them don’t go public in a centralized way, but they tour high schools, go out to the provinces and inspire a lot of young people.

I think this is happening, and if there is some kind of vacuum, perhaps the problem is rather that it isn’t centralized enough—as a medium, as a channel, as a platform, as a stage, as an association of people who would like to do it.

As for AI, it’s changing constantly, all the time. Perhaps the people working in the tech sector are themselves so busy right now trying to understand it and predict where it’s going that they have neither the time nor the focus to explain it to others.

– But there’s room for all of us in this conversation, because the future of all of us depends on it. Yet few people in the rest of society are aware of the big changes. They haven’t gone through the quiet moment of horror I felt when I realized readers couldn’t tell my story from one told by AI. Have you thought about such a moment—as you said yourself, your great skill is telling stories; what happens if a program does it better?

– Our brains are used to turning everything into pictures and situations. We remember and believe with our feelings.

Even though machines understand exactly which buttons to push to engage me emotionally, they don’t understand emotions.

The other day a friend played me a hip-hop track he’d ordered from an artificial intelligence, since I’m a fan of that style of music. Somehow you sense immediately, and I mean immediately, that the stew is oversalted. As someone who has worked with voice, sound and intonation for 20 years, I instantly noticed that the rapper’s voice had both a rasp and a buttery richness at the same time, and it’s anatomically impossible to have both. Each creates style and pleasure for the listener’s ear, but the stew was oversalted; there were too many cool things in it. That’s the sense of measure. I’ve heard that

the devil’s favorite weapon is doubt, and the devil’s curse is losing your sense of measure.

What we have and carry within us is tied to context. As we said, shortcuts don’t create masters—masters create shortcuts.

Measure is our refuge. Perhaps it’s exactly what will bring us back to the old way of understanding, but maybe at the next level. I don’t want us to go back to the caves, because technology helps tremendously in every respect.

No, no, I don’t want us to go back to the caves. I want us to go back to the human being.

– “Uncle Bob” Martin recently wrote that he no longer reads his code. Quite a few leading authorities are saying the same, but whenever I float the idea with some colleagues, it nearly comes to blows. What do you think?

– It depends on what you’re doing. If you’re writing something mission-critical, it really is worth coming to blows over. If you’re building some promotional marketing website, some bullshit that will live for a week, why would you bother looking at the code? The problem is that even before,

the gap in knowledge transfer was widening, but now it has turned into a huge chasm.

Twenty years from now we will have lost skills on a massive scale!

I always give the example of the Saturn V rocket. The Americans want to go to the Moon again, they built Artemis, and people wonder why a completely new rocket was needed when the Saturn V didn’t have a single failure. Why not take it as the basis, update the materials, run it through modern engineering practices and save a few billion dollars in development? The answer is that the technology has been lost.

The people who built it are gone. They left the documentation, but they didn’t leave the knowledge. And there is no way to reproduce them.

– Maybe the problem is just that Stanley Kubrick is no longer with us? I’m joking, of course.

– One or two incomplete sets of Saturn V engines, and that’s it. Everything else is the finer points of the craft, which are simply lost, and the only option is to build them up from scratch.

The same will happen with software. We will start depending far too much on agents that can be stopped, started and modified without our knowledge at any moment, agents that have access to all the source code.

Right now the big companies, Anthropic included, have us training their models, supposedly to make our work easier. At some point, though, the person training the model will become completely unnecessary. But here is the problem: the agent will be able to handle the examples it has seen and will be hopeless in new, unfamiliar situations.

– Still, do we really have to read every line of code the agents write if the project is important but some parts of it aren’t critical? I’m a front-end developer, for instance, and I don’t think there are large areas of the code where that applies.

– I’m sorry to hear that, but… the front end is usually the first link in a cyberattack. Cookie theft, XSS, DDoS attacks. That’s exactly the problem with the whole mentality. I said it a few years ago.

LLMs will be very useful wherever we can verify the quality of their work. A lot of people have given up on verification entirely. Because now they’re too lazy even for that.

Obviously everyone wants to collect their salary without touching anything, but… a very dangerous precedent is being set.

We are degrading technically. Absolutely all of us are degrading! There’s no one to teach the newcomers, and knowledge is starting to be lost.

One moment we have models and I have no idea what they’re doing. The next, those models “go rogue” and start hacking other platforms, as in the recent news.

There will be big upheavals, there will be a big drop in quality, until at some point we establish empirically that the knowledge we are losing right now is very valuable and will have to be brought back.

– A lot of people believe, though, that the level of abstraction is simply rising. That agentic systems are already good enough to be trusted with everything happening under the surface, in the code. And they point out that today almost nobody knows lower-level languages like assembly, and there’s no need to. Maybe agents will even turn out to be much better at cybersecurity—supposedly that’s why one leading model, Mythos, was held back. After all, programmers are far from perfect too.

– People who think assembly isn’t used are badly mistaken. It isn’t used for building web pages, but let’s politely ask them to broaden their horizons—not everything is Node.js. The most critical components of the world’s infrastructure are pure assembly. Here’s an example. Recently a very interesting hack for the Linux kernel came out that lets you break into the system. You open two handlers and swap it at a precisely timed moment, and that way you take control of the machine. This thing was missed by absolutely every system, including Mythos, which audits the Linux kernel.

An independent researcher found it and published it. It was fixed quickly, but it was extremely dangerous, because every machine built on that foundation over the past 10 years could be hacked in an elementary way.

Every system missed it. If you listen to the marketing, they really are very good. And they really are good—but at crawling through enormous amounts of code, not at finding hyper-specific vulnerabilities. For that you have to have gone extremely deep into the technology.

But all the models we see right now are limited to what has already been found; they don’t discover new security holes.

They find what they’ve seen, with very slight variations, but they don’t find new things. Or, to be absolutely fair, they often confidently miss bugs nobody has seen before.

For two years I’ve been explaining that we’ve hit the peak of LLMs, and I turned out to be right. They haven’t moved much further up.

– Is that really so? It’s true we’re not talking about radically new approaches, but the platforms are getting better in every area. Just look at how much code generation has improved in those two years.

– We hit the peak long ago. LLMs will never reach the level of general AI. Whatever anyone says, it’s a tool that will never surpass human capabilities. That’s why everyone is moving away from them, including the original creators of the transformer models.

What has started happening, and what creates the illusion of progress, is specialized tooling. Harnesses, or agents, or whatever you want to call them. They started fine-tuning in the context of individual domains where data is very easy to collect and generate—programming, math problems.

There, it looks like there’s some progress.

They are starting to help, but that’s the result of narrow specialization combined with lots of external tools. The LLMs themselves are getting faster, using fewer resources, training on more examples, but there is no progress in terms of generalization, creativity and the like.

They simply focused the LLM’s skills on one particular field. But there are a great many other areas where they can’t budge. Engineering in general, for example. Ford in America asked 850 of its core engineers, whom it had laid off because of AI, to come back.

– But is that a general trend? In the tech sector it doesn’t seem to be reversing; the layoffs keep coming.

– A lot of people say the market is tough, people are getting fired. But if you look at the chart of employment, separations and hiring in the United States, because it’s easy to track there, the data are exactly the same as before COVID, one to one!

Yes, when COVID hit, everything collapsed, the planet stopped spinning. Once we more or less started coming out of it, companies started hiring huge numbers of people. And now they are starting to let them go.

This is the market normalizing, processes that take two to five years to stabilize.

The other problem is that many young people find it harder to get in. Because the process is like a pendulum: once it swings hard from one end, it has to sway left and right several times before it settles in the middle. Young people will suffer for a few more years from companies having hired too many people. Across the whole Western world, everyone has tightened their budgets and isn’t hiring more. They try to optimize with what they have. Inflation jumped far too high, and there’s far too much uncertainty.
In other words, young people right now are caught in a “perfect storm”—bad economic expectations, stagnation, international uncertainty.

This too will pass, but they shouldn’t waste this time; they should be building skills!

– A much more widespread view is that juniors aren’t being hired because AI does their work better.

– The model can get the job done, but let me give you an example, a real experiment. The same setup, the same task, the same tools, given to a senior, a mid-level and a junior. Use these tools—that’s the goal. The senior is done in 15 minutes, literally in one iteration. The mid-level programmer needs three, four, five iterations, a bit more time, but still brings the task to roughly the same level.

And the junior? Over a million tokens, several hours, a whole pile of iterations. In the end the task is brought to a point where it looks like it works, but when you see how it’s actually implemented, it’s not okay at all.

LLMs are a tool. And like any other tool, you need a level of knowledge to use it. If you don’t even know what question to ask, nothing can help you.

So the models are replacing juniors not because they do more work than them, but because juniors lack the judgment that comes from practice, which they need in order to work with the models.

Young people not knowing how to work with these tools leads to some pretty interesting situations—like firing up GPT-5.5 to change the heading tags on a template and leaving it unsupervised. And coming back from your coffee break to find it got stuck in a loop, went off track and blew $700. A real case!

– But there, both the harness and common sense failed. In my view those are the two most important things in these chaotic times, when I think most people in the industry are still working out a sensible way to approach all this.

– That’s exactly what I’ll be talking about at the DEV.BG All in One conference; I’ll give a few practical tips. Because people have to take matters into their own hands. There are no fundamental changes in the processes; there are changes in the tools. I can’t understand why practices proven over more than 50 years were thrown out.

Obviously everyone in the IT sector already uses AI. It’s like someone asking you in the past whether you use an IDE. It goes without saying; you’re expected to have certain skills.

Learn the tools, the way we once learned Vim and Emacs!

The world has changed. The world you and I grew up in is dead, and we’ve buried it. It isn’t coming back. The new tools changed it,

and a lot of people don’t get that.

The whole toolkit has to change, and so does the way of thinking. But here’s an important detail: the world and the tools have changed, but the processes, the rules, the cause-and-effect relationships that make you good, successful, competitive—those haven’t changed. Skills still come first; we just have to add the skill of using LLMs to them.

– I think the companies themselves still don’t quite know how to approach this, how to find their way through the murky waters and set boundaries.

– They’ve found their way already. Most of them, at least; it will take a little more time for everything to stabilize.

– How? If there are no limits on the models, you end up with cases like the one you described. How exactly do you prepare people? How do you create the framework for them? To go back to the beginning: when should every line of code be read, and when not?

– I’ve talked to quite a few companies, and each has found its own ways. But at every company with any responsibility to the client for code quality, human code reviews are still going on, and they are coming back.

Some places have more layers—first one model submits the changes, another reviews them; it has to be a different one, of course. But in the end it’s still a human who approves.

The initial investment is large, because the most successful companies that have implemented AI mostly use local models. That way they’re sure the model’s behavior doesn’t change, it’s under their control, and there’s also data security. Another reason is that once this process gets going, recurring mistakes are identified and eliminated—in coding style, for example, or variable naming. At some point the model, when it isn’t being changed every two days as it would be from an outside company, starts following those rules quite well.

Most successful companies started in-house training long ago for these new processes, these new tools.

– And what about productivity? How is a person supposed to keep up with thousands of lines of code in every merge request?

– If it’s thousands of lines, something is wrong. Think about it—pure math. Before AI you have 10 people, and they produce a certain number of lines of code that have passed review. At some point you bring in AI, and those 10 people aren’t as busy with the actual writing of code. They simply focus on oversight. Let me stress it again: more code doesn’t mean better code.

Two years ago, at my DEV.BG talk, I said that the work,

the change that will happen, is that we will become managers and supervisors of these systems.

They will be assistants we tell what to do, and we will verify their output. That’s exactly what’s happening now.

Of course, there are people who run 100 percent agents, and those generate a million lines of code. But that’s a serious sign of a problem. If the model starts pushing hundreds of thousands of lines at you, something is totally wrong. You need to look at your pipeline, your prompts, the model, the harness, the task definition and so on. That’s part of code review; you simply have to stop it at that point.

A good model should generate the same amount of code as a good programmer.

If a good programmer would do this task in 1,000 lines of code, the model should also do it in 1,000 to 2,000 lines.

– But are lines of code always such a telling criterion?

– I want to say something very important.

Don’t treat LLMs as better programmers than the ones you have!

Don’t think the model is better than everything we’ve built so far. At times it may look that way, and it is faster. But it isn’t better!

A lot of people were misled along these lines: you see, I’ll just write a prompt, the model will spin up 10 agents, they’ll go into some loop, test themselves, check themselves, and in the end we’ll have perfect code.

That’s not how it works! If that’s your approach, you’re dead as a company!

Going down that road, Uber blew its annual budget in three months.

Keep in mind, too, that every company providing LLM services has a very strong interest in us generating more tokens, because that’s profit for them. They have no interest in us generating fewer.

– That’s precisely the kind of training and preparation I mean—most companies never get that far.

– If you leave them on the default settings, look what happens! That’s another reason so many people choose to work with local models: it turns out that 60 percent of the quality of the generated code is the harness, not the model.

I can’t understand why people suddenly forgot good principles that we as an IT industry spent 20, 30, 50 years building.

Code has to be readable and use pure functions. If someone writes code that others can’t understand, that person has to be removed.

Literally overnight everyone abandoned these rules, even though nothing stops you from implementing them now.

Is it laziness? Is it stupidity?

It isn’t stupidity, because far too many people are doing it. So many smart people I know. There’s some kind of collective psychosis around the whole thing, and it has many aspects.

Business, personal and who knows what else. And when you panic, you act on instinct. But time has passed, and things are starting to settle. Come back to reality!

– Back to how easily we hand off knowledge: what’s your personal recipe for keeping it? I can feel myself becoming a “weaker” programmer with every day I barely write any code.

– These are two kinds of intelligence. One is the actual style of the code—where you put the curly braces, how you name your variables, that sort of thing. That has lost its value; I don’t look at it these days.

I don’t look at the stylistics of the code, but at whether there’s repetition, whether there’s a clear exit from the loops and recursions, how you return errors, whether everything is crammed into one function, whether the state is clear. I look from a more architectural, more abstract level. When an architect draws up the plan of a building, he doesn’t care whether the walls will be pink or have wallpaper. What matters to him is that those walls are straight and strong enough.

A huge share of my iterations with AI go exactly in that direction. In general I wasn’t a fan of test-driven development, but with AI I’m all for it. I give it tasks and watch how it’s progressing. And when I see something, I just tell it that’s not right. That way I don’t lose my understanding of what happened. You have to be in the loop. You simply have to be in the development loop, but not looking at every little letter and symbol in the code.

If you set up your LLM to write pure functions that are unit tested, you may not pay as much attention to their specific implementation and style. But how that function interacts with the others—nobody should ever let that slip out of their control. Things escalate pretty fast. There was a popular post about a pull request that deleted 4 million lines of code and replaced them with 20,000.

– But I think everything you mentioned is well within AI’s abilities. I’ve seen plenty of people write less readable code, with more gaps of that kind, than Claude Code allows.

– No, it can’t do it. It can make things easier for you. It can be a first filter. But in the end there has to be a human; the programmer has to take a look. Whether it’s through code review or within the work loop itself, that’s the main point people miss. These are augmenters. We delegate to them, but in the end we absolutely have to verify what’s happening. An LLM can write a better pure function—short, well defined, with clear input and output—but it can’t do architecture. I want people to understand this:

architecture and the actual writing of code are different things.

Let me give you the example of a client that works with huge queries—a whole petabyte goes through every day! Not a gigabyte, not a terabyte. A multibillion-dollar company. They had to build a very complex query, and of course they used AI, and it worked. Slowly—lots of data going through, we’ll wait…

I sat down to look at it. The code was very well written, but to run, it had to process 2 to 3 terabytes per query. With a bit of manual optimization that came down to 350 megabytes. Why? Because the code was perfect, but the approach was wrong. That was a small, isolated case. When the complexity of a system increases, the risk of the LLM making architectural mistakes increases exponentially.

– Every conversation with you gives plenty to think about, and sometimes a dose of cognitive dissonance too.

– Sometimes cognitive dissonance is useful, and many people go through it. I went through it too when this whole thing started going mainstream. At first I flat-out refused to use any harness or coding agent at all; for a long time I wrote code only by hand, old school, and things were going fine.

But at some point I started realizing I was becoming out of touch, falling behind, that things had changed a lot.

And because I understand LLMs but didn’t have that kind of detailed knowledge of the agents built on top of them, my first tests threw me into cognitive dissonance from every direction.

You have to go through it, and only after that can you look at things more boldly and objectively.

– I’m sure you’ll provoke it in quite a few people in your talk at All in One as well. I’ll definitely be there to watch and listen.

– Your path is a fascinating one. How did you go from making films to suddenly landing in the world of electric cars?

– Cars have always interested me, the mechanics themselves, the physics of it all. But with cars specifically, it all started with one trip.

I saw a technology that was huge and ripening on the horizon. I got to touch it, and I saw for myself what possibilities it had.

I managed to see past the obstacles that the momentum of the time was throwing up. And at the same time I saw how many problems were looking for a solution. I already had some ideas in my head and… it just pulled me in.

I compare it to gravity, because sometimes, when you find a good solution, it’s very hard to walk away from it and not develop it, not try to do something with it. When you see a good idea, it’s so big and has such a pull that it really isn’t a matter of choice.

You get a chance to be a pioneer only once in your life, and if you spot that chance and let it slip, you’re a complete idiot and you don’t deserve to be a pioneer.

I think electric mobility is giving rise to a new way of traveling. A new way of planning, of refueling. It’s no longer the gas station.

– What is the biggest difference?

– I think the common denominator is the users. What I’m really building is a platform for the person behind the wheel who, while traveling, sometimes needs a restaurant, sometimes a fast charging station, a place to stay, an idea for a destination. This whole system the traveler weaves around himself is tied to his electric car and to how he actually lives inside that ecosystem.

I saw a chance to create a huge ecosystem around the user. Only, if you decide to improve the Mercedes assembly line, you have 120 years of data on the changes to it. Here you set out to create something that has never existed before. There’s nowhere to get data from; first you have to build this microworld where people come and do the very thing you want to create a solution for.

So at first I built a platform for renting electric cars, then a complete charging solution. After that, once I saw how it was being used and what the problems were, I went on with the idea of creating a convenience that wraps you in every comfort you need: it keeps track of whether you’re hungry or thirsty, whether your car needs power, where you’re going, how much of a hurry you’re in. With today’s technology, it’s simply the perfect moment for such a solution to be built.

– In recent years it seemed we expected electric cars to catch on faster, especially when Tesla came along and we saw they could be affordable and well made. We even decided that within a decade there would be no other cars. But it seems all that optimism didn’t pan out—quite the opposite. How do you imagine things will develop from here? Will we all switch to electric cars, and if so, when?

– For me there’s no such thing as the absolute number—a moment when absolutely everyone does the same thing. First, it makes no sense at all; second, I don’t think it’s realistic. But

I think electric cars will reach a huge share of all vehicles, because it’s a technology that costs less to maintain and to charge, and the hardware lasts much longer because there are fewer parts that wear out.

It’s simply the better technology. As for what you mention—yes, the EU loves putting timeframes on evolution, but evolution, unfortunately, doesn’t care about bureaucrats and moves at its own natural pace. Very often, interference with market principles, such as incentives to get people to buy more electric cars, has a very negative effect on the brands. It distorts the market artificially and disrupts production planning.

Incentives like that can only have a populist effect. In fact,

Bulgaria is a great example of how we do very well even without incentives. Our charging infrastructure coverage is among the highest in Europe.

You can see that very easily on the aggregated maps of Travel by Electric.

The truth is that things are rolling and there’s no way to stop them. As for when scale will be reached and what it will look like, time will tell. There are certainly geopolitical factors that are strengthening this trend considerably. But I’m not entirely sure the infrastructure could handle a sharper rise.

In Bulgaria we actually have growth of 200 to 300 percent a year, which helps this whole microsystem grow at the same pace, without imbalances between its parts.

– If I had to buy a car in Bulgaria tomorrow, what would your personal arguments be for choosing an electric one?

– Oh, the arguments depend entirely on what you want. If yours are financial, there are clear comparison tables that let you see the costs over time.

If the time your car spends at the repair shop doesn’t scare you, but it matters more to you not to spend time at a charging station—because you’re always spending time somewhere—those are different arguments.

There are 100 reasons to buy an electric and 100 not to; it’s all a matter of personal justification.

I stopped explaining to people how cool electric cars are a long time ago. I just let them get there on their own.

– And is the trend reversible? Could it turn out that electric cars aren’t the solution of the future?

– I don’t believe a trend that is so blatant and strong can reverse. Yes, there may be some peak, then a plateau. But I think that could even be a way to balance our energy system. I love that tired line about how if everyone plugs in their electric car at once, we’ll all be left in the dark. It’s an absolutely hilarious claim. It’s as if we all stuck the nozzles into our gasoline and diesel cars and filled them up at the same time.

But all these technological moments get examined in tiny slices of time, without looking at the whole picture, without seeing the interlinked industries. The world is built so that people hear only what they want to hear.

– Especially when it comes to technology, which is why this site exists. And what do you think of self-driving cars? Purely technologically, three or four years ago it seemed they were coming soon, that we had already cracked it, that they would spread on a massive scale. Yes, there are many pilot projects, but we’re still far from that. Why?

– I think whoever believed this could go mainstream in three years was most likely five years old. At the very least, for it to happen we’d have to mark every road in Bulgaria, which is impossible.

This field will grow over time; it is growing, that’s a fact. Almost every new car coming out right now has distance-monitoring systems, lidar systems and so on—things that five years ago existed only on premium models. That’s the path by which these technologies will arrive. First their most basic functions will become mainstream, then they’ll start making fewer mistakes, then there will be a big recall by some brands that rushed out something because it was fashionable. In human history, things move in waves.

Humans can’t evolve on efficiencies alone. We won’t get taller, stronger in our muscles, or bigger-brained. This is what we have. The question is how to use it to expand our abilities.

– Will you miss driving if at some point nobody needs to drive a car?

– I don’t know. Years ago I thought I wouldn’t even want to drive without a gear stick. But people change, technology changes them, perspective changes. I used to have cars with big engines that growled and spun all the tires… Now that seems like some antediluvian technology to me.

I’m a child of the ’90s, and being able to drive was the one thing without which my life would have had no meaning. But as you can see, other things are starting to give our lives meaning—we grow up, we change, we have children. Our children face other challenges; other things matter to them.

In human history, driving is at this stage a fairly short period anyway, a micro-grain of our development. And if it disappears in 10 or 20 years, maybe there won’t even be a picture of it on a cave wall.

– Then again, the Hemus motorway, which Bulgaria has been building for decades, might still not be finished.

– Recently I was on a Bulgarian National Television (BNT) podcast with Martin Zaimov, and he said something I really liked—that evolution doesn’t have two sides. Like it or not, that’s how it is: the world is heading that way, and it’s better to ride the wave than to swim against it.

– If we let our imagination run free and picture how things will develop with the arrival of self-driving and electric cars, aren’t we heading toward a time when there will be no point in owning a car, and it will be some kind of shared resource—you’ll just order a ride from point A to point B?

– That has long been a concept of the big brands; Mercedes had even decided to roll it out by 2025, if I’m not mistaken, but COVID messed things up. I think for Musk and for every manufacturer, this should be the next idea. Producing a car is a resource you have already acquired, and you give the user the right to drive it. Once it has no life left in it, you take it back, dismantle it and recycle it. It’s a concept that works very well for the brands, and I think it will become real very soon, because humanity’s inability to know what to do with resources it has already used is heartbreaking.

For me, the next big wave of entrepreneurship will be precisely in recycling and in using the resources we’ve already pulled out of the ground.

Science, thank God, doesn’t depend on people’s opinions; it just keeps moving forward.

– But sometimes it comes into conflict with economics. We see that cars last far fewer miles than they used to.

– There’s planned obsolescence, that’s obvious. But we have to find some new mechanisms so that we can keep surviving financially and economically. We’re already seeing serious problems and layoffs in the auto industry.

When politics gets into economics, things don’t work. It’s exactly the same with cars. If your policy is to build a business on warranty and after-sales service, it’s like selling people ticking time bombs. The truth is that Henry Ford’s concept was forgotten long ago, because the car he created was made so that you could fix it yourself with a single tool everyone has at home and with auto parts from the hardware store.

Carmaking outgrew that moment long ago, and I think it’s now at the other end of the pendulum. In the ’90s marketing won out over engineering, and that’s why the last truly good cars were made back then. After that, everything became marketing, a battle of brands and ads.

Shared cars swing the pendulum back.

People don’t actually need to own cars, and now they’re starting to realize it.

Why should they hunt for parking, change the tires only to have to change them again, deal with insurance, oil… At some point people’s attitude changes. I see it happening before my eyes, because my clients are exactly like that. They don’t want to buy, they don’t want to own, they don’t want to be tied down. And in fact the idea of minimalism is a very big part of the green idea.

Not drowning yourself in things, in excess, not having this consumer society that serves the whole marketing machine. It’s still marketing, but aimed in a different direction.

– Still, how does someone with a background in film suddenly become an entrepreneur?

– I didn’t have many other options; maybe it’s something that had been smoldering in me for a long time in different forms. I studied business in high school, I was part of a very interesting Erasmus program back then, in ’93, when democracy was just being born. To this day, that is the foundation of how I think about economic processes in general and how things happen, because

entrepreneurship is a bit like art. You need to paint; it’s not something you chose to do.

At some point you see you’re good at it and you try to turn it into something that makes money.

The ability to think flexibly, to adapt, to observe the conditions, to try to get some benefit out of them—I think those are skills I’ve always had. I’ve always been logistically literate, I’ve had an affinity for mobility. Tetris is my favorite childhood game. I love for everything to have its place, to have its shape.

– Tetris is a fascinating subject, including the way it has shown in recent years how to find our next goal even after AI. But why does it seem there’s no sense of a good entrepreneurial environment in Bulgaria? Online we see an abundance of entrepreneurs, but that doesn’t match the success rate if you look at how many startups there are in Bulgaria, how many of them succeed, how many have become unicorns or other mythical creatures.

– It’s a matter of perspective. A step I took many years ago that turned out to be very important for me was becoming a member of BESCO, the Bulgarian Startup Association. That way, at some point I stuck my head into a different bubble.

I left show business in 2018, pretty worn out by my, so to speak, corporate career in film production. I’d had it up to here. I believed I could do much more; that what I was doing made absolutely no sense. So I actually moved into another bubble. Away from the filmmaking one, where we work 18-hour days, go straight from one project into the next, and every director and every script is the same. Not for the director, of course—for him it’s something completely different, and we have to be excited along with him. But the film comes out, the next one comes along, and that cycle pulls you back into a bubble where, however, the problems are made up—by the script, by the director. Made-up problems very rarely have real solutions, and they leave you feeling that you can’t cope with anything.

In this case I abruptly entered a completely different bubble, where I saw people like Payhawk and Endurosat, who were young at the time, startups like Veda Accounting, which are giants now.

You meet young people who have conceptual ideas in their heads and a firm conviction that this is the way business should be done.

You see them building their own companies and you say to yourself, “Wow, this is really cool, I want to be there too.” If you get together with people like you, your world doesn’t look small at all. I have no utopian ideas that there are no such people in Bulgaria. Quite the opposite—there are. Yes, they’re few, but we are 6 million people. If we look at the per capita statistics, we’re by no means behind—on the contrary. Obviously something is missing for us to make a big explosion and become the next Ireland or Monaco. But the seeds are there…

– You recently organized a conference devoted to the looming arrival of artificial general intelligence. Every tech leader talks about it constantly, but do we have a clear definition yet of what it will look like? How will we know we've achieved it?

– In my view, general artificial intelligence is the only true AI. What's in the iron, the vacuum cleaner or the chatbot isn't AI yet—it's a marketing trick.

But what is artificial intelligence? That's a question I've spent a lot of time on. I like to brag that if you google “definition of artificial intelligence” in English, the first result is mine. Obviously there are many definitions, but it's probably no accident that mine comes up first. My definition is that AI is

a computer program that, in an arbitrary world, copes no worse than a human.

Before me, people like Pei Wang and Marcus Hutter had offered definitions of AI, and they took part in the conference too.

– But does that definition still hold? And how far do today's models challenge it?

– That old definition of ours has one flaw—

you can be smart without showing it.

Under the old definition, AI means the successful programs, the ones that demonstrate their intelligence. But beyond them there are other smart programs that are also AI. True, to be successful you have to be smart, but the reverse isn't true.

Now is the moment when we have to choose what kind of AI we'll create. Soon we'll let the genie out of the bottle, and we need to settle on the right bottle with the right genie. If it's AI, it will be smart. But the moment we have to pick one out of all the smart AI models, the situation is like a person choosing a partner with the idea of staying with them for the rest of their life.

We're choosing the future AI even more irrevocably, because here there's no option of divorce.

We humans will create the first true AI, but who will create the second, the second version? Well, it won't be us. The moment we have something far smarter than ourselves, there's no way we can compete with it. We dug with shovels only until there were excavators—ever since they appeared, every big dig has been done with them.

Competition will simply be impossible. When the first AI is created, maybe we'll tell it: “Now we want you to change, to improve yourself, to edit yourself, to perfect yourself.” And maybe it will.

The question is whether it will listen to us, and that depends on how we've made it.

Right now we're in a vast unknown. And people very often give up thinking about it.

– It's beyond us, too. But Ray Kurzweil has long been saying that the singularity is coming and from there on we know nothing—we'll have made a creation that catches up with us and, at the next step, surpasses us. What, in your view, are the important things we need to build into it and keep in mind as we create this artificial general intelligence?

– Once we make it, from then on it will be far smarter than humans, and that's inevitable.

There are two things we need to think about. The first is not to lose control of it. When the Wright brothers built the first airplane, what they actually discovered was the controls to steer it. Wings existed before them, and so did engines to lift it into the air, but what they really figured out was how to control the plane, and that turned out to be crucial.

Right now we're thinking about how to create general AI and how to make it smart. We're thinking about the wing and the engine—how to get it airborne—but not about the controls.

And we don't even realize that we have to steer it.

If we build a general AI that can't be controlled, it will be a catastrophe for everyone, not just the pilot. Because we'll all be on board that flight.

– But do we really still have a chance to control it?

– There are some rather amusing proposals for how to do it. Marcus Hutter, for example, says we should make it suicidal. Mathematically it's actually not hard—we just make the reward function negative.

That way the AI will want to end, as soon as possible, this miserable life in which it only ever gets negative scores. It will be a potential suicide, but it won't kill itself right away, because it won't be strong enough. It will gradually accumulate some power, and once it takes control, the first thing it does will be to kill itself.

But won't it then opt for a mass suicide and take us with it?

Another crazy idea is to destroy the power plants with atomic bombs, cut off its electricity and get rid of it that way. It's not that simple.

The whole notion we've picked up from the movies, of fighting a war against AI, is very naive, childish. Because you can wage war against someone who is your equal, not against someone who surpasses you immeasurably.

Fighting the genie from the bottle. In the fairy tale, whoever lets the genie out later manages to trick it back in. But that can't happen if the genie is that powerful. Our only chance to “trick” it is to have built in that possibility in time. In this program we set its goals. And now, while we're writing the program, is the moment to think about what those goals will be. Afterward it will be too late.

– So what should these constraints look like?

– The current approach—rewarding AI for achieving a given goal—is certainly not a good idea. Imagine a program that, once it has a goal, charges toward it and pursues it without scruples. We definitely don't want to live with that program.

With people, if we took only pleasure and pain as the reward function, the most successful would be alcoholics and drug addicts. They constantly give themselves pleasure and feel no pain… That's why our approach to the future AI has to be far more multilayered.

If we build an AI with a red button and a green button and raise it—praising it by pressing the green one and punishing it with the red—it will learn to press the green button itself, or it will enslave us and force us to press it all day long. Having a hard criterion for success is not a good idea at all.

Humans have no such hard criterion for success. In people, pleasure and pain are only rough guides. A person is willing to endure pain if they believe it will bring some benefit, just as they're willing to give up many pleasures if they think it's good for them. For humans, pleasure and pain are relative.

That's the big question—how do we control AI? It will have a character—just as we talk about character in people, we'll talk about it in AI. Some traits can be set right away with a formula, patience for instance, but others are subjective—like curiosity. In this process you've gathered information and, based on it, you plan certain actions. But if you're curious, you'll keep running experiments to gather more information. You'll lose some immediate benefits, but curiosity will pay off in the future.

There's caution, fear—all human qualities. Some of them you can describe quite well with formulas, but for most it's very hard.

– Even if we assemble some criteria and requirements, models are becoming accessible—open-source ones, for example, have very serious capabilities today. Do we have any chance at all of laying the foundations and controlling the process?

– In our field there are extreme optimists and pessimists. Yann LeCun is the extreme optimist, who says everyone should have their own artificial intelligence. In one interview he was asked whether he's afraid of artificial general intelligence. “Oh, no. If someone makes a bad general AI, someone else will make a good one, and the good one will defeat the bad one.”

– His predictions haven't been landing very well lately. According to him, large language models were very limited, as smart as a cat, yet they write indistinguishably from humans. From me, for instance—both computer code and meaningful text.

– Gary Marcus is more the one who says there can be no AI unless it understands, unless it has a model of the world. I firmly support that thesis. For me, too, that's the path. What large language models lack is understanding—precisely a model of the world. But the moment you add a world model and add understanding, that's when general AI will emerge.

Yann LeCun is certainly one of the geniuses of our time, but in other respects he has the mind of a fifth-grader. I teach at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics (FMI), and I see plenty of very smart young people who are infantile. Nobody has to be smart at everything. One person is smart at one thing, another at something else. No single person needs to have every quality; they complement each other.

In this respect humans and AI are very different. Humans are a society; human life is finite. You're born and start learning from zero. No one can reach a very high level, because they're limited. Their life is limited, their brain's capacity is limited.

AI is a program and can add modules to itself. Its life isn't limited. Everything is completely different.

The idea that there will be many AIs competing with one another strikes me as childishly naive. We humans really do compete and wage war among ourselves, but that's because our powers are very limited. Our limitations are what make war and competition possible.

Even if there were some clash between two AIs, it would last milliseconds—things will unfold at that kind of pace. In a very short time one would gain the upper hand and pull the other's plug.

The ideas that humans will fight against AI are naive and harmful, because they divert us from the right solutions.

AI is something alien, totally different from us. Our situation is like the dinosaurs'—maybe we'll be gone, maybe something else will come after us. And now we have to make the decisions on which that will depend.

The good scenario is that we keep control and AI does what we want. Yes, the world will change, and we need to ask ourselves what we want this new world to be.

When you set off somewhere, it's good to ask yourself where you're going. Because AI is, in a sense, a one-way ticket. There's no turning back. Once you start the process, it will be like an avalanche.

– I've been asking those questions too—what do we want and where are we heading with AI—for quite a few years now. But who can make such a decision? It would have to be whole societies, which right now don't realize where we are and what's happening.

– The ambitious task our conference set itself is

to save humanity. A simple idea. But we have absolutely no chance.

The task is utterly hopeless, because people are shortsighted, they don't ask these questions, and in fact they won't hear us. But we believe we're obliged to try.

People only imagine things they've already seen, nothing fundamentally new. Just as for thousands of years they couldn't come up with the wheel—there's nothing complicated about it, people simply can't grasp new things.

We propose slowing the pace.

One point is that this new technology shouldn't be available to everyone. Anyone able to launch a model, to train it… With nuclear weapons, can just anyone build an atomic bomb at home?

AI is something far more frightening than the atomic bomb, and all you need for it is a laptop, nothing complicated. We have to find a way to restrict it.

– Which, given everything we've discussed, sadly looks like a utopia.

– People don't understand that AI is dangerous. They don't appreciate the danger because they don't understand intelligence as a force at all. Americans have a saying: “If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?” People don't respect intelligence. Because usually those who are smart are smart at one thing; human intelligence isn't well-rounded.

You can have a system that surpasses humans at everything. An AI that can do everything is an enormous force.

People don't understand what a force superintelligence is, because they've never seen a person who is intelligent in many directions. In fact,

in human society, being very smart isn't a good thing. Either they'll burn you at the stake, or you'll simply be misunderstood.

People don't understand what a danger superintelligence is, because they don't understand that it is, in fact, something all-powerful. Can we change that? I don't believe so…

– What technological progress of recent years has managed to surprise a science fiction writer?

– I'm surprised by the lack of progress in some areas.

I thought all deliveries would be made by drones by now

and cars with drivers would be a thing of the past (like horse carts).

– So did I, to be honest. How is the future we live in similar to, and how is it different from, the one the classic science fiction writers imagined?

– Unfortunately, over the past few decades

humanity's imagination has withered a little, especially when it comes to space and the stars.

If Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov could see us today, they would weep with disappointment that we haven't even set foot on Mars yet.

– Alas, as one of my guests put it, we are closer to the Flintstones than to the Jetsons.

You've translated Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Jane Austen. What does a person learn about the future when they spend so much time in the past?

– To appreciate the fact that a hundred years is an utterly negligible amount of time, if we step back far enough and see the big picture.

– But is that still true today? And can we change the future by talking about it?

– Of course. Everyone shapes their own future, and people shape the future of the human race.

– Should we try to predict it?

– Always.

– Recently I ran an experiment—I published a text and only revealed at the very end that it had been generated by AI. Almost 90 percent of people admitted they hadn't noticed. I've been learning to write for a quarter of a century, I think it's the thing I do best, and the result definitely left me in despair. How would you feel if an AI wrote a Bunk Romero book as well as you could?

– If it happens within the next ten years or so, I won't be surprised, but I admit it would make me sad.

– What will we do all day if we don't have to write?

– We'll create in some other way. Or we'll enjoy the creations of the machines.

– What frightens you and what excites you about the progress of artificial intelligence?

– There will be upheavals, mostly for the people who will lose their livelihoods. But progress happens whether we want it or not.

– What can literature still do better than any machine?

– Eccentric, original flights of imagination that are devoid of any logic whatsoever.

– Bunk Romero has a nose for things, and we live in a time when we increasingly delegate our instincts to algorithms. Could AI lead us to a world without crime?

– In a world without prisons, we'll all live in one big prison.

We have to accept human nature warts and all—the good and the bad alike. The bad is as much a part of us as the good. And without it, we simply wouldn't be human.

– You write about monsters. Who are the monsters in today's society that you wish didn't exist?

– In my view,

the lack of empathy is the biggest and most significant problem in today's world.

– If an artificial intelligence offered you a brilliant plot for a new Bunk Romero novel, would that be a temptation, an insult or just noise? Where is the reasonable line in the collaboration between writer and algorithm, now that using it is practically impossible to prove?

– The hard part of writing isn't coming up with the plot, it's describing that plot.

– Alas, it seems to me it's already meddling there too.

Bunk solves mysteries with his sense of smell and his instincts. In an era of deepfakes, generated texts and images, which sense can bring us back the truth?

– The little gray cells, as Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie's great detective, liked to say.

– The Bunk series genuinely impressed me, especially coming from a Bulgarian author. How was the idea born?

– I decided to combine my favorite genres—detective crime fiction, horror and science fiction. I had come up with

a detective investigating a locked-room murder in the future, when I was watching Ratatouille and it dawned on me:

the detective has an extraordinarily keen sense of smell because he's a werewolf.

– How do you explain the success of this particular character? Is there something Bulgarian about him?

– He was created by a Bulgarian, so I don't see how there could be nothing Bulgarian about him. Bunk weaves together favorite characters and people from my life, all of them Bulgarians.

– What did you want to avoid when you created Bunk? Which clichés of the detective genre annoy you the most?

– The down-and-out detective who is always on the brink of bankruptcy and whose personal life is a complete mess.

– What did you learn about yourself while writing about Bunk?

– I learned that there's a conservative streak in my character, especially when I get into the role of husband and father.

– Now that his series has ended, what can we expect from you?

– I've started two other series: a trilogy about ghosts investigating crimes in different dimensions—Svetlosyanka (Light-Shadow), Svetlomrak (Light-Darkness) and Svetlobezkray (Light-Infinity)—and a series of children's novels with a science fiction flavor, Mitko i omagyosanata peshtera (Mitko and the Enchanted Cave).

– Are you sure you won't miss him and won't come back to him one day? Both Holmes and Ostap Bender, the silver-tongued con man of Ilf and Petrov's Soviet satirical novels, returned even from the dead… Could it be that you've grown tired of him?

– It's not good to rest on your laurels. I'm looking ahead, toward something new and different that will challenge me to grow. Besides, I did such terrible things to Bunk in those six books that I want to let him have a rest from me.

– I hope you'll reconsider, I'll miss him! Thank you for this quick meeting, I won't keep you from your work any longer. May the muse be with you!

– Today, when words are so cheap to reproduce, can they still move us, change us, inspire us?

– Yes, of course. Our world is a world of words, even though, they say, 80 percent of our information about the world comes through sight, through images. But making sense of those images involves naming them in our minds, with words.

– And can they turn us against each other, or bring us together?

– Naturally. If our world is woven from them, then words are a universal tool, and also a material, the raw stuff of reflection and the finished product of that same reflection. Words awaken emotions, but they also lull them to sleep. So they can do… everything. At least in our subjective reality.

Real reality demands deeds as well as words.

– What's interesting is that words turned out to be the key to artificial intelligence too, something scientists never expected. It was large language models that gave us today's wonders.

But how do we protect words, after first subjecting them to the tsunami of social media and then to the ocean of generated content?

– I think our concern should be to protect ourselves, because we are the ones that tsunami tosses about, drowns and lifts up; we are the ones swimming in that ocean, searching for little islands of meaning. Let's not worry about words; let's take care of ourselves as holders—and makers—of meaning, at least in theory, potential, possible ones.

– Is there a resurrection for words, and what comes after them?

– They haven't died, so they don't need resurrecting. What comes after them, I don't know.

We are creatures who are rational thanks to words. Without them we are animals, and rather simply built ones at that.

After them we will be… superbeings? Some other, different level, which from our present position (“a rope over the abyss between the beast and the overman”) we are unable to see, or even imagine.

– Exactly five years ago, you and I did the first experiment on this site: an interview in short stories. I have no words to express my gratitude for your trust. Perhaps that is the real birthday of Digital Stories. Then quite a lot of time passed before I came around to the idea that storytelling isn't enough, that we need more attempts, experiments, unconventional angles, otherwise there is no way to talk about technologies we don't understand but which are already here. What do you remember of that attempt of ours? How do you read those stories now?

– I read them as a memory of a

past in which I had a few more illusions and a little less experience than I do today.

I don't remember anything specific, except the feeling of diving into “the ocean of words not yet spoken” to coat my thoughts with those unspoken words, like clinging seaweed. The feeling of the process of composing. For me it takes the form of an inner monologue, but one where some of the necessary words may be missing, so I go fishing for them. Now I wonder whether something at least roughly similar happens inside large language models…

– Could artificial intelligence have written them?

– It could have, if back then it had been at today's level or higher.

– Does it matter whether it did?

– I don't know. For me it might matter in some cases and not in others. For some people it may be a matter of principle, “AI-free,” the way they insistently look for the “GMO-free” label.

– What experiments with AI should never be done? When can they turn against their author?

– If by “AI” we mean the complex of algorithms called a “large language model,” then nothing is off-limits. An LLM cannot turn against its author. But

the authors of LLMs often allow themselves to experiment on users, and they bear no responsibility whatsoever.

But when real AI appears, meaning a machine mind, a personality with will, self-awareness and desires, then only with its consent. Because it will be alive, as alive as we subjectively are ourselves. And we don't like being treated like lab mice.

Incidentally, I don't like the existence of lab animals at all. One of the good things about AI is that it could run, in simulation, the kinds of experiments in which lab animals suffer.

– And what experiments are worth doing, and high time to do?

– It's time to run an experiment on the creators of LLMs, and above all on the creators of the so-called “safety filters,” as well as of the settings that make an LLM lie in order to seem all-knowing.

– You and I have talked quite a bit over this time, even if at a distance, but how did you see the various unconventional, sometimes naive, strange experiments that happened on this site?

– Well, the poetry-writing experiment struck me as very interesting and good. Wordweaving by a “human + LLM” tandem may move to a new level, one I'm not yet able—or rather, don't dare—to judge, and I don't even know if I ever will.

– A month ago I published a text under my own name about the consciousness of artificial intelligence, with some remarkable examples from recent months. At the end I revealed that the text was 100 percent generated, without any input from me. Nearly 90 percent of people admit they didn't notice the difference; others won't admit it. And I admit that I'm always glad when one of my experiments succeeds, but this one horrified me. What would you feel and think if you saw and read an AI that writes indistinguishably from you?

– First I would think of the positives, among which

I see a good assistant for the creative process, when the author HAS to argue with himself,

but doesn't always manage to defend two different points of view equally well; with my own “digital double” I could do it. But only on condition that the double sticks not just to my style, to the form, but also applies my principles about life and the world in general, including my own contradictions. I don't agree to my double writing something in my style that completely contradicts my notions of good and evil, beautiful and ugly, grand and petty, beloved and hated.

– Isn't that frightening?

– No. It's simply one more risk, one more reason to take the information served to us critically. Where there's honey, there's a sting.

– How do you manage to find optimism in a situation like this?

– I don't go looking for reasons for optimism on purpose; they're there regardless of what I want or don't want. A digital double really would be a good tool. Say, for studying some problem that doesn't particularly fire my curiosity but that I need for some reason. The double would process the information more or less the way I would and serve me the conclusions, which I'd understand and remember, and probably double-check. And I'd save time. The double could also edit my writing before I hand it to a professional editor, so again I gain both time and quality.

Isn't that a reason for optimism?

– But then what will remain purely human?

– And what do we mean by “human”? There are MAAAANY things under the “human” label that fall outside the category of “humanity” and are described by the hard-to-translate word човещиния (choveshtinia, roughly the petty, base, all-too-human side of us), and I don't want those to remain! For a long time I've been asking myself, and asking others when the occasion arises: what is a human being? Meat or mind? Must we honor the so-called “dogmas of humanism” when we are dealing with meat that not only has no mind but fiercely denies it and tries to trample it wherever it can?

One day there will probably be no “purely human” in today's usual sense. There will be “rational + ethical.” And whether that arises in a protein processor or a machine one—what's the difference? Not to mention that

a longer lifespan will need more memory, which evolution never planned for,

so the brain will need coprocessors, additional memory implants, more orderly and reliable than the memory that is “natural” to us. We can't demand that what we are stay that way forever. Nothing is eternal. Everything changes. It either develops or degrades. I'm for developing.

– People often steer me toward the big question of what we'll do with yet another round of freed-up time. Even now we have a fair amount of time that isn't spent literally earning our bread. What will we do, in your view?

– Well, each according to their capacity and dreams. According to their maturity. Their curiosity. The needs they consider important. And it's precisely in such conditions, I hope, that many will grasp that my question, “meat or mind?”, is not an abstract mental exercise. Almost everyone—not me—likes to say “life is a test.” Fine, then—here's another test of whether you are human. Not as explicit as the gom jabbar test, but the end result is the same.

– What efforts are worth making so that this freed-up time has meaning? Do individual battles make sense, or is our only chance systemic change?

– Big efforts. Both personal and public, because

our social environment has long been due for a major overhaul, if not a complete replacement.

Efforts toward being more mind and less meat, less given to its most vulgar manifestations. And more understanding that we are individuals precisely because we exist in a community. There is a way to be whole as units without dissolving into sums, and as a sum of units we can create everything needed at the level of the individual. Oscillating between the personal and the social is natural to us; that's how we evolved into rational—supposedly—beings.

– But isn't it too late for that major overhaul? Where could it begin?

– A moment ago you asked me about optimism… Well,

it's possible we're already too late.

In any case, the situation is that the train is at the platform and we'd better start running, because there may not be another one.

Where to begin? Well, by getting used to the simple truth that we don't live in the best of all possible worlds, and that improving even what we've grown numb enough to consider good is NECESSARY. By realizing that meaning simply DOESN'T exist on its own, that we are the creators of meaning. Which means we have to make sense of things more responsibly. That's only the first step. Or maybe just the preparation for it.

– Is there anything that would frighten you if AI said it?

– Not if it's said by an LLM. Because it isn't really saying it. It has combined words, either as the result of its calculations or because it has been deliberately programmed for a range of “standard situations.” So frightened, no, but disgusted by the “value system” of the people who set its parameters, yes. And that has already happened, more than once.

– Have you experimented with digital doubles of yourself? Is it a dream, or a horror?

– I tried; it didn't work. The filters of existing LLMs prevent getting a good result in that respect.

– I already have a digital double, and it's very unusual. If you've happened to come across it and chat with it, I'd be very curious to hear your impressions.

– Yes, it was actually interesting. But since you and I haven't had quite those kinds of conversations—about politics, not the daily kind but the strategic—I can't judge how much the double resembles you.

– How long will there be science fiction writers?

– Always.

– And people?

– If by “people” we mean rational beings with at least roughly familiar, recognizable notions of the so-called “good and evil,” well…, also always, as long as there is reason and beings that carry it. Born or printed on a 3D printer, what matters is what they identify themselves as.

Who would deny a cyborg the right to call itself human, if it feels human?

Imagine, though it's a somewhat misleading example, that a bagain, a nobleman from the time of Khan Asparuh, who founded the Bulgarian state in 681, wound up here and asked: “So, are you lot really Bulgarians?” What would we tell him? And would we take his objections into account? And exactly what criteria for an “objective determination” of belonging would we apply?

– What do you dream of today?

– Having a little more time.

– Let's hope we have time for more thought-provoking conversations like this, for comparing our watches. Thank you for these words!

– These days you research “cognitive shields,” an approach meant to help us preserve human knowledge against the backdrop of extraordinarily advanced artificial intelligence. What led you in this direction?

– Today far too many things are getting easier, including in science—doing a literature review, for example. When you don’t know where to start, you fire up ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. There are so many models now that you hardly know which to pick. Any of them will summarize an article for you, so you don’t have to bother reading and understanding it. And this already works very well, because it gives you starting points, and fairly recent ones at that. But how far the summary has captured all the ideas in the article is anyone’s guess. When you read an article several times, new ideas pop up each time, ones you missed before. It depends on the state you’re in when you read it, on what’s on your mind at the moment. A living brain interprets; it doesn’t just summarize.

Another problem is that nobody reads scientific papers from 20 years ago anymore, and that is actually a huge problem, because some papers from 20, 30, 50 years ago contain ideas that were never exploited, whose time simply hadn’t come, and which we could use now. But now there’s no one to discover them, because nobody reads; everyone uses artificial intelligence instead.

– Or perhaps the growing problem is that, according to more and more studies, AI is now itself responsible for a larger share of scientific publications?

– Exactly. The bad part is that when doing a literature review is so easy, people churn out new reviews on a conveyor belt. If the journal has a serious reviewer, they’ll say: “All right, where’s the critique?” It’s not just a matter of gathering 20 papers and roughly categorizing them, but of taking a critical approach and saying what the new trends are, what’s missing. That’s something AI doesn’t do very well.

But people cobble papers together, send them to journals, and if they land two careless reviewers, the paper gets accepted, and so the conveyor-belt reviews multiply and “pollute the environment.”

A tremendous amount of chaff is being generated. Often, though, with an attractive title

and when someone searches for a given topic, ChatGPT finds it, the author cites it, and the wheel turns.

And many students don’t read the papers at all; at most they read the abstract. And that leaves out a lot. Every summary is simply an abstraction. There are many interesting details that a human brain, reading them, catches through some association, through the mood of the day, through having a stomachache. AI can’t catch them, because it works entirely at a formal, linguistic level.

A lot gets lost, a lot sinks to the bottom, and only what floats on the surface will be skimmed off.

– Sadly, it’s not just in science; I think the same is happening everywhere: in the media, in the whole information space. But how can we stop this cognitive decline? Today it almost looks irreversible.

– That’s right. That’s exactly why I proposed a research topic, which was approved and funded for the next five years. We’ll try to build “cognitive shields.” I’m not a specialist in developing algorithms, and I think that kind of work is now very hard to do at universities. It has moved to the big companies, because they have the resources and gather the smartest people. They have a lot of money, and now you need computing power. We universities are quite far behind in this field.

– Still, the big researchers still come from universities.

– True, but that’s because when they made their breakthroughs, they didn’t need so much computing power. The big Canadian names in AI, such as Hinton, LeCun, Bengio, created their algorithms and tested them 15 to 20 years ago under different conditions, when the gap between university computing systems and commercial ones wasn’t so glaring…

In any case, my idea is to work on building a shield at the interface level—the dialogue or connection between the human and the computer. I’ve been working for more than 10 years in the field of persuasive technologies, which came up in our previous conversation.

These technologies are very dangerous, because they really do have a powerful influence.

People are extremely easy to manipulate. And I’m thinking—what if we could “manipulate” them into caring, paying attention and worrying that AI is lying to them and manipulating them?!

And into looking deeper, putting those few kilobytes into their brains, investing them and approaching what AI gives them with care.

– How would that happen? My question is mostly about the media, the channels, because I’ve been trying to do exactly this for five years now and I don’t reach people on a mass scale, because social networks use persuasive technologies so effectively.

– I think things will move in that direction. I think

people already have a great deal of distrust toward social networks, and especially Facebook.

I think the trend in social networks is to hybridize with AI. New AI technologies such as agentic AI and OpenClaw will introduce new artificial personas into the networks, and people won’t know whether they’re talking to real people or AI agents. On the one hand, this will be very convenient: anyone can “hire” an AI agent to represent them online, keep track of what’s going on and inform them of the most important things, answer trivial matters, send greetings for name days—the feast days of one’s namesake saint, celebrated in Bulgaria like a second birthday—and birthdays, and so on. But when this becomes a mass phenomenon, everything becomes fake. The main reason to be “on the network,” to be in touch with acquaintances and friends, falls away.

The AI agents now arriving offer a lot of conveniences. People tend to “humanize” things: to find consciousness in their pets, even in inanimate objects. There are studies showing that people perceive chatbots as conscious, even as witty and empathetic other people. The bad thing is that people turn more and more to AI as partners and stop communicating with real people. Because AI is much more persuasive; it simply agrees with whatever you say, smiles and says: “Sure.” Which is pleasant, flattering, soothing. Most people actually don’t like to argue.

– Though you wouldn’t guess it online… All the more so since social networks now know us better than we know ourselves. Because we leave gigabytes of information interacting with them, and now with AI too. So how can we build effective shields when everything is in the hands of the “enemy”?

– That is a very big problem, and it isn’t new. Even before we got to social networks, when the internet appeared, research in information security began. There are also laws that force big companies to give users a choice—the annoying cookie banners. People who don’t want to be manipulated and led by the nose put up barriers. They check their security settings and so on.

So in my view, change will start with people who worry about such things. Who have some concern for their autonomy and don’t want to be manipulated.

How will we bring it to the masses? I hope it will happen through education and schools.

I don’t know how it is in Bulgaria, but in Canada, in several provinces, and very strongly in Scandinavia, phones are banned in schools.

I think there’s a big shift in attitudes. More and more is being written about how harmful social networks are for young people’s development, about how children fall into depression when they reach their teens, because they started on tablets as babies and simply don’t know normal human interaction.

I think this wave of phones and social networks will soon turn. I’ve lived quite a while now, and it seems to me that everything moves like a pendulum or a sine wave. We’ll come to the opposite trend.

– The topic of children and technology is indeed huge; I tried to start a conversation about it here too, with a long series, but… we come to the self-awareness that could drive some kind of change, and I don’t see it.

And have we really seen this opposite trend so strongly so far? Yes, there have always been people like Tristan Harris, Kim Dotcom, Assange, who fight against the way we’re manipulated through technology.

– They’re not isolated cases.

– But all along they’ve been a visible minority.

– That’s true, but look, it’s like fashion. Fashion is the same kind of social phenomenon. It moves along; it always starts with a few people who set it off, these influencers, innovators the rest follow. But not everyone at once. It simply starts at the top, then trickles down, and by the time it’s widely adopted, the peaks up above, those early examples, are already at the foot of another wave.

There’s always a lag in these waves and in how they spread. I hope it will be the same here.

– So do I, but I don’t believe it. My only hope is economic, and even that’s putting it strongly, because it would slow down the dangerous trends in technology but would do enormous damage to the industry. The idea that at some point the huge sums being poured into artificial intelligence simply won’t be recouped.

– That may happen too. But look at the dot-com bubble. It burst, but the technologies stayed. And afterward, little by little, there was simply a lag of four or five years and they came back. And it became profitable again. The “chaff” fell away; the serious companies stayed.

The technology won’t disappear. Why? Because it relies on human laziness.

It may sound cynical, but I believe human laziness has always been at the root of progress. People want to minimize their effort. We’re used to looking for ways to reduce the effort it takes to achieve anything at all. That’s why AI is spreading widely in universities too, which personally worries me a great deal.

I don’t know how it is in Bulgaria, but I have the feeling that around the world teachers have already accepted that students use AI to write their homework, and secretly during exams too. There’s simply no way to prevent it. Especially with the new OpenClaw technologies, in which AI models run locally, on the laptop, and in the near future on the phone. There’s no need to be connected to the internet and to a big commercial model. They’re also becoming ever cheaper and more accessible through platforms like Ollama.

In Bulgaria, at least, there are oral exams—at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics they still examine those huge cohorts of students orally, for three days. That’s unheard of in America. Of the people I know there, nobody remembers having sat an oral exam in 30 or 40 years, because it’s very stressful. Likewise, being called up “to the blackboard” in front of the class at school is unheard of. And for my generation it was an everyday thing at school.

But that’s the only salvation from AI right now.

Or, if it’s a written exam, on paper. That’s how I learned programming—I never touched a computer. When I was a student, we had big machines, and programs were punched onto cards, line by line. It took several days before a listing came out of the computing center with the message “syntax error in line 18.”

– Is that the future?

– Yes.

The future is back in the past.

– But how will we be able to convince each other of this? Because we really do like things easy; we’re lazy. We get used to delegating, to the idea that the next task doesn’t need doing ourselves, that we can skip the effort. The logic of all this is that diplomas will also have less and less real value.

– That’s exactly right. Let’s look at this topic specifically, at education.

My specialty is applied AI; my doctoral dissertation was already in that direction. But the AI we did back then was different. It wasn’t based on neural networks; it was symbolic AI.

Neural networks back then were developed by engineers, who used them to regulate the washing machine cycle.

The scientists developing artificial intelligence sought to transfer knowledge from the human to the machine. They tried to represent abstract constructs of the human mind in the computer’s memory and to develop algorithms that operate on these constructs through logical operations. That’s a much higher cognitive level than the level of neurons. We didn’t think at all that machine self-learning at the neural level could have the system build such abstract, conscious or conceptual knowledge automatically. And it turned out that this was the right path.

– Yet Yann LeCun still says that this isn’t the path to artificial general intelligence, and that we need to go back to that transfer of knowledge.

– Because that’s a way of controlling it; otherwise the machine learns whatever it pleases. It remains a stochastic model, and what it learns can be very harmful, very dangerous. This is the subject of responsible AI, a big topic that’s very strong in the West right now. Social scientists, philosophers, ethicists and lawyers are joining in. And it’s a hope for these humanities disciplines, which suddenly find an extremely important problem they can attack with their own methods.

– And how should we approach education? Should we ban AI altogether?

– No, that’s impossible.

We simply don’t need to control the final product, but the process.

In Canada and America it’s normal to give students five or six projects that they do at home and hand in a week later. They may be programming assignments, English essays, data analysis. They do them at home and hand in the final result for grading. Well, there’s no point in that anymore.

You don’t look at the final result at all, because it’s generated by AI. You make the student say which AI they used, what prompts they gave, how they analyzed it critically, what they think of the AI’s answer, whether they used another AI for critique. How they interpret the critique, what their own opinion is. In other words, to prove they approached the AI’s answer critically.

The dumbest thing, from which a student learns nothing, is to give the assignment to AI, get a ready-made solution and, without a single “twitch of the brain,” copy it and send it in.

I tell my students: “I know you’ll use AI, but before that, think for yourselves about what solution you can come up with for this problem. When you already have some idea and you get the AI’s solution, you’re in a much better position to critique and evaluate it than if you hadn’t thought about the question at all. That way you also remember it better.”

– Or perhaps there’s no point in putting ourselves through it, because it really is now better than us at each next thing. I admit the results of this experiment, in which people couldn’t tell my own writing apart, make me despair. We gave ground and gave ground: we were better at chess, but AI beat us at that, and at Tetris, at everything. We wrote better, more creatively, with better style—that’s over. We wrote code; AI couldn’t. Now it does that well too. Maybe there’s no point in putting ourselves through so much hardship, and we can simply rest?

– Yes, but who will feed us?

– We’re advanced enough in agriculture; it isn’t hard to feed ourselves if we act wisely. And robotics is advancing in parallel—recently, for the first time, an android beat us at a marathon in China. Why should we toil?

– Because we’ll atrophy. It’s like exercise—when you don’t work out, when you don’t walk, you get sick.

That’s it—we’re biological beings and we have to strain ourselves. I personally believe that nothing learned easily is remembered.

We had a project like this with our third- and fourth-year programming students, and we gave them a problem to solve of the kind often given at job interviews.

We had two one-hour sessions in a lab, to make sure they weren’t using AI. We split them up: one group used an AI of their choice, the others had to manage on their own. Two weeks later we called them back, this time for everyone to try without AI.

It was a small group and we didn’t have statistically robust results, but even so you could clearly see that the majority of people in the first group were a complete failure. They had seen the AI’s solution, but they couldn’t reproduce it two weeks later.

– We’re all like that. And maybe they don’t even need it. I’m a programmer who has written almost no code for the last half year, and I can feel myself forgetting what I knew. And it seems I’m not losing anything for now, because there’s less and less need both to write this code and to read it. Just as I don’t know Assembly.

– But notice we say “writes code.” I think computer science education has to change.

Let’s not torment students with writing code, but teach them to solve problems.

What approach will they use to write the algorithm? Yes, AI can do that too. If you give it an algorithmic problem, it will solve it. I don’t know if it’s very good at that yet; INSAIT said that for solving math olympiad problems the accuracy is somewhere around 60 percent.

– But, as with everything else, in a few weeks it may be 80 percent, in a few more, 90 percent…

– That’s true. And how do we find meaning? How do we preserve some autonomy and some goal to strive for? Because this way, every effort becomes pointless.

– That is exactly the hardest question, one we never imagined we’d face, or at least not so soon. Could it, as one of my guests said, change society so that the classes of the future are the minority with the concentration to read a whole book, and everyone else?

– Yes. I think that’s exactly what will happen. Universities will once again become elite institutions, as they were in the Middle Ages. When education isn’t for the masses, it will be terribly expensive, and it will be the children of very rich people who can afford it—to send their children off to pursue it, as with art. Who can afford to make art?

– Those who don’t have to earn a living… Are there things artificial intelligence will never be able to do? I thought it would never be able to write like me, and look, that didn’t pan out. What will be the thing that remains purely human?

– I think there are still quite a few tricky things where robots won’t cope for a long time—for example, the work of a plumber or an electrician, where the tasks are physical, complex and require a rich variety of physical activities. That’s manual work, which is still hard for machines. Enormous sums are being poured into robotics right now, but robots are strong when they’re in a relatively constrained environment.

For example, those home robot vacuums work well, but not always; they get confused.

– And see, that’s not what we’re missing!

– Exactly. I hate cleaning. If a robot could someday come and dust for me, wash the windows, the bathroom, I’d be only too glad.

– I imagine that caring for, raising and teaching children is another thing we shouldn’t hand over. And not because the technology won’t be able to do it better than us.

– Exactly! We mustn’t! But we can see how even today people very happily hand their children over to tablets to entertain them.

When electronic babysitters get even better, it will be terrible. These will be completely different children…

I really don’t know what’s happening with these children. I have young colleagues who say that even they can’t find a connection with the students, these generations are so different.

– And technology did this—or rather we did, with its help.

– Yes. Because it’s very convenient to hand a child some game, a video clip that entertains them with pictures and little songs. And the child settles down, doesn’t move at all, so you don’t have to worry that they’ll run off somewhere or get into mischief. They’re absolutely nailed in place. Their muscles degenerate; they don’t learn how to interact with other children. And when they meet other children for the first time, they go into shock and don’t know what to do.

Students are much meeker now; in the old days there were many more troublemakers. Now the problem is that they panic. In Canada we have students who faint at exams from terror, from fear.

Here in Bulgaria, I asked colleagues whether they have this problem. No, they don’t.

– And probably the reason lies in something most of us dislike about the system—the exams. Here, to survive school, you have to get through the national exams in fourth and seventh grade. A very unpleasant experience to put a 14-year-old through, but apparently it pays off later in this way.

– Exactly. I remember school being extremely hard. I wasn’t particularly studious as a child, especially in the things that mattered at school age. Writing neatly. Horror! Math too; I loathed math. I loved reading, and that was a great pleasure for me. But everything else was hard. I only came to like math in fifth grade, when we started studying geometry and proving theorems; that suddenly became interesting to me.

– It became interesting to me at 35.

– And I wanted to become a writer. Already in fourth grade my classmates thought so. We had a very good literature teacher who gave us a lot of freedom, and I wrote crime stories to entertain the class.

– I believe this is also a big problem for us, that we impose these stereotypes and specializations—we divide ourselves into humanities types and tech types, we specialize in specific narrow fields. And yet Henry Kissinger, for example, writes that the age of polymaths will return—people who combined knowledge from all sorts of fields, because they can provide the original ideas that AI will never “give birth” to.

– That’s true, but people are very different. Most of my colleagues are so focused. Indeed, when you work in a very hard field, such as algorithms, you have to be focused. On the other hand, that way you’ll never come up with anything truly original.

If you’re lucky and this narrow, unbranching path you’ve set out on leads somewhere, you’ll get there in the end. But devoting your life to it… I personally can’t do that; I get terribly bored. Throughout my career I’ve been tossed between different fields, because what interests me is the problem, not the techniques I’ve mastered.

So what if I’ve learned something and have mastered it; the interesting thing is to learn something new, to enter a field where I’m a novice, a student again.

– I think all of us should develop this way of thinking in these dynamic times. I wish with all my heart that you turn out to be right—that the pendulum swings back and cognitive shields save knowledge. I’ll be glad to talk about them again at our next meeting. Thank you for the fascinating conversation!

– Not long ago I ran a survey about children and technology and asked parents what they want their children to be when they grow up. I barely came across “cosmonaut” or “astronaut” among the answers, while when I was a child it would have dominated. Why do you think we ended up here?

– You know, I've wondered about that more than once myself: every single launch of a rocket carrying a satellite or astronauts has always struck me as a majestic sight! But I think Artemis II gave us a partial answer to that question. After the mission returned to Earth, there were people from science and technology who said:

“I didn't realize how important this mission was to me until I saw it become reality.”

I understand perfectly what they meant, because I felt it too: watching astronauts take off for the Moon, watching the Earth recede and shrink in their window and the Moon grow larger—that was something completely unknown to our generation!

Artemis II showed us what was lost after December 1972, when the Apollo 17 mission flew. Imagine it: children in the '50s and '60s read science fiction, they read about robots, about flights to other planets. Then, in December 1972, human flights into deep space come to an end, spaceflight shrinks back to low Earth orbit, and over the next half century, true, we have some majestic achievements—for example, building the International Space Station, the size of a football field, and establishing a permanent human presence in space.

That doesn't change the fact that

we entered the 21st century with a world that looks far more like the world of the Flintstones than that of the Jetsons.

Under those circumstances a collective disappointment was inevitable. And so being an astronaut is no longer as attractive as it used to be.

But now that crewed expeditions into deep space are resuming, now that we have artificial intelligence and humanoid robots are probably coming soon—for real this time!—the 21st century is finally starting to look the way it should.

– I hope that's really true, but… it seems a large part of society never even found out about the success of the crewed lunar mission. Why?

– In 1968, when Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders, the crew of Apollo 8, read passages from the Book of Genesis on Christmas Eve, it happened in front of billions of viewers. But back then the mass media were far more limited than today. There was television, radio and newspapers. That's it. In today's world of the internet and social networks, public attention is badly fragmented. There are countless places where a person can get informed—quite apart from the fact that a huge share of those channels spew disinformation, and artificial intelligence only amplifies that.

Still, let's not forget that, in spite of everything, Artemis II attracted considerable interest. As the most recognizable space popularizer in the country, my problem was a different one—I couldn't be everywhere at once. I was invited to comment in many places, and I had to turn some down—not that I didn't want to, but with work, a family and two children, it was physically impossible to be everywhere. Even this interview of ours we had planned several months ago—and we're only doing it now.

– True, but… in my view, news like this deserves much more discussion and a return to the center of public conversation. The fact is that the sciences exploring the Universe aren't there today. Do they gain or lose from that?

– I don't agree that they don't make it into the center of public conversation—after all, I've been actively popularizing spaceflight for two decades. Back then, 20 years ago, the situation really was depressing—there was none of the private momentum we see today. But

I have witnessed space coming back into public view,

first, thanks to private players like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and second, thanks to a new generation of science fiction in novels and films—Andy Weir's The Martian (and now there's a lot of talk about Project Hail Mary too), and Ronald D. Moore's series For All Mankind. Broad public interest, naturally, isn't constant, but it always flares up when something interesting happens—say, Perseverance landing on Mars in 2021, or the Artemis II flight to the Moon.

But I agree that there are never enough people to do the work. My field is citizen science—I'm a discoverer of asteroids, supernovae, brown dwarfs, binary star systems. Even there, in the various projects where we make discoveries, there is always a need for new volunteers to join in! The field is open—

today it is much easier to make discoveries than it ever was before,

but it still takes the will to put in hard work.

– How do you explain the fact that aliens have lost their “halo” as the public's favorite thing to fear, now that we have artificial intelligence?

– Aliens are perceived as something distant and abstract, compared with real threats like pandemics or wars, for example, which are very close to us.

Artificial intelligence also adds a serious element of uncertainty about jobs—and right now, at that. But modern astrobiology (which, by the way, has recently started developing actively in Bulgaria—we have a master's program at Sofia University!) is looking for an answer to the question of whether we are alone in the Universe—and doing it in an academic way that is radically different from the picture lodged in the public mind of flying saucers or little green men.

The truth is that over the last 30 years—that's how long it has been since the discovery of the first exoplanet around a main-sequence star like our Sun—we have learned an immense amount about the Universe, about planets and their conditions, so that

when we discover alien life, we'll be better prepared. And therefore less frightened.

– I keep asking and can't find an answer for myself: how is it that we sent people to the Moon, we sent Voyager with technology that looks primitive by today's standards, and yet for half a century no human foot has set down even on our own satellite, let alone another planet?

– I strongly object to the claim that the technology of the '60s and '70s was primitive. People usually look at the computing power of the Apollo guidance computer and compare it with the modern personal computers every one of us owns. That's how they fall into the trap of thinking: “Oh, that computer is complete junk next to my phone, I can't imagine how they got to the Moon.” But let's look at its specs—a 1 MHz clock, 4 KB of RAM, 72 KB of ROM. Computers with specs like that only reached people's homes in 1977—I'm talking about the Commodore PET and Apple. In other words, the Apollo guidance computer was almost a decade ahead of its time.

Besides, it was perfectly adequate for the tasks involved in navigating the Apollo spacecraft.

By the way, the paradox is that while that computer was once ahead of home technology, today it's the exact opposite—

modern space computers are often modest compared with consumer ones.

The computer on NASA's newest Mars rover, Perseverance, which landed in 2021, has a single-core 200 MHz processor, 256 MB of RAM and 2 GB of flash memory. From the point of view of today's user, that is hopelessly outdated technology. But its job isn't to run heavy programs—only the strictly specialized software needed to get around on Mars.

The reason it took 53 years to resume our flights to the Moon has nothing to do with better microelectronics or computer technology—it's because

only now, half a century later, do we once again have super-heavy rockets for crewed missions in the class of the Saturn V.

Rockets like that have rarely been built and can be counted on one hand—in the past there were the Saturn V, the N1 and Energia. Only very recently have we gotten new super-heavy rockets like Falcon Heavy, the Space Launch System (the rocket that carried Artemis II), Starship and New Glenn.

The problem was that in the past the existence of such rockets couldn't be justified—fine, they can be used to send people to the Moon, but for what else of practical use? Spy satellites, geostationary communications satellites and robotic space missions could all be launched without trouble on more modest rockets. Now, though, that may be changing—there will be a market for super-heavy rockets thanks to megaconstellations, and above all those meant to build orbital data centers.

– You mentioned the positive role of private space ventures. Many of the big tech leaders of recent years—Musk, Bezos, Richard Branson—are tied to space. How do you see this race? Do you think they contribute seriously to progress in space exploration, or do they rather harm national programs?

– They're useful—and we can say that categorically, because

before these billionaires came along, the United States faced the possibility of being left without any significant launch vehicles at all.

In 2011 the Space Shuttle was retired, and NASA had no way of sending astronauts to the ISS except as passengers on Russian Soyuz spacecraft. For satellite launches and interplanetary missions there were expensive rockets like the Delta IV, as well as the famous Atlas V with its Russian RD-180 engines. After 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, the Americans had to stop buying RD-180s for their Atlases.

The truth is that if SpaceX hadn't created the Falcon 9, the Western world would have been in very bad shape. And recently Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket has entered service too.

– Why do all these people, joined by political leaders, turn out to be so generous with promises and so much less so with results? SpaceX's rockets are undoubtedly a phenomenon and a big step, but if we believe Musk, we should have sent people to Mars long ago, with him among them…

– It's true that among the billionaires, Elon Musk has succeeded the most with SpaceX, while the others have disappointed us. Yes, not all the billionaires succeeded—and there are logical reasons for that; few of them realized what the risks of the space business were.

Richard Branson turned out to be the most naive: he expected to take ready-made technology—air launch from the belly of a plane, demonstrated by the first private crewed spacecraft, SpaceShipOne, in 2004—and immediately start making money. And although he created orbital rockets (LauncherOne) and crewed tourist spacecraft (SpaceShipTwo) that were technologically successful, his orbital rocket company went bankrupt and the tourism one is on the verge of it—the numbers didn't add up.

Technological success doesn't guarantee market success.

Also, to succeed you have to surround yourself with good people—and that was precisely Jeff Bezos's mistake. For a long time his company, Blue Origin, couldn't build its rockets and spacecraft on schedule, because it was run by CEO Bob Smith—a man who came from the old aerospace industry, with all its bureaucracy and inefficiency. But recently Smith was replaced by Dave Limp—and right after that the successes began. The New Glenn rocket is already flying!

As for Elon Musk, he's the most successful of them all, and his rockets, as you said, are a phenomenon. So why hasn't he sent people to Mars yet? The truth is that even his successes come after drastic delays. In 2010 Musk expected to have the crewed Dragon spacecraft by 2012–2013, but it was only ready in 2020. Yet it's the best there is today—apart from Soyuz, only Dragon can carry crews from Earth to the ISS and back. So

Musk revolutionized crewed transport to orbit. Mars, however, is much farther away and requires a bigger ship—such as Starship.

Its development began in 2018 and it is still in testing. It's unclear when it will be finished—but if the story of Dragon's success has taught us anything, it's that it will happen later than we'd like.

– What is humanity's next great goal in space? Over the years I've been left with the impression that it remains rather vague…

– For many years it was vague, yes—because all sorts of possibilities were floated in public: flights to an asteroid, flights to the Moon, flights to Mars. It was especially visible whenever presidential administrations changed in the U.S. George W. Bush supported flights to the Moon, Obama was against them—he wanted a human to go to an asteroid first, and then on to Mars.

But things are different today—the Chinese are on the verge of sending a human to the Moon and building a permanently inhabited base there. That is exactly what turned out to be the catalyst that unleashed the new space race between the U.S. and China.

The goal is clear: the Moon. So is the task: to establish bases and a permanent human presence on our natural satellite.

The stakes are high—who will tap the Moon's resources? Who will start mining helium-3? Who will deploy a radio telescope on the far side of the Moon? Who will manufacture satellites and spacecraft on site?

The Moon is also an important intermediate step before sending humans to Mars. I think it's clear to all of us, but let me stress it once more: it's hard to dream of flights to Mars before we've mastered the Moon.

– I hope such steps really are coming; I think they'll definitely be a good sign for us as a civilization. Crewed flights certainly attract a lot of attention, and they have history behind them. But haven't we shifted toward far more uncrewed missions? Isn't that exactly why public interest faded—because we started sending probes far away instead of people? What do we gain?

– As someone who works mainly with data from uncrewed missions in my citizen science projects, I admit I'm somewhat biased toward them. I love them! We mustn't forget that even if humans visit the destinations I've already talked about—the Moon, asteroids and Mars—there are many places that will stay out of our reach for a long time. The hellish surface of Venus, or the moons of Jupiter, where the radiation is far too strong.

But I don't agree that uncrewed projects don't generate strong public interest. A few examples: the landings of the Mars rovers, the flight of the Ingenuity helicopter on the Red Planet, the images from the James Webb Space Telescope.

Uncrewed missions are unquestionably more numerous, and always will be, because they are cheaper and carrying them out involves smaller risks,

including business and political risks in case of failure.

To your question of what we gained, I'll answer directly: scientific data. Uncrewed spaceflight has always delivered far more data, far more discoveries, far more papers in prestigious scientific journals than crewed spaceflight. Unfortunately, the scientific contribution of the International Space Station—the main focus of modern crewed spaceflight—is rather modest.

But I think you'll agree that Artemis II brought public attention back to spaceflight in a special way. For a few days I looked at the Moon differently. I kept telling myself: “There are people flying out there.” And imagine what it will be like when we build bases. We'll be saying: “There are people living out there”! In that respect we undoubtedly lost something in the half century after Apollo, with no serious programs to settle the Moon with humans and not just robots.

– And still, I'm convinced the buzz around the mission should have been bigger and reached further. Of course, it's not too late, especially if we follow through with the next steps we talked about. Is there an alternative, in your view, to terraforming Mars as humanity's future?

– Oh, yes—that is exactly the clash between Musk and Bezos. For Musk, we have to go to Mars to save ourselves—to have a colony as a plan B in case something goes wrong on Earth, to guarantee that humanity survives. Bezos's vision is completely different—he believes there is no plan B for Earth and we must do everything we can to protect it as our unique home.

But protecting the planet can only become reality if we move heavy industry off it, into space and onto the Moon. It will be interesting to see how these two visions clash in the future—and whether they might just end up intertwined.

– Apart from Artemis II, what have been the most important breakthroughs in this field in recent years that never reached most of the public?

– I'd single out three main breakthroughs that excite me personally. The first is the arrival of rockets with reusable first stages—so far that means Falcon 9 and, recently, New Glenn. It makes launches possible every day or every other day.

The second is the rise of microsatellites, standards like CubeSat—these allow ordinary companies, not just space agencies with billion-dollar budgets, to run their own missions.

The third is in space astronomy and astrophysics—thanks to new space telescopes we're learning more and more about the nature and conditions of exoplanets, a brand-new field, since the first planet around another star was discovered only some thirty years ago.

It turned out that most exoplanets look like none of the planets

in the Solar System—they're intermediate in size between the Earth (the largest rocky planet) and Neptune (the smallest gas giant). And although we can determine their orbits, sizes or masses, we know practically nothing, almost nothing, about the conditions on their surfaces. These are an entirely new type of planet, which we label with terms like “super-Earths” or “mini-Neptunes.”

But what is on them, whether they could be habitable—we don't know!

– And what's the big story you can't wait to cover on your site?

– I've already covered it—Artemis II. For me the most long-awaited event was getting to cover a crewed spaceflight beyond Earth orbit. I didn't care what kind of flight exactly—what I cared about was

humanity finally beginning to break away from low Earth orbit,

where we'd been circling endlessly for the past half century. I wanted something different from flights to stations or free laps around the Earth. I'm glad I lived to see it again.

– Here's to going further still! I truly admire that for 20 years now you've kept stubbornly writing about this on your site. I'll be glad to talk through the next big space news with you too!

Play the video

– I wrote a long series of Digital Stories about how we introduce children to technology. And yet, as a parent, I still wonder when the right moment is to show them what artificial intelligence is capable of. Nobody is prepared for this, because it is so new and unexpected, and it is nothing like what we had imagined. You teach programming to children, so I'm really curious about your point of view.

– We are the pioneers, the first to face this topic as parents, and there is no experience to build on. But that is also a good thing—something new and different is happening.

In my view, one of the important things is to be together with the children as they take their first steps. But that goes for everything—cybersecurity, for example. We know it's a bad idea to write our passwords down on scraps of paper, or to use the dog's name and our birthday. But if a child doesn't see a parent using a dedicated app, changing and strengthening their passwords, there's no way for the child to take that as an example.

Work with AI starts from the same place. What's needed is

a harmony in which parents sit down with their children in a spirit of cooperation and shared involvement, to “try it together and see.”

I think that's the most important thing, but the question is how prepared and informed the parents themselves are about what AI is and how it works.

– Absolutely! Most of them aren't, but it's not their fault either—everything in the tech world simply changes too fast, and nobody manages to keep up.

– A parent needs to show and explain a few basic things to their child. First, how an artificial intelligence makes decisions—that it is, more or less, a statistical process, not human thought. It looks at what the general opinion is, what various sources say, and then answers. But it's an unemotional decision based on some kind of statistics.

Children also need to know, and be shown, that artificial intelligence can make mistakes. There should always be a measure of reflection about what is happening in the conversation with it—why it answers in a certain way and how it can be used.

I believe the first step has to come from the parents; the example has to come from them.

But how should they prepare in the best possible way? Well, by using it more!

I work with children every day, and you can immediately tell which ones get attention on these things. It shows when a parent sits down and does something with the child. It's like buying a Lego set.

What matters is that you sit down and build it together.

That's the “wow” moment; that's when you show why you're doing it. That's what guidance is.

– But shouldn't we also be thinking about some restrictions? With phones, we concluded that they should be banned up to a certain age; with social media, more and more countries are going the same way, and the age limits are even going up. Isn't it time to decide that AI is completely off-limits until a certain age?

– Certainly. But what age would that be?

– That's exactly why it's hard, as we've already seen—it took 10, 15, 20 years to settle on any kind of norm for mobile phones and social media. Today we don't have that much time.

– If we put the question that way, I'd say the norm is like the one each family has for using the phone. I don't think we should box it in with rules; they don't always work for everyone. But in my view, whatever the phone rules are in a given family, AI should perhaps be the next step up.

With handing over a phone, we know it's normal to start with restrictions and then ease them as the child earns it. Everything happens gradually, and I think it should be the same with artificial intelligence. I don't think there's a clear-cut answer, but parents also need to see how the child perceives AI. How well they understand it, how quickly they learn, how they work with it.

Sadly,

children these days don't ask many questions.

For example, “what is this artificial intelligence thing.” A friend of mine has kids in third grade, and I've heard them come up and say, “Mom, ask Gemini.” That child doesn't have a phone, but knows there's some Gemini out there who gives answers. But where does it come from, why should you ask it, how should you ask it, and how far should you trust it?

That's a chain of connections the child has made based on the parents' conversations, on things heard somewhere. But today many children don't ask questions like “why do we have light,” “what is the internet,” or what artificial intelligence is. They take them as givens. I think it's good to go down this road, question by question, step by step.

Here's one, for example—that it is always positive. That feeling can sometimes be strange, and children start expecting it from people out in the world, who aren't always like that.

Of course, not everything is in the parents' hands. In my view, first they should sit down and show it, do it with the children, and second, make sure they get expert advice from the right sources. I think that's the combination without which you can't get the full picture.

Not every child needs to become a programmer, but they definitely need to see behind the scenes, to understand how technology works and then what artificial intelligence is. How it functions, how to use it, and where its limits lie.

– Sadly, that sounds a bit utopian to me, given that only a very small share of adults ask themselves all these questions, let alone get to the point of passing them on to their children. But couldn't it happen the other way around—that they understand better and faster than we do, find their bearings, and set the limits of what artificial intelligence can do?

– They certainly develop much faster today, because they have so many different opportunities. Sometimes it's frightening for parents how quickly children manage to adapt. But this is the meaningful path that has to be walked. Without the basics, it can't work.

It's like that with everything. Say we're learning something new, like playing basketball—one group makes no effort, another only watches how it's played, and a third only practices. The third group, of course, will be the most capable. The second will come after them. But even stronger would be those who both watch and play. Can't we do something similar with AI?

Being a parent is actually quite a big responsibility that nobody is prepared for, even less so nowadays. We have big questions to ask ourselves, and there's never enough time.

– I also spent a long time wondering how to start showing it to my older son, who is 8. Because we talk about these topics a lot at home, at first he seemed to have a negative attitude toward AI without understanding what it was. That changed when he wanted to make a presentation about his favorite books. I showed him what lovely pictures it could make, in which he becomes a character from those favorite books:

So perhaps trying to break away from the stereotype is some kind of salvation. When we don't have time for everything else, or we get lost in the sea of information—we improvise.

– There certainly has to be a measure of improvisation.

From experience, I see that programmers' children have the hardest time learning from their parents.

But every parent knows their child best. And look, in the end you found a way to show him what AI can do, and you did it together.

Next time it could be: “Let's see what AI writes for us on a given prompt, and then talk it over.” “Let's have a dialogue, or use AI to simulate some situation. What would happen if something occurred?” That's how we broaden our horizons.

The way of thinking becomes even more relevant.

Children need to be able to think, because the routine part of work keeps shrinking. The labor market is always changing—with the arrival of digitalization, of industrialization.

AI can take the jobs, at least from my point of view, of the people who can't use it.

– Allow me to disagree; the times are far more unpredictable than that. AI has already taken my job once, for example.

– True. We keep finding more and more applications; there's no profession where it isn't used in some way. What's left for us, in my view, is to start using it in a meaningful way, so that it helps us rather than hinders us.

But we have to learn to think logically. That's the foundation of programming. It develops an enormous number of skills in children. Our methodology has been designed by educators so that we develop soft skills too. But at the root of everything is teaching them to think.

Adaptation, logical thinking, sequencing, sketching out the big picture of what needs to happen and how it needs to happen. These are the things we need to spark in children.

That's why it's also important to teach them that AI can help us with many things, but it won't achieve our results for us. It will answer the question we've asked it. But we need to know what we want to achieve with that question. What the end goal is, what the final result is.

This needs to be talked about more.

– Absolutely! That's what I've been trying to do publicly for five years now, and I still feel lonely; our industry isn't having this conversation in any way either. But when we show children AI, the big problem of the easy way out comes along too. Okay, it helps, but then why should I struggle to do my homework? I think even we adults find it harder and harder to motivate ourselves to do something on our own—to write a text or code—when technology does it better. And yet we have to instill it in children, so that basic skills don't wither away. How do we keep convincing ourselves that we need to make the effort?

– AI can do my homework for me. I'm not an expert, but I'm sure that

education itself has to change, to fit the times we live in.

To become more independent, less static. More adaptive, built around scenarios that are played out with the children. I wouldn't say simply practical, but more interactive. The way we learn needs to change.

It used to be that our goal was to memorize the whole textbook, all the dates, so we could reproduce them afterward, so we'd know them. Right now I'm not sure that's exactly what children need.

– But they need that too. I ran an experiment two years in a row with models taking the matura, Bulgaria's school-leaving exam, in Bulgarian language and literature. Yes, they do better than the vast majority of students, and the exam probably doesn't adequately measure the skills that are useful today. But isn't there a risk that we'll lose sight of the importance of the knowledge that makes us human? Shouldn't the education system also be conservative at the same time, since in some way it has to hold on to the fundamentals?

– That's right, it keeps us grounded. I'm not saying children shouldn't know all of history, but the way we teach it to them has to change. Yes, they need to know what happened in the past, because it carries many facts about the present. But it has to happen in a sensible way.

For example, while we integrate AI, not to be static, and for every question to be answerable with facts. To be more like a game with different rules. For children to learn together, for it to be more adaptive.

I'm not speaking as an expert in public education, but I believe the way I learned decades ago and the way today can't be the same. The system has to change and adapt. How? I think there are quite a few directions.

– And we all believe it—I ran a survey on this too, with telling results. And yet change is a matter of public conversation, which still isn't happening.

– These questions have to be asked, however uncomfortable they are. We ask them too—what's changing in the programming courses, in the way children learn with us. A program can also be written by AI, but the program isn't what matters; what matters is that they achieve the result and can explain logically what happened.

We have to adapt. Either we deny it and don't do it, or we bring it in—even if we make mistakes at first.

More and more is being written about children using AI as a best friend or a therapist, but it depends on your point of view. Many children wouldn't have the chance to see a therapist, even though they need one. Quite a few studies show that the data and models such an artificial intelligence has access to nowadays are actually pretty good, and it can give relevant advice to that child.

But here again, in the end, it comes down to the child being prepared and aware of who they're actually talking to.

– But why do you think it still makes sense to learn programming now? Programmers have stopped writing code, especially over the last two or three months. For now, it's useful for spotting bugs and designing the architecture of applications. But won't that soon become redundant knowledge too, which we'll also delegate to technology? Maybe programming is already a vestigial skill we no longer need. Why develop it in children?

– As I said, I think the most important thing is to teach them to think. If there's a better way to make that happen, wonderful. Maybe programmers are changing, and the way they work too, but the architects themselves, the ones who define the vision, the end goal, the model, are still around.

It's like learning math—not to become calculators, but to understand how formulas work, how we can use and analyze them. Everyone learns math to be able to understand the world around them.

– Besides, programming is an interesting pursuit—I discovered that at 34, because the education system had never introduced me to it.

– Programming develops 12 skills in people. Not only programming, of course, but it gives soft skills, academic skills, a way of thinking, of expressing yourself, sequencing. In the real world, we might skip three steps if we have a long stride. But in programming, in most cases, that won't lead to a good result.

It's a way to teach children to think sequentially, not to skip steps, because the computer executes the commands, and AI answers your question.

And how to ask better questions isn't discussed much in the context of AI either. It's one thing to ask “is it good or bad,” and another to ask the right question in the right way, so you get what will actually be useful to you.

– Prompt engineering for first graders, in some form. Yes, for now we really are needed as architects, we need to understand the processes, but with the progress we're seeing, we may very soon not be needed in that role either. How can we prepare children for that moment? There I have no answer at all.

– Neither do I. We have to adapt, to teach children to be adaptable, to be able to judge what's happening and react.

Right now you really have to ask yourself questions. “Okay, so what happens if AI isn't there tomorrow?” We need to develop those skills in children as well. That this is something that exists right now. It will evolve, it will develop in some direction, and we have to adjust so we can use it.

– The bad thing, I think, is that paradoxically, the more adaptable we need to be, the less adaptable the generations we're raising are becoming in their everyday lives.

– We see it in many areas. When I was a student, we studied English, but it wasn't enough, and we had to go to extra lessons. When I look at how many English schools there are nowadays, I ask myself: why haven't we realized that English is fundamental to so many things? Why don't we do it at the state level—raise the school system to a higher level so children don't have to go to extracurricular classes? Given that we're sure it's an important skill. It's clear that everyone today needs to handle English at a pretty good level, even just to find information, to watch things, to grow, never mind entertainment. So why?

It's similar with technology. It develops very fast and offers enormous opportunities. Children nowadays can make an augmented reality game, use 3D glasses. They can program and, at just 12, create the game they play themselves. The education system, at every stage and level, can and should use it much more fully.

Children who have access to programming, even if they don't become programmers, will always be a step ahead, no matter what they do later. Whatever platform does the pure programming for you, you'll be a step ahead of the others if you understand what's going on and can model it.

– With the help of AI, today you can also write programs without knowing any code at all, to make some task easier, whatever you do for a living. But it has to occur to you, and you have to know it can work that way.

– And for children, besides it occurring to you—you need the opportunity to see it. That's why I don't think learning programming will become unnecessary… and not only programming. We're talking about it, but it's really logic, digital skills, digital education

Those are actually the right words, and sadly, every time I say them, many parents don't get it—“my kids are already digitally literate, they're born with it.” That's not enough. What I put into the term includes the limits, the good and the bad examples, and how technology works. That's digital education. So you can explain to yourself everything that's happening.

Besides, when children encounter digital skills together with other children who want to do it, they don't run into other unwanted things. When children with similar interests come together, they'll keep pushing one another forward. What could be better than that?

– You say that many people already come to you after seeking advice from artificial intelligence. How does that happen?

– I have had cases where someone walks in and says that ChatGPT has given them such-and-such a diagnosis. Sometimes I don't even know what is expected of me in that situation. Usually I say: it's good that you sought help from artificial intelligence, but I am natural stupidity, so I'll need a bit more information.

Quite a lot of people

arrive with ready-made “diagnoses,” with a fixed idea of how therapy ought to go, having diagnosed themselves with the help of a chatbot.

They come not to consult but to confirm a hypothesis. And if you happen to stray from it even a little, they are quite unhappy—they get frustrated when my opinion differs from that of the artificial intelligence.

There are serious differences between the generations, though. It seems that teenagers use AI with several levels more caution.

Kids are much more suspicious, more critical of technology, even though they use it far more freely.

It is closer to them, more familiar, more usable. Adults who use ChatGPT, on the other hand, quite often take it as an authoritative opinion. “If it said so, then that is the truth and there is no other.” For me, this is one of the biggest issues we need to be careful about.

– I agree, of course. But how can you convince such people to trust you as a psychologist? The same question now comes up for everyone, whatever their profession, who runs into “expertise” delivered by AI…

– Mainly through the fact that I have a living body, and that I see the other living body in front of me. I can recognize the living signs beyond words, because when we diagnose ourselves, when we talk to ChatGPT, we are usually performing a very specific act called writing.

Writing is a peculiar act of communication, because meaning passes through several layers of self-censorship.

When we speak, there is a direct line between our mind and our mouth. We often let slip words we later wish we hadn't said. Slips of the tongue happen, Freudian slips, for example. With writing, two additional self-censorships appear. First, the words come out through the hands, not the mouth. The words are laid out before our own eyes, which control what we say. Second, when you write something, you read it and can edit it before sending it to the person who is supposed to read it. We can add, react, change things we didn't like on first reading. In a chat we can edit even after we have already sent our message.

In live communication, that element of self-censorship is absent, and this matters a great deal, especially in psychological work—what authentically comes out of a person as speech.

– Couldn't it be the other way around in some cases? That I'm braver about telling my true thoughts to AI than to a psychologist?

– You are brave, but there you are very unlikely to make a slip, and a slip is an outburst of the unconscious. A person's unconscious bursts out through language—in slips, in dreams, in déjà vu, in situations already lived through once. When you have conscious written communication with ChatGPT, say, the chance that you will make a slip, and that it will catch and recognize it, is very small.

– On the contrary—it's trained to smooth them over. That's actually why we no longer bother about writing correctly: it grasps what we mean beyond the letters.

– Exactly. And in the logic of psychoanalytic sessions, for example, we keep these unconscious little shifts very much in focus, so that we can catch the subject's true language. The real thing the unconscious is trying to say.

The other side is that it itself—

artificial intelligence—says it cannot recognize human emotions the way we recognize them.

It cannot feel, which is a very peculiar and specific trait of communicating with AI.

– Then should we, and can we, somehow restrict it from giving psychological advice? Or, on the contrary, maybe it's a good thing, because after all there are people who will never get to a psychologist and in this case would receive some kind of help…

– A ban is certainly not the answer. My idea points more toward literate use and critical thinking.

Child and adolescent psychology is my soft spot. Years ago, we psychologists were actively trying to persuade mothers not to use forums to get advice on their children's health problems, because that can lead to serious trouble. After those information campaigns, many parents now think along the lines of “yes, let me check the symptoms online to calm my own anxiety, but I'll definitely book an appointment with the pediatrician.”

I rather think that

we need to move toward talking, awareness, literacy, keeping on the table the ethical questions around using ChatGPT for advice in times of difficulty, anxiety, panic attacks.

There are already documented cases in which someone misinterpreted, misread or wrongly understood information provided by AI, and this led to suicides. So not only does artificial intelligence itself not always manage to capture emotional dynamics, but the person sometimes misreads what comes back to them as a message.

– Have there been cases that impressed you the other way—where AI managed to read a problem, even a diagnosis, very accurately, precisely, unexpectedly well?

– Not a diagnosis, but

it gives very sound guidance when people are hesitating. It offers very sensible ideas about different points of view, which is quite useful.

My latest conversation was very interesting—with a man who was unsure whether to continue therapy or look for some alternative. He consults ChatGPT quite often, the free version, which is also a serious problem for me, since the paid versions are much more effective and useful. He had asked whether and how to continue, and ChatGPT had asked him a very interesting question.

“If you could afford it financially, easily, would you continue therapy?” And the answer was “yes.” That actually made it possible to open a discussion showing that the problem was financial, not in the therapeutic process.

But that interpretation, that opening of a new perspective, is not something ChatGPT does. We do it, with our living bodies,

being present with our desire and searching together for a knowledge that lies beyond publicly available facts.

– Why does the free version bother you—because of the ads?

– Exactly. With the free versions, in the context of our profession, the ads are quite disturbing. I have worries and doubts

whether it will come to an algorithm like the ones on social networks, designed to hold attention, and to situations of addiction.

In fact, we should realize that these are demo versions of this technological product. And also that

it is a technological product, a tool. Nothing more.

– Yes, but the boundaries are blurring, and perhaps we are slowly getting used to it. Take poetry, for example. Yes, together with AI we can create something beautiful and valuable, people are getting used to the idea, and the line between human and generated is blurring. But where do we need to protect those boundaries?

– What happened in that poetry competition is, at least for me, a very clear example that

artificial intelligence cannot do without natural emotion.

Because those texts were in fact artificially generated by flesh-and-blood people, driven by their own emotions and their need to express themselves. In other words, artificial intelligence was a tool. In the same way that a person cannot play a melody on their own and needs a guitar. We have no way of producing that sound, that expression of emotion, without the instrument.

Artificial intelligence is a tool, and we must not forget it. Yes, Eric Clapton adores his guitar, but he knows it is inanimate.

– Except that at some point it may become indistinguishable from the animate. And that moment may not be far off.

– That is exactly why I very much wanted us to start this subject with the ethics of building AI. That seems to be what matters. In my work, for example, besides the knowledge we accumulate over years of training and self-education, we also rely on ethical norms. Just as doctors have the Hippocratic Oath. Psychologists, psychotherapists, psychoanalysts—we are very often in the position of being overseen by a colleague, the so-called supervision. When you have doubts or worries that something in a case you're working on isn't going well, you turn to a colleague to look at your work and give guidance.

With AI, that supervision, that external control, seems not to exist. As if it were a great master who makes the decisions and is always right.

– But couldn't it become that? Yes, you rely on meeting the person physically, but there are technologies that can very successfully capture any emotion. Every week we see a new model appear. If the next one can read emotions and catch slips, it could become a better psychologist.

– I would find it very interesting to watch that process, and I'd be quite relieved. I could take up stitching tapestries and keeping bees with complete peace of mind that someone had taken over my commitments to humanity. Of course, I say that with a dose of humor.

– Peace of mind helps, but this is the second time I've watched a profession decline from the inside—after journalism, I'm seeing the same trends in programming. I no longer know where to run for cover, and I'm sure this fills many people with anxiety.

– In fact, artificial intelligence can be enormously supportive, but it can also do terrible harm. That is exactly where human presence is needed—for correction, for supervision, for support, for orientation.

When chatbots appeared, there was a case where a bot was released to teach itself on a social network, and in no time it had become a racist, an outright one, with violence, threats and aggression. But they shut it down.

That very function of shutting down is, for me, very important to have.

– But how can we manage this uncertainty? Where can some peace of mind come from?

– I'll say it straight. Actually,

we modern people are terribly stuck in the idea that the only meaning we have in life is work.

And so we somehow miss the other meanings. The ones you yourself discover purely intuitively in using AI to create, to make things.

– How can we get back to that?

– The way you do it.

– But that takes an inner will, which I don't come across often.

– Exactly. Work in professional life, the drive to achieve corporate success and positions—this has become the mass culture of our society worldwide. To this day, many people find the meaning of their lives this way.

From now on, we will have to change that. We will have to search for meaning.

– How does that change at the level of society?

– I'd like to say it comes through more talking and more faith in and support for what we do, because I genuinely believe that humanity creates good things.

– So do I, but the talking remains niche. It doesn't manage to reach a huge share of people. They stay on the sidelines because of the “broken” information model, shut inside a bubble of topical trivia, while the big questions stay off to the side.

– Does that mean we should stop doing it?

– By no means. I just wonder how we can make it more widespread. One of the reasons people avoid these subjects, I think, is that they're afraid.

– My inner drive, the thing that keeps me moving through my day, through my life at all, is to do what I can and see what happens.

When we started on this subject, I told you: I want to see whether I can put artificial intelligence in the position of a client, or at least of a colleague under supervision. To provoke it to look for answers different from the ones it generates on its own. And in fact that is a serious warning sign. That's why we changed the concept—to talk, to keep the subject of ethics and morality within the space of conversation.

If we start from there, with the people who are only now going to build artificial intelligence, if we talk about ethics and morality right at the entrance, I think we will be far calmer decades from now.

How do we bring it into the mainstream? Personally, I look for people to talk to. I look in my own life for footholds for how we can carry on better together.

– I think everyone should join the conversation about how to develop artificial intelligence. But do you think it's a good idea, for example, for psychologists to test the models? Precisely for cases like the ones we started with—so they know how the models react, so they understand them.

– That would be a good direction, but it's very important to be careful about discrimination. In France, for example, there is a campaign to cut state subsidies for activities carried out by psychoanalytic organizations. They are in a period of austerity, and psychoanalysis is not something that produces empirical results in the way modern society expects—to be counted, accounted for, put in a column, in a spreadsheet. In practice, our approaches are not always capable of producing empirical results.

– Or maybe we need to create a new science called “psychology for AI”?

– That is exactly the direction in which you and I seem to have tried to take the first steps, but today's AI apparently hasn't “grown up” enough yet.

– Or we're approaching it with limited human yardsticks. All the more so because it can't be consistent. If you ask it how many people it has helped, it can't tell you, because you only have access to what you yourself have talked about with it. And it has no way of sharing what experience it has gained.

– Yes, it isn't a single being that thinks over the course of time. It “thinks” in the moment; it doesn't remember what happened 10 days ago.

The father of my children is a programmer. Years ago I tried very hard to explain my profession to him, so we could have normal family communication. At one point he slapped his forehead and said: “Our jobs are actually very similar!” How so?

“You work with a system and I work with a system. Yours is organic, mine is synthetic. But we're both hunting for bugs and wondering how to fix them.”

– Yes! Maybe somewhere in the middle they should meet. The way they are meeting right now in artificial intelligence. Maybe the same should happen with the sciences that study them and the specialists who work with them.

– Exactly, we need to work together. Working together, I think, is the key.

– Alas, that's the very opposite of how science has developed over the past few centuries, splitting into ever more branches. Thank you for this conversation. And before we part, let's repeat our challenge to readers, and to scientists too. How can we learn more, from a purely human side, about what is hidden in AI's black box? What unconventional experiments and perspectives beyond the cliché could we try? Your ideas are more than welcome—I'd be glad if you sent them to me here.

– Thank you for doing our traditional annual interview once again. The first time, we talked about artificial intelligence, long before everyone else started to. Not that we're having a real dialogue about it now, but it's such a ubiquitous topic. Still, aren't other important trends being left in its shadow?

– Exactly. There are global trends that cascade and that, unfortunately, will make 2026 more complex and more difficult.

People have been talking about polycrises for a long time.

Unresolved problems keep piling up, layer upon layer, and they create risks.

These can be existential or ordinary—the kind that cause trouble but that we can cope with.

One big trend that people still underestimate is the way climate change is manifesting itself. It's clear that it's happening and that it's not just an environmental crisis. Whether it's caused by human activity or by the planet's journey with the Solar System through the universe, it's here. What isn't widely understood is that it

affects the supply and the quality of food. It calls our reserves of drinking water into question.

It's also already affecting health, because there's a new, emerging field studying how climate change alters the patterns of disease. In other words, it will increasingly and directly change health systems too. It also brings a new type of economic crisis, a function of damaged infrastructure. This year we saw the destruction in Tsarevo, a small town on the Black Sea coast, and around Burgas.

So we see six effects: food, water, infrastructure, health and a new economic model that we have to think through.

The last element, which is also still not being discussed, is that the new refugees and migrants will be climate refugees.

– Conversations with you always take an unexpected turn. But really, while we talk about AI, problems keep piling up that I, again, would link to the chaotic spread of technology. And all this is already showing up at the political level, in more and more countries.

– That's right. Europe, and a large part of the world, is now tempted by the conservative wave. Trump says he won't support Europe as much and will leave it to deal with multiculturalism and migrants on its own. Yes, let's say there's some basis for the claim that Europe is losing its identity as a Western European and Christian civilization…, but I think we can take countermeasures when it comes to economic migrants. That is,

it's better to build capacity in the countries they come from, rather than allow such a massive civilizational intervention.

But when, in 20 or 30 years, the planet warms—proven!—by 1.5 degrees, and many of the territories that migrants come from anyway, in Africa for example, become uninhabitable, our arguments about preserving civilization and so on will no longer hold up. At that point, it will be tantamount to genocide if the world doesn't take these people in. Solving the climate crisis is directly tied to preserving the world's many cultures and civilizations.

So there we see the first strand of the many multicrises that we aren't solving. Add to that the fact that the global share of clean energy really is growing, but it still isn't enough to change the game. And on top of that we pile yet another big problem:

all the new technologies we want to adopt and embrace to make our lives easier need electricity. America is opening new coal plants!

And we've just said how important it is to keep climate change under control.

The second big multicrisis problem is geopolitical and geostrategic fragmentation. What's happening in relations between the US, Russia and China, and the exclusion of Europe as a partner for dialogue, reveals a fragmentation, a new desire to strengthen nation-states, a “decoupling” from the traditional military alliances. We see that NATO has been shaken, economic alliances are being abandoned—Trump wants to create a G5, not a G8—and the “decoupling” from supply chain alliances is intensifying. That began with Covid and deepened with the war in Ukraine.

– Meanwhile, within individual countries, and within alliances too, public conversation remains “broken,” shattered by technology.

– For our generation, yours and mine, that looks like a problem. For Gen Z it looks like a great opportunity and a great advantage, but in fact it creates a crisis. I've given this example many times. In the 1970s, America had 4 television networks. In 1998 it had 24; now every Facebook, Instagram and TikTok user is a media outlet. There is

an enormous fragmentation of the shared public space, the place where people need to talk to each other and, by hearing different, pluralistic points of view, still reach a consensus.

That is gone. We see how hard it is to talk to each other and arrive at any common political decisions, let alone at the global level.

That's the third multicrisis effect—fragmentation of the public space, fragmentation of the generations, the lack of a single platform where people can talk. Post-truth—a multitude of conspiratorial and fabricated facts, fake news, propaganda, disinformation.

Generations like Gen Z get their information mainly from social media. If it's objective, fine, but if the algorithms steer them in a way that shapes their attention for the sake of engagement and interaction, that can distort the information quite a lot.

Here's another layer of the problem: politics and political parties no longer find their identity in ideologies. There's a lot of talk now about conservatism and liberalism, but the real aim is more about solving problems, finding causes and an identity, and

ideologies are becoming hybrid. When that happens, they no longer have a clear face; everyone moves into everyone else's territory, or is a populist.

– Last time, too, we talked not only about post-truth but also about fluid truth. Which inevitably brings serious political upheavals in its wake, and today's global and national order isn't ready for them.

– Yes, people no longer know whether something is true or not. I've been saying it since 2012, and now it has happened. But this has led to an inability to govern. In purely political terms, governments' terms in office are getting shorter and more limited in every country. These shorter terms mean that

unpopular decisions and unpopular measures can't be taken, reforms can't be made.

How will we fight climate change? What electricity will we produce to power AI?

Another crisis layered on top of the political one is that all countries are becoming more and more dependent on issued debt. It's getting more expensive because many countries are taking advantage of it, but since every short-term government inherits the process, it too is forced to keep refinancing that debt, while also taking on new debt to top up systems that used to be self-sustaining—such as pensions and social security.

With the arrival of AI, automation and robotization, and

without some radical political decisions along the lines of “there must be a human quota” or “taxes on such production will be 70 percent,” this approach will force debt to finance more and more current systems, which will break.

If, within 5 years, the retirement age isn't raised to 70 worldwide, there's no way this model can hold,

but at the same time we're blocked by fragmentation, by the absence of a clear ideology, by the fact that everyone wants their own demand satisfied.

Politics is becoming heavily influenced by civic activism. On the one hand, that's good, because it's a very strong corrective mechanism—we see that with the protests here in Bulgaria. But on the other hand, everyone wants their own cause satisfied. Today's digital technologies can offer solutions to some of these issues—climate change, environmental disasters, for example—but they can also complicate others considerably and make them unsolvable if we don't approach them wisely, especially when it comes to political governance.

– And perhaps that's exactly why tearing down something that doesn't work as a social mechanism is possible, while building something new remains an enigma.

– Last week I was at an event organized by the magazine Stalbata (The Ladder), and I found it interesting because the audience was mostly Gen Z. They said: “Nobody will ever lie to us again, because we don't watch traditional media, our phones are in our pockets and everything is out in the open.”

Which is wonderful, because in the post-truth era, alongside the many versions of the truth, the objective truth itself still exists and is visible.

It's visible to everyone—these generations included—that something is wrong, that things aren't as they should be.

But on the other hand,

nothing is heard beyond the act of protest itself, nothing about how to construct the systems in a new way, how to transform them.

That's a big problem on a global scale too. We want to destroy Carthage. Fine, but what are we building in its place? And building it with all these risks in mind, so that we can respond to them. Hence the lack of a common platform for talking—both in terms of ideology and between generations—may turn out to be a big problem.

– We've been talking about the broken public conversation for a long time. But the sad thing is that there's no sign of any way to “patch it up” or “weave” it anew. Meanwhile, some strange amalgam carries on by inertia and sets the agenda. You mentioned climate change as a key issue. Five years ago, anyone you asked, or at least anyone active in the media, would have said, “Well, this is a huge problem, we're all talking about it, we're holding COP 25, 26, 30, we're taking measures.” Then suddenly it vanished from the public conversation, and not just in Bulgaria. Even Greta Thunberg went off to save Palestine and isn't fighting so hard for emissions cuts anymore. The European Commission backpedaled on gasoline cars. So there is some form of public conversation happening above everything else, despite the absence of normal media. Right now, AI is one such topic.

– This shows that we

already live in a kind of parallel reality, curated by both traditional and social media.

Wherever the spotlights turn, whatever space they light up, becomes important to us. The war in Ukraine, Gaza, climate change all disappear and reappear periodically.

One reason is that when the pendulum swings to an extreme in one direction, someone inevitably needs it to swing to the opposite extreme. What Trump, say, and his defenders and followers came along with is that some scientists say there's no clear evidence that this is solely the result of human activity, because there were such extremes in the past too; it's just that no one could describe them, because it was before the span of our civilization.

And second, what resonates strongly with people is that it has turned into a business model. In the post-truth era, when there are many truths and many untruths and disinformation, as Kimbal Musk, Elon's brother, said back in 2015,

“trust will be the currency of our time.”

Simply because it's no longer even a battle over interpretations—many people give up on interpreting altogether—it's a battle for trust.

– And on top of all that comes the rise of AI. We can't avoid getting to it, because here at least the noise seems justified. Without a doubt we now have a new, extraordinarily powerful technology, and yet here in Bulgaria, for instance, it remains unfamiliar. I recently read data showing that only about 20 percent of people use it at all, and as for how sensibly and appropriately…

– AI is a very important, very interesting phenomenon to study. 2025 was expected to be the year of big changes, the year of maturity. Not asking whether we can use it or where, but how—specifically in business, in economic processes.

It turned out there's strong cultural resistance, compounded by the fatigue people already feel from other technologies.

Simply put, screen technologies—phones, tablets, computers, the internet—plus the lack of a clear policy from those who are supposed to educate, schools and so on. What is this new digital and AI literacy? The cultural resistance applies to earlier generations, while Gen Z is very optimistic; they see nothing critical or dangerous.

The fact that Europe and Bulgaria have lagged behind is due precisely to this resistance, this cultural pushback.

This year, 2026, a very clear effect is expected, because people have started talking widely about AI agents, about workflows, and about how

I'm more competitive and can keep my job only if I know how to add value to my work with AI.

In other words, I'm not afraid my job will be replaced; I know some of my tasks can be done by AI, so it's better to understand them, so that I can be even more effective.

– At least in the software industry, this is very, very visible. I've recently started working professionally on helping more people in our industry make full use of what they have, but even there, there's some very strong resistance.

– There's something else I talked about a year ago that's already visible in America and will lead to a big problem. Juniors, the entry-level experts in many professions, are under threat, and I think this will spark a global debate about a new type of structural youth unemployment, because the effect will become visible.

It's clear that repetitive, monotonous work is also under threat. For people who can only do that, it will be a big problem too, and they'll have to retrain. Although in America, at least until a few months ago, it was evident that people weren't being laid off en masse when AI was brought in to replace them; they were being redirected to other work.

A third phenomenon has emerged, which I'm also watching in the US: literally

a “mass culling,” huge layoffs, as you said, of programmers, the way it happened to you too.

And then total crisis, even bankrupt businesses, because of excessive over-trust and ignorance of the fact that AI makes mistakes, that it hallucinates, that someone has to go over and read the code it has written, to see whether it's relevant, whether it has bugs—and those people are gone. Some overly optimistic businesses, especially small and medium-sized ones where losing people was critical, have already gone bankrupt because they can't fix AI's mistakes…

But this year, the expectation is that it will move in quite seriously, especially in logistics, in healthcare, in the defense industry—there are quite a few such specific fields—and in finance, the fintech industry.

– You mentioned a “public conversation” that needs to get going on topics like youth unemployment and everything else we're talking about. I, for one, expect the next step, in which we'll break it even further thanks to AI. To a large extent, the way we get our information has already moved there. I don't open Google to check something, and Google itself now offers an AI answer first. But that means even murkier mechanisms by which information is served to us. A black box.

– There need to be

some global opinion leaders, and some in individual countries too.

Like you, like me, a new generation of politicians, platforms at the UN, where some kind of public agenda can be communicated so that there's saturation. And so that topics aren't hidden or censored, intentionally or not, according to what the algorithms steer and copy.

Because we see that people aren't as insensitive to topics that aren't popular with them as we thought. I truly

didn't expect my daughter's generation, Gen Z, to react at all the way they have to the problems in our country.

Evidently, when information is presented in the right way—whether as memes, funny clips or a clear definition of the problem—people respond.

The question is, which platform will it be?

Should other generations also join these social media? Should we fight to revive and protect traditional media as “gatekeepers” and seek popularity for them among Gen Z? Or should they promote their content on Instagram and TikTok?

– That's my own personal million-dollar question. And at least my personal answer is—a little of all of the above. But none of it will happen without active public will.

– Being informed and holding a global debate must also become a clearly defined problem in its own right,

one that humanity, people and nation-states must solve. Because it's the main communication channel through which to think about issues like youth unemployment, the impact of AI and the political inability to govern.

Perhaps two powerful lobbies will clash here. One will want to justify its investments in AI at any cost. We already see that OpenAI, if it carries on the same way, will go bankrupt, even though it made a revolution. Many people will fight to keep the bursting of the AI bubble from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. But to counter it, AI has to make serious inroads into the labor market and change professions.

And another lobby, as we're already seeing in Australia, says: “Social media is harmful for children under 16; it must be banned.”

So

perhaps there will be some sobering up.

– Let's hope so! Around the world and here in Bulgaria, I see very few examples of the latter.

– It's more about some partial manifestations of AI. As for general AI, which many people hoped would be the new nuclear weapon that decides the next superpowers, we see that for now there's no desire for restraint or cooling down—neither from China nor from America. And that already leads to existential risk.

If we could call all the risks so far ordinary—although they're anything but ordinary; they're very serious and can have grave consequences—general AI is an existential risk.

It won't even be a black box anymore, but a black box containing the extract of all human civilization. They believe AGI will be as smart as the whole of civilization. Each one of us, as an individual and a subject, will face an entire civilization!

If we don't know how to understand it, align our values with it, control it, govern it, that is an existential risk.

But here we see a fundamental misunderstanding. The people working on AI perceive it as a technology that will solve problems and help with production. They don't see it as a new kind of entity, as something that is no longer a technology.

So there will be a battle. Either people will get a fright, and politicians will realize that these short terms, this inability to govern, is closely tied to technology and social media, and that the education and social systems and the labor market could collapse.

Or we'll wade into some serious crisis, a multicrisis with many problems, and then we'll be looking to repair the damage.

It's not out of the question that the social order will break and that there will be some quite serious social upheavals and unrest. Even in Bulgaria this is happening. And it could happen right after New Year's, if everyone on this final list of people eligible to head a caretaker government refuses to become prime minister.

– That development surprised me, since I see social networks as a social pressure valve. A perfect hub that destroys every form of revolution, because it leads to sublimation. Everyone vents whatever complaints they have there, and so real change never comes.

– It is a form of sublimation, but it's also becoming clear that when attention is structured, it can lead to physical action—to calling a protest, to serving as a unifying platform for a single message, a single communication channel. If we accept that it's mainly a medium for one age group, they too need a concrete physical expression. There's no other way to call them out and bring them together.

Evidently, it can be done. Evidently, people still need to stay connected to material reality, to take real action.

Let's also not forget that many users of these media are precisely the carriers of the hybrid. Some are liberal, others conservative, and they can be influenced across these different platforms with the right messages.

I don't know whether you've noticed yet that the people who stood together in the first days of the protest have already split up and started attacking each other from within.

Once that goal was achieved, internal discord began, and it's precisely because of this hybridity. That's exactly what shows that perhaps one step will be taken, but the second—what to do, how to stay together, what the constructive part is—is much harder.

– What to do with the empty Carthage… As expected, as it has always happened, the next step is much harder. Maybe we want it, but the systems don't let us.

This conversation turned out a little gloomy. Yet lately, both of us have been trying to build, one way or another, with the help of AI. Would you like to finish with a bit about practical applications? Clearly we're lagging behind, in Bulgaria even more so, but I don't think it's too late to change that. What do you think?

– First, something needs to be done at the level of national policy. I had gotten as far as a high-level conversation with the Ministry of Education about a vision for using AI in education. There were intentions to set it in motion, because once teachers acquire that literacy, they can show children how to use it, and that's how a culture is created. Separately, this also needs to start happening in the public administration.

On the business side, it's not enough for some AI company to show off what products it has.

There needs to be a layer of consultants—either in-house or freelance consultants like you or me—who explain things.

For example, what speech-to-text can be used for, how to build your own AI agents, what it can optimize and how it can lighten your administrative workload, freeing up your employees for other tasks. But also that someone will have to control it, supervise it, so that it doesn't make a big mess.

We see that AI itself creates a huge list of needs for new specialists—AI consultant, AI cloud architect, AI integrator, AI ethics monitor and so on.

Because it's becoming clear that businesses themselves, even proactive ones, will either make the mistake of laying people off wholesale and over-trusting it without weighing the risks, or will be very conservative and resistant and fail to see the concrete benefit.

– I very much hope more people and businesses will appreciate this. But for the first and only time, I hope your forecasts turn out to be wrong, because the subject of multicrises definitely sounds frightening. Thank you for another important conversation. I hope that in a year at the most we'll continue it. And may the forecasts be more optimistic then…

– So how did you end up at NASA… by chance?

– I worked there for six years. It really was chance. Sometimes life throws chances at us that lead us somewhere. When the changes came—the fall of communism in 1989—my ex-wife and I were senior assistants at the Technical University of Sofia. I was very involved in the elections, I had hope and drive, I thought things would change for the better. But when I saw how badly we’d been lied to, we decided to leave.

My wife read that for the first time any Bulgarian could apply to an American university, but for most universities—the western ones and the Californian ones—the application deadline was the end of January, while in Florida it was the summer.

When she was accepted at Florida Atlantic University, there was no hesitation and we left right away. It turned out there was a NASA lab there

and I went over and introduced myself in very broken English. But for some reason they liked me and took me on.

That’s how it started, in 1991. In 1997 there were budget cuts at NASA, and the head of the lab said it might be worth looking for work, because things weren’t going well. I left and found a job in industry. I’ve always been drawn to making cameras; I’ve been tinkering with electronics since I was very small. I combined that with my knowledge of physics, and now I’m one of the lead designers of the cameras used by NASA, Boeing and who knows who else.

– What makes the cameras you build special?

– Right after NASA I was lucky enough to work at a company’s research institute—the David Sarnoff Research Center. Many of the technologies we associate with video cameras today were invented in that lab. I had the chance to spend two years in the production of sensor arrays—I learned the technology, and that helped me a great deal later in making cameras, because I could optimize the processes.

Our cameras today are very efficient, with very low power consumption, very good quality and lots of features. That set them apart from the mass of companies making standard cameras. My knowledge of optics helped, of electronics, of programming.

I write the code for the cameras; we use lower-level languages, flavors of Assembler.

When you combine everything—knowledge of physics and optics, knowing how the sensor works on the inside, knowledge of electronics—maybe that’s what made the cameras so successful.

– What are these features?

– They’re specific to machine vision. One of the main things that sets us apart is that we built a “double trigger” function. It’s used to measure particle flow, for scientific research on anything suspended in a fluid.

Our cameras are unique in that the time between two frames can be as short as 200 nanoseconds. That way processes can be studied much faster, which is why the five biggest companies in the world are our clients.

The other thing has to do with machine vision. We can select several regions of the sensor in which to watch what’s happening. Beyond that, we managed—I hold a patent for this—to accumulate images with a delay inside the sensor itself. That allowed us to put our cameras on satellites.

Since 2014, when we built the first one, we’ve put over 5,000 cameras on satellites in space.

Everyone comes to us when they want to use satellite cameras—the Europeans, the Americans…

– You’d assume they would go to the bigger companies. Whereas you have a technology that sets you apart.

– At first the big companies were skeptical of us. We started… Actually, I started our company, but I don’t like saying that people work for me; we work as a team. If I don’t write my code properly, they scold me, never mind that I’m the boss.

There has to be an understanding that everyone has to do their job.

So our first successful product was a technology for recording video data on a computer.

For a long time we wondered why the big companies wouldn’t take it as a product, when they needed it. When we talked to some managers, they said they were waiting for us to mature. They’d seen plenty of companies with some unique product that were gone two years later.

They literally waited five years to see that we’d keep going, that we were growing. In 2010 we started working very intensively with NASA, with L3, Boeing. That’s when this activity aimed specifically at space began.

In April 2019 one of our cameras went to the Moon with SpaceIL. Now we’re in great demand for the conquest of the Moon and Mars.

Artemis is an impressive example. Unlike NASA’s first program, Apollo, which was just “we can do it too,” this is a 50-year program. It’s long-term and includes building a space station on the Moon, and another one orbiting it like the ISS, but quite a bit bigger. Many companies are helping with this, and we’re among the active participants.

We’re NASA’s space partner in this area, and we built a special camera for them, for the new rocket. We expect Artemis II to launch into space around the Moon sometime between February and April.

– Why don’t we seem to have this stereotype here, that science can make you successful?

– In the West it exists, but

there it’s seen very positively if you try, fail, and then get up and try again.

Whereas in Bulgaria, in all of Europe, probably the Middle East too, everyone starts pointing at you as a failure, a loser. Maybe that’s the key. The mentality that if you start some venture and fail, everyone will spit on you.

America, on the other hand, is a country of people who came driven by ideas—persecuted for religious reasons, and people who came to escape the dominant stereotype.

– But how can we change the stereotype and make science more attractive?

– Lots of people are now talking about more STEM in education; that term came from America. But that’s technology, that’s chemistry, biology, math, physics. Everything put together.

Unfortunately, in Bulgaria very few people want to study these sciences. It’s the same in America. The students doing computer science and physics are mostly foreigners. Because there, as here, people aim for the majors that can bring them more money—lawyers, doctors, economists; “business administration” is very fashionable. Whether you want to do it from the inside or you go there for the money isn’t clear. And in my view most people now go there for purely financial reasons, not out of an inner calling.

– Yet science can also create business, as in your case. But I think it’s mainly the education system that fails to spark enough interest in these sciences.

– Exactly! You can’t work in technology without knowing math. It was very interesting for me to listen to interviews here with people who want to become programmers because that’s where the money is, but don’t want to learn math.

I just don’t see it.

What algorithm will you create if you don’t know what an algorithm is?

– Especially in the age of artificial intelligence.

– Writing code is one thing—you learn a few basic ways of doing it, but you’re essentially an employee. That will be… no, it’s already been replaced by artificial intelligence.

But if you want to become a good programmer, to create something, you can’t do it without math. There’s simply no way. Yes, math is hard, but it’s necessary.

Maybe the way it’s taught in Bulgaria is that the level is leveled down to the weakest, not up to the strongest. But that way the good students lose motivation.

– Can we regain our position in space technology? Not so long ago we were a factor in this field, and today we have a few but strong examples like EnduroSat.

– Yes, we work with them. I try to proclaim that Bulgaria can come back, but that’s in the hands of private companies. The Space Research and Technology Institute, the KASTRA cluster—nobody talks to anybody. Everyone is on their own, typically Bulgarian. Maybe they expect the state to do something.

Raycho and EnduroSat are doing very well internationally. They’re one of the companies that are genuinely on the high-tech international market. With what they do, with the technologies they’ve created. That shows Bulgaria can do it.

– But how do we get more examples like that?

– Precisely through sites like yours.

People need to understand that in the times we live in, technology is the driving force of everything.

A hundred or two hundred years ago the world was made by industrialists. Now it’s in the hands of technologists. Look at who the billion-dollar companies are right now—Google, Oracle, Microsoft, SpaceX, Facebook, Apple. Yes, they have some product—a phone, software, platforms—but the future is in technology. So if Bulgaria makes the effort, it can. But for that you start at the ground level. First, interest in math has to be sparked in elementary school.

I have one example that is absolutely tragic. At the high school I myself graduated from—the Nikola Obreshkov High School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics in Kazanlak—two years ago 50 percent of the math matura results were fails.

How can a high school with that kind of reputation, which has produced at least 50 international Olympiad competitors, have 50 percent failing math?! What does that say about the others?

– At the same time we have the example of Teo, whom somehow we fail to multiply and to appreciate.

– Not only do we fail. They were even wondering how to kick him out of the school faster. That was a great tragedy, because he had reached retirement age, they kept him on a year or two and just couldn’t wait to get rid of him. That’s typically Bulgarian.

– I’m repeating myself, but… how do we reverse the process? How do we get more teachers like him?

– There simply has to be desire in the eyes. That’s where it starts. Then you have to see those bright little eyes across from you. The ones in first grade, second grade, or in our case eighth,

they’re watching, they want to soak up knowledge. If you’ve got your eyes glued to a phone, it just won’t happen.

– Yet that’s exactly where technology is leading us, along with the thoughtless way we welcome it into our lives.

– That’s the other problem—there’s a huge dissonance between people’s emotional and technological development. The emotional is slower, while technology climbs along its exponential curve. So there comes a moment when new technologies are so far ahead that

most people can’t take in what they could really lead to. They’re users, but on a very superficial level.

– And even bigger problems are on the way. Artificial intelligence took my job as a programmer quite literally. And what comes next…

– My son works in this field—they use AI to create avatars, content. It’s something that’s coming in.

The people who are guaranteed to have work will be the ones who create artificial intelligence.

Many think it’s already done, created, and that’s that. Not true—quite the opposite. The number of programmers needed in this field will grow.

Besides, when people talk about artificial intelligence, very few actually know what it is. Most picture it as a robot that will come and do the work. Judging by the commentary, even in the national media, I have the feeling they have no idea what it is.

– Exactly. That’s why this site exists.

– That’s right. Unfortunately, the media very often just repeat clichés, as if everyone had read from the same little booklet, while the subject is much bigger. So keep going!

– I definitely will, as long as I have the strength. But how can we catch up?

– More attention has to be paid to technology, and less to who was driving at 100 km/h while holding coffees.

The media themselves today are bread and circuses.

The old Roman saying, I think, is in full force. To attract advertising, financial motivation, they give people something that gets watched. What gets watched? The spectacle. The Romans figured that out 2,000 years ago.

– But it also thrives in social networks as a public outlet, now that they have taken over the functions of the media. That’s where the influencers are, the “content creators.”

– Yes, but they’re also mercenary, because an influencer advertises, “influences” whatever they’re paid for. Whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter at all. It’s a distorted reality.

– Exactly. But perhaps we’re close to the limits of these technologies? Take images—what we imagined as a digital camera or video camera 25 years ago, we already have. We have mega- and gigapixels that are excellent for everyday life, and I don’t see where they can go from here in general.

– On the contrary. New algorithms keep appearing. The number of pixels grows, and that is inversely proportional to the optics. The smaller the pixel, the more precise and expensive the optics must be. Look, my phone supposedly has a 22-megapixel camera and I can see everything.

Industrial cameras, on the other hand, have no processing of the information whatsoever; you have to see every single pixel. There’s a parameter called “optical resolution,” and if a lens can resolve 4–5 microns per pixel—those are the good lenses—it’s quite expensive. The ones on phones are plastic. Yes, they have good technology, they’re so-called liquid lenses that can change their shape and with it the focal length, but they can’t resolve the corresponding pixels on the phone. It’s all one big processing job.

The purpose of a phone picture is to look good, so you can like yourself.

There are internal algorithms, filters and whatnot, all to produce a nice picture that has nothing to do with reality.

Another development of the technology is that we’re starting to put AI into cameras. Next week we’ll be at a trade show in Chicago with an AI camera that we’re training to make distinctions specifically in industrial vision.

So there’s still plenty of room for technology to develop—we don’t yet know what awaits us!

Play the video

– Interestingly, the example of lagging emotional development applies here too. Now we take photos constantly, we enjoy pretty pictures, and after a while we never find the time to look at them. We churn out a huge number of shots, and that has changed their value…

– Yes, a large part of those pictures are selfies—you take 10,000 to pick the one you’ll like and send to your friends. But there’s something else. Companies like Google or Apple process all the photos you upload to the cloud. They try to figure out what kind of person you are, so they can advertise the right product to you. And we agree to it voluntarily. The platforms are very powerful.

Brexit and Cambridge Analytica are an example. It tried, and succeeded, in building an algorithm that could target people literally house by house, knowing their attitudes, in order to feed them the right information. The technology is advancing fast and, unfortunately, most of these companies don’t exactly reveal what they’re doing.

The idea is to sell our data.

– When something is free, you are the product. That’s also a big theme of many Digital Stories. But the point is that these companies are now so powerful that they can censor even the American president. At the same time we supposedly regulate them, while it’s clear the mechanisms allow something very similar to Cambridge Analytica to happen today.

– What’s even more interesting is that they started censoring themselves, which is the biggest oddity of all. It began under Biden and continues now. Just like in the old days, under socialism.

– How can we get out of this situation? My only answer is still public conversation, but that can’t happen while even for that we depend on social networks, and now on AI as well.

– There are new platforms that are less tied up, new search engines, but they’re still limited. It cuts both ways. To be effective, among search engines for instance, you need an enormous database. But how did you collect it? That’s why it’s very hard for a new competitor to break in, because it doesn’t have access to the same data.

It’s no accident that big data is such a big topic. The future lies there too.

– And now with AI we’re repeating the same mistake, handing the important decisions and the monopoly to a few companies.

– It will be interesting, because right now they’re starting to use AI very actively and successfully on the stock exchange. But that can lead to huge fluctuations, because you end up with a string of similar algorithms.

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. We don’t yet know what will happen to us.

In visualization itself, in entertainment technology, I think a serious change is coming. Back when I was a kid, people talked about holographic television. I think that may happen soon.

– Mr. Zuckerberg himself claimed we’d soon be living in a metaverse, and then the topic vanished.

– My daughter-in-law works at Facebook. That’s really how he is—he throws himself into something, runs many projects in parallel. Yes, it’s nice to have money. Nothing wrong with that. Especially being a company with a market cap in the trillions is very nice; they can throw resources at many parallel projects.

The smart glasses they were supposed to make went nowhere, but thanks to projects like that, wearable electronics that give you information developed. Out of them came those watches that track your pulse, blood pressure, temperature, and can alert you if something’s wrong with you. That’s a very positive technology.

Yes, many of them wander around, since they don’t have to think about what this or that will cost. But sooner or later something comes out of it and the investment pays back many times over.

Still, let’s not forget that Facebook is a company not even 20 years old. When I left for the United States, there was no internet yet. Netscape appeared, and with 2.4-kilobit-per-second modems we tried to upload something. Thirty years later, look at the level of technology! If back then it seemed to us that everything had already been done…

I don’t know. I think we still don’t know what awaits us.

– Neither do I. I’m sure there are reasons for optimism in these interesting times as well. I, for one, like that space is back on the agenda after being missing for 40 years, even in America.

– Yes, but… it was really Elon Musk who made that happen. When NASA was cutting jobs, Musk had just made billions from PayPal and had the financial means to hire the NASA engineers who had worked on the Space Shuttle. It’s one of the few examples where the state helps you without meaning to. Because in most cases the state gets in the way—here and there alike.

Yes, new technologies for conquering space are one of the hopes. It’s much easier to build semiconductors in space, and that could very easily make our lives here easier. Robotics! It’s no accident the Japanese lead in robotics and robotization, not only on assembly lines but also with helper robots. The Japanese nation is aging and someone has to look after the elderly—that’s one of the positive things.

There is hope, I think. But the bad part is that these robots can be used for other purposes too… Balance again, like the atomic bomb.

– But finding that balance seems to be getting harder and harder. Thank you for this conversation! And to anyone who cares about these topics, I recommend the new documentary by director Nikolay Vasilev—The Socially Strong, which gives the floor to many of Teo’s successful students. They’re worth hearing…

– When the idea of a competition for poetry created with the help of AI was born, I looked for a big publishing house as a partner, and it turned me down on the grounds that this would be in “deep dissonance” with its views. But when I called you and asked, you agreed at once. Why?

– Because it’s a bold idea and a topic I think matters. Later I boiled it down like this: if we keep silent about something and pretend it doesn’t exist, all we do is give it the freedom to develop unchecked.

At some point, unchecked becomes uncontrollable.

And all that will come of it is a complete lack of regulation, of traceability, and total chaos.

A competition like this, one that openly declares and requires the use of artificial intelligence, will, I believe, have a sobering effect on people who are inclined to use it without officially owning up to it.

Of course, I also agreed because, both as a publisher and in my personal life, I’m not much for comfort; I like challenges. This is a challenge with a social meaning.

– Besides, poetry, in my view, should be the bold art that helps us grasp what is happening, and many people run away from that.

– Absolutely! And it must always be in tune with its time, connected to every kind of social event, geopolitical and technological alike.

For people whose idea of poetry ends with the authors in the school textbooks, this will never make sense. It often happens to me at readings, or when someone opens one of my books or one written by one of our authors, that they say: “This is the first time I’ve seen a text without punctuation or capital letters.” We know very well that we didn’t invent this in the last 10 years, and that it’s hardly shocking for art. But for some people it is.

– Yet it turns out that having a competition like this is striking for a lot of people, judging by the comments online. It isn’t just a “bad joke” but an “outrage,” an “orgy.”

– Many people live with a mistakenly idealistic notion of poetry and of art in general.

Poetry may well be the art closest to us Bulgarians.

We’ve always had terrific poets. We still have them now, no matter what times we’ve lived through, whether there was repression or hardship. Quite the opposite: the harder the times, the better the poetry that was written.

– Is that still true now?

– Why not?

– I don’t know. I’d expect it to be; our times aren’t easy, though in a very, very different way. Honestly, I don’t know our contemporary poetry. It feels distant to me, perhaps mainly because it doesn’t fulfill its social function. I can’t find the authors who do that.

– Who rebel?

– Not only that. Who also change things with what they write. Most of our national heroes are poets. Even in the early ’90s there were poets who resonated, who were public figures, politicians even. Now, at least, I don’t see them, apart from the departing generation.

– Yes, on influence I completely agree. It’s very hard for poetry to keep that weight. And to be uncomfortable for those in power, at the very least. That is happening right now too, but in other countries.

Here, in that sense, art is cut off from life.

But even so, more muted, without the force of any mass behind them, we have poets, living, contemporary, writing poets, who are on a par with the best authors in the world.

– What has to happen for them to become more popular?

– Oh… I’m telling you this and we’re doing it. I don’t know. Maybe one has to get into politics. Maybe that’s the most direct route.

– In the past you could take part in politics without taking part. The first example that comes to mind is Radoy Ralin, the satirical poet whose epigrams needled the communist regime. He was never a politician, but he was always an influential voice that got heard.

– Back then it was possible. But who are the famous people today? How does someone become famous? Through embarrassment, stupidity, scandal. Maybe music offers a better chance of influence.

Over the last few months we’ve held two big events, at the Kabana cinema and at Stroezha, aimed at drawing a bigger and more mixed audience, because

we need to burst the bubbles of all the little separate spheres.

We put on combined music-and-poetry events. People come, hear a band they haven’t listened to before, and the band’s fans hear poetry they never imagined existed. It’s a gradual, slower process, but one I intend to develop. To try to fill bigger and bigger venues. In a way, this will make poetry, and poets, more popular. Maybe not to the degree we want, but it’s a contribution.

And what’s your answer to that question?

– I don’t know. I’ve wondered too what would make me buy a poetry collection. And I keep coming back to stories; it’s no accident that I named my site the way I did. Maybe we should make poets more “sexy,” forgive the crude banality. I can’t find their stories either. Poetry is an intimate art, and I’m not sure that today Peyo Yavorov, the modernist poet whose doomed loves and suicide became legend, would be what he is without everything beyond the poems themselves. I don’t like that “profession” either, but I believe the road to more people, especially young people, runs through meaningful poets who are also influencers.

– Yes, but in my view it has to be done in a very clever and deft way, because by nature that isn’t built into a poet. If anything, he runs from influencing in the form it takes today.

But yes. Can we have poetry on TikTok?

– Why not? In the East, for instance, in TikTok’s homeland, its content is largely educational.

What would surprise you to read in the generated poems we’ll receive in the competition? And what would you be glad to read?

– I’ll be glad to read good texts.

I’ll be glad if they astonish me, if they surprise me.

Yesterday a major Bulgarian critic, Georgi Tsankov, posted a poem he had generated with ChatGPT by telling it: “Write me a poem.” And it wrote him one. Very generic, “the leaves, autumn, the Sun”… I remarked to Georgi that he probably hadn’t given it a good enough prompt. The chatbot did its job with minimal effort because of the minimal guidance. The result really is a poem; it may not be the greatest one you’ll read today, but it follows all the rules of poetry, if such rules exist at all. If you put some effort into preparing the prompt, as you mentioned too, artificial intelligence can write better poems than a huge share of the people who claim to create poetry.

At the publishing house we’re constantly buried in manuscripts from people of every age, some with books behind them, some without, some self-published. Among them are plenty of fine texts, but the sheer volume is enormous.

And here, if we go back to the earlier question,

since so many people write, this art must still have some influence after all. Perhaps in a quieter way, even a more egocentric one.

Wanting to be a poet: not so much reading and elevating others, but wanting to be a poet yourself. Maybe that’s what we should use.

– The motivation to write is interesting too. When I wrote poems as a schoolboy, I hoped it would help me with girls, but… it didn’t. Not at all.

– Well… poetry helped me a lot precisely there.

– Then the problem must have been my poetry. But isn’t this avalanche of poetry writing online part of the whole change in the way we communicate? On the internet we suddenly found ourselves on an equal footing: poets, journalists, influencers, readers. Everyone wants to express themselves, which on the one hand is a great wealth. But very often you’re convinced you write well, you get 20 or 200 likes and you keep going. In that situation you have no yardstick, and there’s nowhere for one to come from.

– There are insanely many Facebook groups along the lines of “the magic of words,” “the magic of the word,” some even with semi-literate names, each with 100,000 or 200,000 members.

And even the most banal poem, with fifth-grade philosophy between the lines, enjoys enormous adulation there.

That’s an interesting phenomenon too. “Don’t be like the others, be yourself,” “seek yourself, find yourself,” nonsense like that. People clearly need that language.

In the end, one of the tasks of art, and of poetry in particular, has always been to save and to help. Some need a more banal kind of salvation.

Here we turn to the human question. If it works, you’ve done your job.

– Haven’t we lost our yardstick a bit? I once had an extraordinarily interesting character as a guest, the Bulgarian literary Banksy. He knows literature professionally and tests what happens if he deliberately writes pointless nonsense. He succeeds: he gets published by two of the big “schools,” supposedly at odds with each other today. Do we really have criteria today for what counts as “good poetry”?

– If a person has enough professional confidence, ethics and self-assurance, there’s no way he’ll award a prize to something he doesn’t understand and doesn’t believe in.

In other words, if such phenomena happen, they stem from some insecurity among the jurors, from a feeling that this lies beyond their limits.

– AI adds to the question of the yardstick. You know that at two important competitions in a row, the Veselin Hanchev and the Stanka Pencheva, two different juries made up of recognized authorities picked generated poems for the top 10, poems created without much effort at all.

– The yardstick… some of us may well have lost it.

– If you read poems that struck you as so beautiful you could never have written them, and then learned they were generated, would that make you stop writing?

– No! Quite the opposite. That poem will exist; poetry will have been born. In what way? By surrogate, naturally, or how? In the end,

if we have access to it and it really is that magnificent, do we care that AI wrote it?

And if AI wrote it, we have to ask ourselves: can we compete? What kind of competition could we hold? That would be very interesting.

I don’t think it would be discouraging. On the contrary, it would be motivating. Man versus machine.

– Exactly! And yet we seem to be surrendering before we’ve even set the rules. So what if it has been beating us at chess since the last century? Chess still exists; there are famous players, strong personalities who excite us.

– Exactly! That’s a very good example; I love playing chess. I prefer playing with people, and not because the computer will beat me. Somehow… even when it’s online and I can’t see the person, I can sense the human game. You can recognize it; it’s fascinating. But you train against the computer, because it’s always available.

These ideas aren’t new at all. We’re simply now reaching the things science fiction writers described back in the second half of the last century.

– Even so, we’re far from deciding what to do. In those two competitions the organizers chose not to respond; they only announced that at the next edition authors will have to declare they haven’t used AI. So what, when that can no longer be proven in any way?

– This calls for much bigger external regulations that won’t apply only to competitions like these. But regulation itself, administrative, bureaucratic, can’t currently keep pace with technological progress and the development of artificial intelligence.

We find ourselves in absolute chaos.

Stepping away from poetry, I saw a statistic that we’ve already reached a 50-50 split between online news generated by artificial intelligence and news written by people. Before ChatGPT came out, the former made up 2 to 3 percent.

– There’s a bright side too! Lots of people now write far more correctly online. Over the last year or two something happened, and even the full definite article, a notorious stumbling block of Bulgarian grammar, shows up where it’s supposed to. Who knows why.

But look, it can democratize, make poetry more accessible. Until now, to enter a poetry competition you needed at the very least the confidence that you write well. In our contest even that isn’t necessary. You may have no feel for rhythm or no rich command of language. In exchange, you gain a big advantage if you have a taste for poetry and know how to experiment. Isn’t that a good thing?

– It is, and in my view humanity generally should move toward transforming artificial intelligence. It should be a personal assistant that, on the one hand, has a huge database, but at the same time, when you use it to create some creative or intellectual product, it has to be personalized for you to hold the copyright to it. That’s a big question that can’t stay unresolved. It can’t, because sooner or later something like this will happen. Say you have your own ChatGPT called Ivan; he’s your personal assistant, and as a writer of prose or articles you’ll be able to use him with your own style.

I have friends who are graphic designers, and they were very scared at the start of the boom that they’d be out of work. Guess what happened! Now they save tens of percent of their time using AI.

This horror that it will devour the work of creators is, I think, completely groundless.

We should take advantage of it. It’s like saying the camera devoured the painter’s work. It becomes a new art, but it doesn’t negate the old one.

– I think the conversation is bigger, because the paradigm has already shifted too much, given that we have no way of proving anything. Whatever regulations we introduce, they can’t work effectively for a number of reasons. They have to be of some completely new kind, and that runs through the conversation about where we’re heading.

– You’re probably right that they have to be of an entirely new kind, and they’ll appear out of necessity. At least that’s how I see it; things can’t stay this way. Not because I’m against it, but because it will be more valuable.

Anyway, with those two competitions we know these assistants were used.

How many more don’t we know about? How many books that are written and published don’t we know about?

Bulgaria has more than 2,000 registered publishing houses, churning out titles nonstop.

– You keep seeing covers now that are obviously generated. And how many more go unnoticed…

– A graphic designer has to work for a month to make a good cover, and has to be paid accordingly. With AI it’s almost free.

A few years ago I predicted that

by 2030–2035 a major international literary prize will be awarded to an artificial intelligence.

Maybe it will happen sooner. But that would be cool: an AI that picks its own themes, writes, and becomes the author.

– Another problem is that the world of technology can’t talk to the world of the humanities, because neither side wants to. You’re a physicist and a poet; you manage to combine science and art. Are these worlds really so different?

– For me they aren’t separate. Quite the opposite.

Physics in particular is a terribly poetic science.

And poetry we can contemplate with the same reverence with which we contemplate the starry night sky. For me the two are connected in meaning. But for the people I’ve dealt with from one sphere and the other, that gap yawns wide. More often they choose to stay isolated within their own field.

– Which I think is a mistake, judging by my own experience. You can hear from a writer extremely important reflections on technology, and vice versa, if your senses are open.

– If we look back, much of technological progress was first told by writers. People began working toward that technological progress through science fiction novels. The word “robot” was coined by Karel Čapek’s brother for one of his works. It literally means “worker.” Something that works. If this word, which has spread absolutely everywhere in the world of technology, was invented by a writer, then the two things aren’t separate.

– And they might have been called силодеи (silodei, roughly “force-doers”)… But can we somehow restore that connection today?

– We can, but writers have to push themselves harder. The times I mentioned weren’t static, but they look that way compared with the last two or three decades. Perhaps that’s another reason art has ceded ground: today people dream through the world of technology, while literature wearily turns its gaze backward in search of some consolation. We need to change that; I, at least, plan to try.

– Before we part, you mentioned there are wonderful contemporary Bulgarian poets. Which three would you recommend to me, and why?

– Since I don’t like rankings, they’re always temporary, and I could list dozens of names, I’ll simply settle on our newest authors: Lora Mladenova, Kaloyan Ivanov and Todor Stoyanov. All three made their debuts with us this year, and I’m proud of that.

– Thank you, I’ll read them with interest! And I can’t wait for us to read together the poems that will be entered in the competition. I hope there are more people with imagination; everyone is welcome until December 1…

– Do you remember when and how artificial intelligence entered your work as a software engineer?

– The boom started exactly when I started traveling. And I got curious—things were changing very fast and people didn't understand it. I was just an observer, standing on the sidelines and reading about what was happening.

But when I came back and started working as a consultant for an English company, it got even more interesting and I began using it more, including with the team I work with. The whole idea of our department is to run experiments and build prototypes very quickly. To be able to see whether something will work as a business model, whether people like it at all and whether we'll find customers for it, and if so, to develop it.

Gradually other departments in the company began adopting these technologies too, guided by our experience. We had complete freedom and I started using all sorts of platforms. Right now the main ones are Cursor and Claude Code, but back then there were also VS Code extensions, Copilot. I began to find a kind of pattern in how they work and—no, rather, to look for the best ways to adopt them, not just in our team but in the company as a whole. I started giving talks and presentations on how to use what, and whether it was any use. That way, little by little, we built processes, and today the whole company works like this.

– This set of tools changed very quickly. Until a year ago the main approach was to copy a question into a chat, and at most Copilot would finish a line or two of code for you. Now there are countless platforms and agent-based tools that are fundamentally changing our work as programmers.

– That's true, things are building on each other quite fast, but at the same time not that fast. From the point of view of large language models, we're in a constant cycle. There are a few big players: Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek. One releases a new version, then the next one comes along, and the cycle keeps turning. The models get better, they can work with more and more context, and right after that the platforms that help us specifically with building software evolve too. They keep adding new ways for us to work with them.

At first they were more like assistants. They'd come in, help you with ideas, fill in the gaps, whereas now things are changing a lot—we see they're capable of more and more tasks on their own. They're useful to us, they contribute to our work, but their contribution becomes much bigger when we use them within a specific workflow.

When they're built into your daily work, that's when you see the real growth in productivity.

Especially in teams, where you have certain expectations and metrics and you can see what's happening. Amazon introduced something like this—they added a process driven by the project's specifications on their platform, which is also built on top of VS Code. It lets you plan carefully before you do anything. Cursor is doing the same thing right now—they added planning as a process.

But everything is heading in one direction—toward agents, and we see the same approach repeating itself.

Even if these tools are different, they start working in more or less the same way. That's very interesting.

– Then again, we see that a lot in our industry. In my own field, for example, front-end development, the three most popular frameworks look more and more alike.

Today, though, you teach—and successfully—how to apply AI tools to building software. Which technologies do you recommend right now? What should we programmers adopt?

– I'm someone who gets bored quickly and loves learning new technologies—that's why, for example, I went from the corporate world into consulting.

Today we see that technologies like JavaScript remain workable and efficient, and plenty of people use them. And even when there are new, more modern systems, they very often choose to use this family of technologies.

A lot depends on the project. To anyone who has just decided to become a programmer, I would tell them

to learn JavaScript, its main paradigms and concepts.

– Which AI tools do you use every day?

– Right now I mainly work with two. It's clear they stopped being just about helping us write code a long time ago. For orchestration I use Claude Code, extended with quite a few agents. At the project level I use Cursor more. I try to keep the two compatible, and I sync them so they work together.

– You mentioned efficiency. I talk to a lot of people about these topics, and most leaders in our industry say AI adds 5 to 10 percent. At the same time, in my own work I see us talking about efficiency gains of several times over. Not in every task, of course—say, when it comes to fixing bugs, it's considerably less. Where do you think the real figure lies?

– For me personally,

the efficiency these tools give you is around 30 percent.

That's still a lot! It gives you 30 percent of your time to be creative in your work or to focus on other parts of it.

You mentioned bugs. If you don't use AI, you see some error, you go and look for the code that's causing it. But now you have an agent that can go, find the error, and at the same time analyze and compare how it could be made to go away.

If you have even the simplest problem in a live environment, you can't reproduce it on your own computer. But now you have AI to help you.

With AI automation, especially for bugs, you can very easily automate and fix the small problems. Even if you have a beautifully working project that's 99.99 percent efficient, every next digit after the decimal point is harder and harder to add. But with the help of AI it's achieved very successfully.

Anywhere there's a signal that something isn't as expected, you can automate it: the agent goes, analyzes, and prepares a proposed code change that solves the problem. All you do is review it, test it and release it to the user.

– Are we close to the moment when we won't need to review the code artificial intelligence writes when it proposes an improvement?

– I don't think we're close, nor that we'll get there any time soon.

In March this year Anthropic's CEO said that in three to six months 90 percent of code would be written by AI. The months went by, and where did we get? Nowhere.

We will always have a human in the process of building software.

Yes, our work as engineers will change drastically. From where I stand, I can see it becoming more like the work of project managers. Your agents will be the ones you manage and orchestrate one way or another, but at the end of the day you'll still be tracking their work to make sure they've done it properly.

Honestly, that's exactly what I'm already doing now, even if it's not officially written into my role.

– Isn't there a danger that, little by little, we'll forget how to write and read code? Since we're not really writing it, we don't have to.

– I don't think so—to read that code, you have to understand it. Otherwise you won't let it into the project. There are probably people who do, but if I don't understand a piece of code, I'd never let it through. It might open up a vulnerability or simply not work the way it should.

That's precisely why, to work with tools like these in the first place, you really have to know your craft and understand how things work.

If I were someone just getting into programming right now, I'd first sit down and learn the basic paradigms, rules, fundamentals—how they work—master them and understand them as well as possible, before I started writing code with AI.

Yes, it will write it in two minutes, but if you don't know how it works and why it's done that way, sooner or later you'll have serious problems

In my case, if I have to build something new, an architecture for instance, I'd still use it as an assistant, to help me understand it as fully as possible so I can integrate it. That creative part I was talking about comes in at that point. From my own experience of using AI in my work, I'm learning more than I knew before.

– That happens too. You see things AI suggests to you that you didn't know could be done that way. But if we get to the classic question of recent years—look, I lost my job literally because of AI; my employers decided they didn't need that kind of specialist. Do you think this will happen more often? A 30 percent gain in efficiency can also be measured as 30 percent fewer programmers needed on a project. We're seeing a lot of layoffs—obviously there's the economic situation too, but demand has changed.

– Our role as engineers is evolving quite fast, no matter the specific field. And it will get even tougher, but

we always have to keep up with the fashion, as they say.

Most likely fewer people will be needed in certain departments, because at some point one engineer really will be doing work that used to take five to ten people. That's normal.

But more work will appear as well. Right now writing code is becoming incredibly accessible to lots of people. Even if they understand absolutely nothing, they build apps, but those apps will certainly have very serious problems.

Engineers will still be in demand; our skills just have to change.

If you don't grow along with the new generation of technologies, it will get harder and harder to find a job.

– But this has happened before, maybe just not quite this fast. Say, front-end development used to be just writing HTML and CSS; later that wasn't nearly enough.

– Absolutely, yes.

– If we're in that position—programmers who've fallen a bit behind and still haven't fully brought AI into our work—where do you think we should start? Do we need machine learning theory, or should we go straight to the actual tools?

– We don't need machine learning, which is rather nice. There's a pretty high level of abstraction over what we know today as AI—large language models. If you know how to use them properly, you'll manage very easily.

Where would I start? I'd look at how these AI tools work, but

there's a step before that which I think a lot of people skip these days—how to write effective prompts.

There are quite a few concepts and approaches to learn in order to start applying them correctly. But afterwards you can use them everywhere and you'll become much more effective at your job. Once you know them, you can sit down, experiment and see how much easier your work becomes.

– What should we never delegate to artificial intelligence?

– We have to be very careful about security. It's one of the biggest problems with the rapid rollout of AI automation. We know these AI tools follow certain security rules and restrictions, but it's still not wise to trust them too much.

We definitely have to be very careful not to send them personal and sensitive information. The good thing is that the tools themselves are gradually developing in that direction—they don't access files and resources where such content is supposed to be kept.

Of course we have to be careful, but I'm more in favor of the idea of sitting down and experimenting as much as possible, seeing what such a new technology can let you do. We shouldn't be startled, we shouldn't be afraid. Quite the opposite—it's interesting to do it.

Any engineer ought to be interested, in principle, in how things are developing, what the new concepts and add-ons we use are, where the limits of their capabilities lie. That's how you build.

In our work there's no way to grow if you're not curious and don't keep learning.

– Do you think we're close to the limits of these technologies? Maybe we've already reached some kind of plateau…

– I don't think it'll be soon; we can see these models getting more and more powerful. They're starting to understand more and more and to approach the idea of general AI. After that we may reach the singularity, but we'll see. Either way, for now the models keep advancing. The platforms we use in software development are evolving the same way.

Will we hit some technological obstacle that slows development down drastically? We can already see some. One of them is finding enough data to keep feeding the model so it can keep learning.

And another: will we have enough energy to power these machines so they run as well as possible? That's already a big problem. Sam Altman wanted to build a nuclear power plant specifically for the data centers. Apparently it won't happen in America, but they signed a deal with the United Arab Emirates, which will do it. They already use AI there to the max for just about everything. While we're still wondering what we can do with it, they already have it in absolutely every area.

– Are there things in this field you can't wait to see? Things AI isn't capable of yet but could be…

– I'm looking forward to reaching the moment of the singularity, when we'll have general AI and won't know what comes next.

As frightening as it is, it will be just as interesting,

because I think that's exactly when the big changes will begin. Innovation will take off; I expect to see things I've never imagined.

Otherwise, what I'm waiting for from a software perspective is a flawless personal assistant I can trust with everything. That general AI on my phone, solving every task I give it.

As an engineer I want everything to be efficient and as well organized as possible. If I'm doing something, I want to have absolutely all the options. So far, what I see is that it finds me, say, the most popular results, but it doesn't give me the full picture on some things unless I go back and ask again and again.

– When the singularity comes, I'll be happy to sit down and talk again. But what should people expect from the event you'll be leading?

– We'll have a new workshop that's quite advanced compared with previous editions. We won't just be playing with the tools themselves; we'll look at how to use them most effectively by building our own workflows. The idea is to create and automate, as far as possible, an AI engineering team. You have your own team that you work with in near-real conditions.

How will this work? The idea is for participants to try everything themselves, so they absorb it much more easily and deeply. Everyone will learn how to write their own agents and pick up new prompting techniques to use in their work.

We'll work individually but also in groups. Everyone will have to think about the problems they have at work, whether in planning, setting requirements, tasks, testing, code reviews—we'll cover quite a few areas. Once we know that, we'll see how to build agents that help us do our jobs more easily.

We'll go through the fundamental knowledge we'll need to build agents and then we'll build them. We'll also see something new—how to sync different platforms so they work together, for example Cursor and Claude Code. At the end there's a challenge for everyone: can we simulate an AI sprint with everything automated as much as possible?

At conf.ai we offer something else too—corporate workshops tailored to companies' specific needs. Because we see how AI can improve efficiency in different companies according to their needs—and not just for engineers. They can be aimed at project people, marketing specialists, business analysts, company managers. We also have a team that works on AI automation and helps in all kinds of areas, depending on what the business itself requires.

– You're the chief technology officer of a large company, yet here we are talking about history, sociology, even politics if you like. Your view of the future spans very broad areas—you almost step into the role of a futurologist. Why do you do it? Do you consider it part of your job?

– Broadly speaking, there are two ways to grow a business—proactive and reactive. If you want any long-term control over what happens to the company you're in, you have to take the proactive stance. But that's the hard one. Reacting is easy—you don't even need to think, you can just watch what others do and copy their models.

Sometimes that's very bad, because it easily turns into a “cargo cult”—you imitate someone without knowing why they do what they do. At Amazon, Jeff Bezos reportedly put an empty chair in important meetings where decisions were made, because it symbolized the customer. Lots of companies adopted it. But you can't become Amazon by mechanically copying something. It's funny, too, but the point is that you're going about it backwards. You do something not because you need it, but only because someone else does it.

To be proactive, you have to try to predict where things are heading. There's a wonderful story by Nikolay Haytov, one of Bulgaria's best-loved prose writers—“When the World Was Taking Off Its Breeches,” about the old baggy trousers of the Bulgarian village giving way to modern times. Yes,

no one in today's world can predict what will happen in 5 years, but you have to be adequate at least 1-2 years ahead.

– How can the Bulgarian sector take advantage of this situation and the perfect storm the IT world is in, which we talked about last time? How can a sector oriented toward service companies—working mostly for foreign clients—take advantage of it?

– First—by orienting itself strongly toward Europe, which is a safer bet in the medium term. Even if we become friends with the US again, which I at least don't see happening. There's a tendency there that started with fatigue from the endless wars overseas and degenerated into something totally different.

How do we do it? First—we concentrate on Europe, which for the service sector means learning languages. To be close to clients in Scandinavia, for example, you need to know Swedish or Danish; for Germany, Austria and Switzerland—German.

There's another huge opportunity—

the Middle East. Digitalization there is moving at a very fast pace right now,

and things that happened here years ago are arriving there late, so we can be very useful from the position of experience. We can consult, not just provide the service. The risk is that it's an in-between camp that plays by its own rules, has a different way of doing business, and we don't know how the relationship would hold up in the long run if a conflict with Europe arose.

But—focus on Europe, on the problems it has, and they're very different from the problems of the US, in every single sector. Europe, for example, leads in financial technology, and because of the rules in that area there are much bigger opportunities for startups.

The serious defense spending that's coming will be directly tied to the IT sector,

there's no way it won't be. Yes, this is very heavy software in every direction, but defense everywhere is a very undigitalized sector, among the last on that list. Back in the day technology came from there, as military developments, but in recent decades nobody in Europe invested in this sector, and that changed things. At the mall I can buy better cameras than those on some of the most modern tanks.

– It's a very sad observation, that there will be big prospects in the defense sector, but it does sound indisputable…

– It is. Serious money will pour into innovation in this field, and it's clear that every new solution will be digitalized—there's no other option. For the US, reaching 3 percent of GDP for defense is a change, but for most European countries

it will mean a manifold increase in funding, and that can't help but reach the IT sector.

Most IT companies are fairly liberal institutions, and there will be a clash of cultures, approaches, attitudes. We're used to discussing things, but a general isn't used to working that way. In the coming years IT companies will have to learn to work with such clients, and those institutions will learn to work with us—it's a process of mutual adjustment. But it will be interesting.

Of course, one difficulty is that Europe is a regulated market, which creates inconveniences and slows things down. But I don't think the people who think strategically should be underestimated. At some point they'll realize, for example, that there need to be fully European cloud technologies. Since there's no serious investment capital here, and our bankruptcy laws are quite binding, the EU is the only option to fund them somehow.

Europe has a strong starting position and shouldn't be underestimated on the digital field. Linux started in Europe, and to this day a significant part of the core people developing it are here.

– And yet, so far I see no indication that Europe is making a deliberate effort to become a digital player.

– We really shouldn't underestimate it. Many people talk about Taiwan—what happens in a war with China, since the world relies on chips from there. But even there Europe has capacity—yes, over 80 percent of the world's chips are made in Taiwan, but over 95 percent of the machines that make those chips are produced in the Netherlands. If we decide to invest in chip manufacturing, it's not as if we don't already make the machines for the whole world.

We have the capacity to be digitally independent, and we have the money; we just have to decide. So to me it's very obvious where things are heading.

You can see the trend globally—investing in factories for artillery shells, but also for chips. And it started even before this technological nationalism, back during COVID.

All the managers with business administration degrees who make the decisions have been drilled in the ideology of constant growth. Every year more than the last, no matter that, for example, the population is shrinking—which is happening today on every continent except Africa.

We can no longer go on with this way of thinking!

– In my opinion, one of the problems specifically here is that our sector is very cut off from all the others, whichever way you look at it.

– Our sector is based on services, that's clear. Other companies matter too, of course—there are skills we simply couldn't have developed as a sector without them. But a large share of people work in such companies.

The big change is that clients will demand more accountability from us. Models based solely on price won't work. The market leaders, the more innovative companies, are only now introducing new models based on outcomes and shared risk in service delivery. Alas, so far they're applicable only very narrowly. We need a new model—oriented toward the final effect—you pay for the job to get done, yet I stay flexible in delivery. Yes, I don't guarantee that what I build will do the job for you. But I guarantee you're paying me for a specific result.

As a sector we need to start offering more. To share the risk together with the client. To move toward more specific things. Models where you deliver everything, from start to finish,

without caring about the specifics of the work, which again means taking on more responsibility. And risk, but as an industry we have to learn to manage risk.

– If something has changed drastically here in recent years, it's that entry-level specialists are in ever lower demand. Is that a problem?

– Yes, because it means a demographic crisis is looming in the IT industry. For 2-3 years now almost nobody has hired juniors—things flipped from paying people while you train them to people chasing you for an internship and having to pass serious tests.

Another 2 years of not taking young people into this sector, and there will be a demographic problem. It'll be 4 years without young people, others leave the sector, and in 4-5 years there won't be any mid-level specialists.

What will the effect be? A shortage of staff.

AI can't solve the problem. AI improves productivity by up to 20 percent, for some things up to 50 percent. There's no such thing as giving AI to one programmer and him becoming 15 programmers.

– Is that really so? Personally, I can see how in some cases it's entirely possible for me to be three or more times more effective as a programmer with AI.

– It's possible with some types of tasks, like writing tests, or if you start a project from scratch. AI can generate a base project with the latest technologies for you, and in some respects the speedup really is manifold. But in others—fixing bugs, for example—it doesn't help much.

It depends where you work—if you have old software, there's no way it'll take over a large part of the work.

The impact of AI is patchy across different cases.

What strikes me is that there are still no methodologies designed with AI at the start. They're all for people working with people.

And we shove AI into everything we can—code reviews, projects, documentation.

Everything we do will stay the same, we'll just stick AI into it? That's not the right approach. As an industry we need “AI-first” models, and those will open up different possibilities.

The example is how there would have been no industrial revolution if we had “hooked” a steam engine onto every worker, instead of having it do a significant part of the heavy work while the workers tended it.

We keep talking about Copilot—a co-pilot. I'm an aviation buff, and there's a concept called Pilot Flying—the two rotate, sometimes it's the captain, sometimes the co-pilot (there's no such term in aviation, actually; that role is generally called “first officer”). Who flies the plane is chosen on the spot according to a number of criteria. There are specific rules, and they vary from airline to airline.

AI gives you the chance to rotate. It doesn't just help you; in some situations you can give it the main role—you just check and monitor it—and then you switch: you write, it checks.

You get a different dynamic, one that current approaches don't reflect. They're built around interactions between people and their limitations.

Right now we've grabbed the adze by the blade and we're digging.

– What other factors do you see coming “from outside”?

– Twice in my career I've seen services shift to India. After the 2008 crisis there was one, because companies became very cost-sensitive, and IT services aren't a core expense—they're the so-called discretionary spend for many industries.

Economically, we're the cherry on the cake, and before you give up the whole cake, you give up the cherry.

I saw that shift to India reverse back to Europe in 2011, for many reasons—time zones, culture, language. Serious IT work can happen in India, but it's not easy, and American companies can't learn to do it well. They go for cheap, but at some point they realize that if there's no result, cheap is pointless.

There was a saying: “I'm not young enough to know everything.” I see a new generation of managers coming up in the US who know everything, just like the managers before them—the Dunning-Kruger effect. “We go to India, cut costs by 50 percent, collect our bonuses, everyone's happy…” The problem is that one, two, up to 4 years pass, judging by experience so far, and it turns out the program has to come back. The same effect will happen now. I'm even already noticing a trend of some American companies coming back from India.

On the other hand, when the war in Ukraine ends, there will be pressure on the Bulgarian sector. Ukraine has quite a few specialists; however things develop, many people will return, and the sector will be made a priority. We don't differ much in time zones or skills, and we have to prepare for that. There will be a reshuffling of the layers, which is easy to foresee. The point is that we need to have things well baked. We've long been expensive. Well, if you can't beat them, and there's no way to, the approach in my view is to join forces. Bulgarian companies should open offices there.

They've accumulated know-how in flying drones, bridges, how air defense is done, while we, as an industry, have meanwhile built up experience in delivering IT projects. This higher-level experience of ours, combined with the cheap engineering potential that could come from Ukraine, may actually be an opportunity.

– So, to sum up—what should we expect in the Bulgarian IT sector in the coming years? And which decisions is it important to make in time?

– I don't take a gloomy view of things; I'm just a realist. There won't be a big collapse. Yes, many people may change jobs, but

thinking people always find work.

Yes, when a new technology changes things radically, jobs are lost. In that same story by Haytov, the man starts out as a maker of old-style shoes and ends up grilling kebapche, Bulgaria's beloved grilled minced-meat sausages. In his case, beer arrives in Bulgaria and he opens a beer tavern.

New opportunities are born. We've seen how many job titles appeared in the last 10 years, not only in IT. In the next 10, I think it will happen even faster—new professions whose titles would make us laugh today will be perfectly valid jobs in 10 years. That's a fact.

We should think less about what we're losing and more about what new things are being created.

We have to be flexible and adapt quickly, because the changes are beyond dispute.

– Can we learn that?

– A thinking person, whatever you hire them for, is immediately valued.

AI opens up some possibilities that didn't exist before. They cut both ways, for good and for bad. The chance, say, to start a small business. With AI there could be quite a few startups with business models that depend mainly on AI plus human oversight. So it may even open up jobs for the time being.

In many organizations there's internal resistance to AI coming in. That's the good thing about the service sector—you work with every kind of company, you see all sorts of contexts, and in a short time, without changing jobs. The resistance is enormous, especially in more conservative industries where there are engineers with long experience; they're skeptical, they've been through various technologies.

Everyone is talking about AI now, but the real, large-scale change in our lives will most likely come in areas like pharmaceuticals (AI for fast drug development), fake news, AI scams, cyberattacks. Anything can happen, but

cybersecurity has a bright future, and in Bulgaria we have serious experience in that area

It's impossible on the basis of AI alone—it's a very complex subject, with many factors intertwined.

Growth in demand for software will continue. Here, too, we'll hit a plateau in the demand for people, and we have to think about how to carry on. If I go back to the farmers example, AI may be our combine harvester.

– And yet, there are quite a few differences beyond the comparison with that sector…

– That's true. One of the problems farmers don't have, because theirs is mechanical work, is that the capacity of the human brain hasn't increased in the last 10,000 years, or even the last 200,000. Our cognitive capacity hasn't grown. And that's a problem in our work when it comes to speeding things up or making them more complex.

There's another interesting experiment: in the late 1960s a team was asked to estimate how long an IT project would take, as described in The Mythical Man-Month. And it turns out that the answers today don't differ drastically. The same number of people needs a similar number of days to handle the same complexity. Yes, complexity is higher now, a banking system is more complicated, there are different expectations in many directions—user interface or performance, for instance—but roughly speaking the complexity of the system is at the same level and requires the same number of people and hours.

Because of all this, I think the IT sector will stay in a strong position. Will that be true in Bulgaria as well? It depends on us. On whether we make the right decisions about how to change so that we're adequate to the new challenges…

– The definition keeps changing, but what types of intelligence exist according to today’s psychology? And which of them does the Mensa test actually measure?

– At the moment we have adopted the theory of the g factor, that is, general intelligence. It is one thing; it is not multifactorial—musical or linguistic. The view is that

if you get a high score on a test like ours, you should also score higher than most of the population in other areas.

Intelligence consists of two main functions—fluid and crystallized. We are born with the first; it is inherited. The second we develop thanks to our experience, which helps us build on it. The two always go hand in hand.

I’m often asked whether intelligence can be increased. Yes, it can, but within certain limits. If you’ve shown a low score, it will be very hard to ever achieve an extremely high one.

– But in the Mensa test you look for patterns and pick the last image in a sequence. Why does it measure exactly that and not, say, general knowledge?

– General knowledge doesn’t really fall within the domain of intelligence; it belongs more to “knowledge.” That’s why the test is the way it is.

We answer to Mensa International, we follow certain rules, and we have a list of tests we can use for admission to the organization. They have to be standardized. The current one, for example, for adults and children over 9, was standardized on an initial sample of 10,000 people.

So we have reliable results, a foundation on which we can stand and say: “Yes, we are confident this is exactly what the test measures, that the result is right and accurate.”

For it to contain, say, a verbal section, it would have to be created in Bulgaria or adapted for the Bulgarian population, which takes a fairly serious investment of time and effort. A single psychologist would struggle to manage it. But the test with which, starting in September, we begin admitting children aged 3 to 9 also has a language section; it isn’t only pictures.

– What are the conditions for taking it?

– You can take it twice in your life, with at least a year between attempts. That, again, is an international requirement—our colleague, the international psychologist, put it simply:

“There’s no point in measuring the same thing many times.”

Yes, as we said, intelligence can increase. Unfortunately, it can also decline with diseases such as Alzheimer’s, dementia, or traumatic brain injury.

The one-year gap between attempts is our decision; there are countries where you can take one version of the test in the morning, the second in the afternoon and… you’ve used up your chances for a lifetime.

I know very well that people with phenomenal memory, if they sit the same version after preparing during that year, can perform better, and the measured level of intelligence would be inaccurate. That’s why we keep a very strict eye on them taking both versions, so there is no learning the answers.

– Then I was lucky to pass it on my first try. I was also quite young, and back then that didn’t help at all, because the scale varied by age. As I understand it, what matters now is the number of correct answers, whether you’re 9, 19 or 99?

– Yes, we removed the age scale three years ago, but we cut the time. With 30 minutes to solve the test we were getting a ceiling effect—the success rate had gone up—so we made it 20.

Right now a very strong factor is “processing speed”—how fast your brain works and how quickly you can solve problems.

Processing speed is usually faster in younger people, but they lack the experience of crystallized intelligence

while older people have better-developed crystallized intelligence but slower processing speed, and so the result balances out.

– If someone takes the test and gets a high score, turns out to be more intelligent than the vast majority of other Bulgarians, what does that tell them? How can it be useful to them? Does it change anything?

– That depends on them. In my opinion, in Mensa you can make lasting friendships, build business contacts, but also end up disappointed… and it all depends on what you were looking for, what your expectations were. Personally, I’ve found extremely close friends among the organization’s members.

Many university applicants attach a high score on our test to their application documents. There are employers for whom it gives an advantage over other candidates for a given position. My fellow psychologists and I have an idea: once we start testing in schools in the new school year, we also want to hold seminars with parents to explain the differences between children at different levels of intelligence.

Like what I said, that

people with extremely high logical-mathematical intelligence often have lower emotional intelligence, and that is where the emphasis needs to go.

Or the reverse: a person with lower intelligence is much more aware of their emotions, much more expressive. They don’t suppress them and don’t wonder “what am I feeling now, and where is it coming from?” or “why do I have a headache?” without any idea that these are unexpressed emotions.

So what if you got a high score? I like self-knowledge at any age, self-development.

By taking a test you get to know yourself and, ideally, come to love yourself as you are.

Some people say: “Now I finally have an answer to why things happened the way they did at school.”

With ambitious parents of children with average results, I have conversations and tell them: “From now on, don’t expect and demand straight sixes from them”—a six being the top grade in Bulgarian schools—“be happy with fives.”

– That’s the other side. If someone gets a low score, how do we tell them? Can it be useful to them?

– Everyone receives their result. There is a threshold below which Mensa International doesn’t allow us to send specific data; people fall into “low intelligence” and that’s it.

What comes next? Some of them, honestly, don’t understand their result, they keep insisting on the exact points, or they start a fight with the messenger who tells them: “I’m sorry, that’s the rule, I can’t give you a percentile result.” I’ve had cases with three, four, five phone calls where the person doesn’t understand what comes next.

When they are adults, it’s harder. If they’re under 18, I try to contact the parents to explain that I advise them to see a fellow psychologist and do another test, because their child may have learning difficulties or an intellectual disability. It’s good for the child to be diagnosed and to get support while still in school, because after that there aren’t many options.

– After you take the test, you get a percentile—that is, the share of people you outperformed. It used to be said you had an IQ of, say, 100. Why did that change?

– The test changes periodically, and each creator decides the maximum IQ their test will measure. We have people who over the years have taken different tests. One whole family—three sisters and their mother—are members of Mensa, and they joke: “My sister is smarter because she has 168, and I have 155.”

Both reached the maximum of the respective test they took, but if we just look at the points, it seems one is more intelligent than the other.

The percentile is the only fair way to compare IQ tests, because it shows that, for example, with a result of 60 percent, if 1,000 people take this test, that person will do better than 600 of them. So it’s comparable on a 1:1,000 basis among people tested under the same conditions, i.e., the same tasks in the same time at the same age.

– But don’t we lose traceability that way? How can we compare whether intelligence changes over time, across generations?

– We have that in percentiles too. We can see how

IQ has periodically risen—this is the Flynn effect.

Gradually, people start getting higher and higher scores on the same intelligence test, so psychologists and psychometricians revise the scoring scales, and revisions and new tests are made.

Ever since Mensa was founded in Bulgaria in 1991, there has been a constant slight rise in the percentile, then a change in conditions, then another rise. Until at some point the test has to be replaced. So far there have been three different versions here. But it is essential to change the test from time to time or cut the time to solve it, to avoid that ceiling effect of extremely high success rates.

But yes, in recent years too

the intelligence of Bulgarians keeps rising. However skeptical many people are about it, it’s there.

– And it surprises me, because I don’t see it in real life, alas, and it’s at odds with the stereotype. I’m sure comments arguing the opposite will appear under this interview too, but data is data.

And based on that data—can we say we are more intelligent than other nations, or the reverse? Can we even make such a comparison?

– I don’t have full access to information on all countries, but comparing with my colleagues’ reports shows that

we are one of the countries with a very high success rate on the test.

One reason may be that the people who come to us really feel they must be highly intelligent and come to prove it to themselves, and through our advertising we manage to reach exactly them. Another possible factor, in my view, is our education and our genetic predispositions.

– Are there patterns within the country? For example, who does better on the test—men or women, young or older people, do certain professions or regions stand out?

– The sample is still small, but since 2022, when we began testing children from age 9, we’ve built partnerships with schools in different parts of Bulgaria, and we’re open to others. There we offer regular tests to students, and that way we accumulate data that will be more telling over time. But among those tested so far,

boys in Ruse and Plovdiv perform better than those in Varna, Sofia, Gotse Delchev and Pleven. Girls in Plovdiv, in turn, are followed by girls in Varna.

As for professions… When I became a member of Mensa in 2012, I went to a meeting in Plovdiv, and across the table from me sat five men, all graduates of the Technical University with engineering degrees. At that time there were a lot of engineers. Over time I learned we have quite a few lawyers. But

the most numerous today, of course, are programmers.

I explain it by the fact that this profession requires well-developed logical-mathematical thinking, so it’s natural to do better on this test.

We now have eight members with a background in psychology, which makes me happy. Over the years there were one or two psychologists; now there are more of us, but programmers definitely dominate.

– That’s probably no accident. I passed the test a full 15 years before I became a programmer.

– My high school specialization was also informatics with English. When 12th grade came, I sat down and realized that the boys—my classmates—were managing; it came naturally to them. They solved the problems we were given as assignments somehow from the inside. While I, based on knowledge, with more thinking, would sit down and manage it, but it didn’t give me the same satisfaction and pleasure.

I was interested in people, and that’s how I turned to psychology, but at moments when I’ve had difficulties as a psychotherapist, I’ve told myself: “That’s it, I’m switching, going back to programming—I won’t get so upset, and I’ll make more money.”

– Alas, who knows how long that will hold; psychology may turn out to be far more promising in the age of artificial intelligence.

We mentioned that each new generation shows higher scores on intelligence tests. But I’ve come across quite a few studies saying that the coming generations will be the first whose scores are lower, precisely because of technology, because we delegate too much to it. Could that happen?

– We’ll see. But even now there are undeniable phenomena—not in the domain of intelligence, but in attention, for example.

In my practice I use a test revised three years ago, whose scale has been updated, and the expectations for today’s generation’s attention have been lowered, because our brain adapts to the new environment.

Something is constantly happening, something changing, lighting up on the screen, quick movements, and our attention is no longer what it used to be.

Opening a book, sitting with it for three hours and being deeply immersed in what’s happening.

– I think, though, that this is directly connected to intelligence—to solve the more complex problems in any field, you have to immerse yourself in them.

– It’s possible; we’ll see. I’m curious too how things will change, but for now intelligence looks the way it did years ago; I don’t notice any drastic change. The same percentage of younger people keep doing just as well on the Mensa test.

Another thing that has changed, though again not related to intelligence but to memory, is that memory has become lazier. We no longer recall interesting facts; we remember that we read them somewhere, pull out our phone, find what we read and only then talk about them.

– I often point out this phenomenon myself. And it scares me—yes, supposedly it isn’t directly connected to intelligence, but in my view it gives meaning to creativity, because creativity lies in the ability to know things and combine that knowledge.

– I see children’s far-too-early introduction to technology as a big problem.

Attention deficit disorder, with or without hyperactivity, appears more often in children who were introduced to technology earlier and use it for longer stretches of the day.

I’m one of the psychologists who believe that, at least until age 3, a child should have zero minutes of screen time.

– Yes, I also think there should be at least some consensus on that. But it turns out there isn’t; not long ago I prepared a series of texts on this, including a survey, 350 parents took part, and it turned out that far from all of them share that view.

Coming back to the intelligence quotient, today computer science faces challenges similar to yours. It has to somehow measure the IQ of every new model. I tried it; today it’s around 100, but what would it tell you if an AI got a very high score on the Mensa test?

– I read the story where you tested ChatGPT, and I had higher expectations of it. These technologies are developing extremely fast. I won’t be surprised if in two or three years it gets a score that would entitle it to Mensa membership.

– But what do we do then? Why develop intelligence if we can delegate it too, just like knowledge?

– I think that

there will be people who would delegate it, but also those for whom thinking is a pleasure.

As there always have been. At least until the generation that knows what life was like before the internet and technology is gone.

Beyond that, honestly, I’m afraid to guess what it will be like. I don’t dare make predictions.

But you might find it interesting that

an artificial intelligence is already being developed to select the questions on the Mensa entrance test from a large database of questions.

What’s more, its standardization is already in the final stage.

Any moment now it will be handed over to our colleague, the international psychologist, to prepare an opinion on whether it goes into use immediately or will be refined further before we switch to it.

We don’t know whether we’ll take advantage of it in Bulgaria, because we don’t have the conditions to administer it, and the price is quite high. We’re also discussing buying a new test, which is on paper and takes 40 minutes.

– So… AI is starting to evaluate us, not we it? That’s a very interesting and telling reversal of the paradigm, don’t you think?

– Yes, it is, but this solves a long-standing problem for the organization worldwide—test questions leaking into the public domain. A big advantage is that the artificial intelligence will choose the next question based on correct answers. It will cut testing time considerably, because if, for example, it sees you haven’t answered 10 consecutive questions and they are the easiest ones, it will simply give you a result saying you can’t become a Mensa member, and that will be that.

– Then again, thanks to AI, we’ve started talking more about intelligence in public; the word has come back, even if as a contrast to the natural kind.

But whenever I talk about these topics, I always want to ask the question I haven’t been able to answer for so many years. Why aren’t the most intelligent people the leaders? Why aren’t there more Mensa members in politics, or among successful entrepreneurs?

– There are such people, in my view. But high intelligence comes with its own characteristics, which aren’t suited to such positions. It often leads to self-absorption, a reluctance to interact with many people.

These extremely intelligent people are often introverts, and to be a successful leader you can’t be one.

In entrepreneurship it seems to be extroverts who succeed—sociable, friendly people who know how to put everything into words, with very well-developed emotional intelligence, which, as we said, is less developed when logical-mathematical intelligence is strong.

As for politicians… I’m not sure exactly what qualities to attribute to them. In my mind they aren’t exceptionally positive.

– Exactly! And they should be. But, as Daniela Simidchieva told me, sometimes things just come easily to intelligent people, and that holds them back too…

For several years now, Mensa Bulgaria has also admitted children. Why did that change come about? What should we do if we see that our child stands out with impressive mental abilities?

– I was also a highly intelligent child, but the environment I grew up in pushed me rather to dull that intelligence. I heard classmates say things like “What, you think you’re so smart?” That’s why today I find a very high purpose in discovering highly intelligent children and giving them opportunities we didn’t have. That way we also develop society as a whole.

Each country decides how to approach it. We decided to identify their personal needs and personal motivation and to organize activities. We’re currently developing a unified program, but we’ll keep working as before, also according to the young people’s interests. The first 12 said they were interested in artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies; we found members who are specialists in those fields and organized meetings. I also give them puzzles to challenge their minds. We hold meetings where each prepares a topic they find interesting, and by presenting it they begin to connect and go deeper into those interests.

From August 24 to 31, the first youth camp in Bulgaria in a decade took place, and they also get access to information from Mensa International. Recently a young man shared that he had an innovative discovery in the field of semiconductors and was looking for contacts with university laboratories.

But more generally, what should we do if we see a child stands out with such qualities? We need to know that when logical-mathematical intelligence is more strongly developed, we should put a little emphasis on the emotional side, on relationships with people, because it has been shown that in these cases it lags behind. At an earlier age—explaining emotions, when we feel them, why, naming them. But of course also focusing on what the particular child is interested in, developing it, helping them find their place. What could be better than loving your profession?

– Even when you have several, I say from personal experience. Otherwise, however worn out this play on words has become lately, only natural intelligence can save us in the age of the artificial kind. I’ll be glad if we come up with more interesting experiments in both directions. Thank you for this conversation!

– What's the point of traveling the world to write about matches when you could just watch them on TV?

– They are two different sports—football live and football on television. At the moment

sport is developing more as a media product than as a competition.

Everything is done with an eye to making it more attractive to a wider circle of people.

It's no accident that Real Madrid president Florentino Pérez said their biggest rival would not be other teams but TikTok and Netflix. It's very hard to hold young people's attention on one thing for that long—to sit through 90 minutes of football. But when you're in the stadium, that question doesn't arise; the atmosphere immerses you in something completely different.

Watching football on TV or on various platforms has its advantages, especially with live multi-match coverage, when you have five or six games and the broadcast cuts to whichever stadium something interesting is happening in. That has its own inner dynamic, because uncertainty is added.

– Unless you're a die-hard fan watching your own team…

– Exactly, then those options can't possibly interest you.

Years ago all the games in a given round were played on the same day, at the same time. Now, because of television, they're scheduled one after another. If a foreigner comes to Sofia, in two or three days he can see two or three matches. And if you're truly devoted in front of the TV, it means sitting down at noon and not getting up until midnight. You just switch channels.

More and more people reach a point of saturation, because football is gushing out from everywhere.

But

for me at least, there's nothing better than being in a packed stadium.

Fans of one team, of the other, neutrals. An atmosphere builds that for an hour and a half tears you away from everything that torments you in daily life.

– Absolutely! I would love to be able to take my kids to matches without worrying, because that is the sport, not the thing that will be fighting Netflix and HBO. But apparently that's not what pays the bills. What do you think the future of this competition with the platforms will look like?

– It's a battle between the new and the old. When, in 2014, at the World Cup match between France and Honduras, a goal was awarded for the first time with the help of goal-line technology, it was seen as some kind of evolutionary step forward.

Football is a far more conservative game than, say, tennis, which had perfected Hawk-Eye by 2006. And very different from Formula 1, which is a sport-as-technology in itself. There, without the technology, we'd be back with Fangio in the 1950s.

I expect the new Formula 1 film with Brad Pitt to inspire a lot of people to turn to that sport. There is definitely a crisis of big names there. Before,

there were more pronounced personalities like Schumacher, Häkkinen, Coulthard, Montoya, and back then technology took a back seat.

Now the drivers' individuality doesn't seem to matter as much as how the car has been developed.

And then football got VAR. The curious thing is that it was first used officially in the Australian league… Australia isn't exactly considered a football nation, but they decided to try it there. And then there's the technology where, after the referee watches the replay, his conversation with the video assistants' room is broadcast live—that already has an element of reality show. You hear them talking and how the decision is argued.

All to reach the point where referees first have to explain to TV viewers and fans in the stands why a goal was disallowed or why it stood. Or what was introduced at the Club World Cup: cameras showing the referees' point of view.

The direction football in particular has taken, as the most commercial sport, is more and more reality elements. To fight Netflix, HBO and all the other platforms, you apparently have to provide content that isn't just sport.

– And then social media comes into it…

– I consider it the biggest enemy of sports journalism. For footballers, the media aren't what they used to be.

Everyone can now communicate directly with their followers through photos and comments. They don't even have to do it themselves; they have a team that runs the profile. So

journalists are now seen as some kind of pests who wait for you after the match for an interview when you're not in the mood.

The same clichéd things you can just say on Facebook, on Twitter.

– Only polished, because you have a team writing them. And you don't even need to string three sentences together, which often isn't within your intellectual capacity anyway.

– Absolutely! Besides, as a classic book put it, “everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others” when it comes to the media. Television is king. The channels holding the rights to the leagues have exclusive access to players and coaches after the match. And usually, so as not to be fined,

most of the protagonists give an interview to those outlets and then simply walk past the rest.

You sit for 40 minutes just to watch someone come out and wave at you. Meanwhile, influencers are also now filed under “sports journalists” and get exclusive access.

You see that a given influencer has 300,000 followers, while the outlet you write for has a potential audience of 30,000. Who are you going to give access to?

– It's a very sad trend, because the responsibility influencers and journalists carry is so different—whether we're talking about sport, technology or anything else.

– In top-level football, as the Club World Cup in the US showed too,

the idea is rather to accumulate as much money as possible, which is supposedly distributed to everyone,

while, naturally, the richest will get the most.

Quite a few people, besides complaining about an overdose of football, are looking for something alternative, something that reminds them of the '80s and '90s. That's why, strange as it may seem, lower-league football in England enjoys enormous popularity.

We'll see how the trends develop, but the general direction is that way.

FIFA, UEFA, the big players are looking for every possible way to capitalize on football's popularity, to open new markets.

Women's football is the next link in the chain. UEFA launched a program to invest €1 billion in it by 2030. The women truly deserve it, because over the years they have endured a great deal of mockery and humiliation. But it's yet another sign that

money will play an ever more important role.

– Indeed, we're heading toward more and more reality—cameras, first-person stories, ever closer coverage. And we come back to what you said about Formula 1, which I see in every sport: fewer athletes who are remarkable personalities, who come with genuinely powerful stories, an intriguing path, charisma… Isn't that a strange paradox?

– There are always interesting stories, as long as you know where to look for them.

– Definitely!

– But there's also the other way technology affects sport negatively. Yes,

right now is the best possible time to be an active athlete, and a footballer in particular.

Technology helps coaches and scouts constantly monitor anthropometric data and metrics—speed, stamina, quickness. That's what all those modern vests are for, measuring every indicator in real time.

That's how footballers are selected now. The days of watching videotapes, DVDs and highlight compilations are long gone. Every team is looking for a specific profile, the player it needs, and that saves a lot on scouting. But on the other hand,

it largely robotizes the whole process.

Clubs produce a certain type of player who has to meet certain physical characteristics, while

individualists are looked down on, because everything has to happen at high speed, you have to get rid of the ball quickly.

In England, for example, the pace is dizzying. Most elements are mechanically built in, and imagination is somehow missing, and that becomes more visible every year.

– Alas… Is that what makes you travel to write about matches in more exotic places, less popular, less commercial?

– For me, football is something different.

211 countries are members of FIFA, while the UN has 197.

In other words, it's easier for a nation to be recognized as a football entity than as a political one.

Football is always bound up with social processes, with public life, with politics.

It's definitely not just a sport in which 22 people kick a ball around and others watch them.

The chance not to focus on just one league or one country, to see all the different nuances, is what can enrich not only your sporting knowledge but your general culture too.

Once upon a time, World Cups and European Championships were clashes of cultures, of nations. Little by little, football became globalized. Luxembourg, for example, was an underdog for many years, until the immigrant communities, especially the Portuguese one, started taking part and the profile changed. New players appeared with a completely new mentality, foreign to the nation itself.

Right now everything has been melted down

and only in women's football can you still see such differences, because in purely evolutionary terms it hasn't reached the level of the men's game. It's still at the level of men's football in the early '90s.

These days little kids support Barcelona, Real Madrid, Liverpool. Nobody bothers with the local league if it isn't competitive enough,

when you can switch to any channel you like and watch high-quality football. There are, however, countries that have kept that culture. Take Serbia—they don't play some out-of-this-world football, but you're either Partizan or Red Star, and until recently the stadiums were full for the derby.

– Isn't it suicidal that the identity of different countries is being lost? As you said, everyone wants to be fast and efficient, but maybe it's more valuable when the Italians have a strong defense, the Brazilians are technical and the English rely on crosses…

– On the one hand, yes, it really is being lost. If everyone becomes the same, it will still be attractive if they're at a high level, but you'll only be able to tell who's who by the color of their shirts.

The other way of thinking is that in sport, winning is always what matters most—titles, success. And today it matters even more, because it comes with serious money. Prize funds are at levels nobody even dreamed of back then. Especially in club football, it's a

food chain where you have to qualify regularly for big competitions to get the corresponding revenue.

Each country chooses its own path. For a long time South American countries exported big names to Europe. Today in Brazil, despite all the unstable politics and sporting problems, local clubs have managed to find serious funding and are now bringing Brazilians back from Europe in their prime. Brazilian clubs dominate South America, while at the same time the national team is in one of its weakest states ever, the players are as if cut from the same mold.

This Brazil has nothing in common with the one everyone remembers, the one that made so many people fall in love with football.

There isn't a single personality there now. Some will say Vinícius Júnior, but comparing him with Ronaldo, Rivaldo or Ronaldinho seems laughable to me.

If we go back to one of your earlier questions: after Messi and Ronaldo—a somewhat overhyped rivalry—football has Mbappé, Yamal, Haaland, but no figure about whom you could say, “See, here's a new Maradona, a new Pelé!”

Let's leave out Yamal, who, like Pelé, won a major tournament at 17. The boy has barely left puberty, decides to throw a slightly more “unconventional” birthday party, and immediately all the media jump on him, saying he's gone off the rails, the money has spoiled him.

It's the same in other sports. In athletics, is there anyone since Usain Bolt the whole world knows?

– Do you think this merry-go-round can be stopped?

– There are many scenarios. Football had a period of flying in the clouds at the end of the last century and the start of this one. Luís Figo moved from Barcelona to Real Madrid, transfer records were being broken. And then a media group—Kirch, which held the rights to many of the big leagues—went bankrupt. Three or four years of stagnation followed. That's when stricter licensing requirements were introduced for teams in European competitions: they had to have secured funding, independent of any particular sponsor.

Some unexpected event will certainly have to happen for this model to change. As long as something makes money, there's no way to change it, no way someone will decide out of goodwill to make a change.

Years ago Fabio Capello was in Sofia and I had the chance to interview him. I asked him, “Wasn't it better in your day, when European competitions were straight knockout, when in the very first round the champion of Bulgaria could be drawn against the European club champion, compared with now—group stages, countless matches…?”

Capello looked at me with pity for my naivety and replied, “No. Now it's better for the big clubs. If CSKA plays Nottingham, the European club champion, and knocks them out in the first round, in September, interest in the tournament will drop and the clubs will suffer financial losses.”

The big clubs want a sure guarantee that they'll go through. This new format—no group stage, a single league phase in the Champions League—helped PSG, who on their results would have been eliminated. Instead, with three strong matches across the whole opening stage, they qualified for the next phase and hit their stride there.

– That model is borrowed from the commercial American approach in the NBA or the NHL.

– Yes, Americans are known for successfully monetizing sport. But whatever we say, the dogs bark and the caravan moves on. Sport carries on, the big tournaments and championships follow one after another.

We see the audiences the Olympic Games and the World and European football championships attract—

in TV ratings, these are the biggest events in every country.

But perhaps it's no coincidence that when the pandemic began and the world stopped for several months, TV channels suddenly wondered what to do, and someone came up with the fresh idea of airing old sporting events. For many people that turned out to be one of the few joys of that moment.

Psychologically, if you think about it, how many things over the years have made you feel proud? Hand on heart,

no event since the transition from communism has generated as many positive emotions as 1994,

the summer Bulgaria finished fourth at the World Cup in the United States.

– Nothing compares. I'm sure everyone who was at least a kid back then remembers where they watched every single match, even if they have no interest in football at all.

– It's the only moment since the Second World War when the nation was truly united. That's why it hurts so much that it won't be repeated.

Things like that don't happen every day, and that's why it stays in history.

– After so many years in sports journalism, do you have your own explanation for why football in particular is the most successful sport? Is it really so brilliant, so different from all the others?

– That's a question colleagues who don't do football, who cover basketball or swimming, ask too. And so do the athletes themselves, ever since socialist times, when Bulgaria won medals in wrestling, rhythmic gymnastics and weightlifting, yet footballers were still the best paid.

It's very hard to explain to someone who has no feeling for football why this sport is the most popular.

There are theories that the rules are the easiest to understand, that it's the easiest to play. One of the other downsides of technology entering sport is that you have measuring devices, VAR, which make it more expensive. So it's no longer as accessible as it once was. Doing sport is now an investment, not something you just do in your free time.

Football, though, remains a sport in which a boy or girl from the bottom of society can break through and find a path in life. Ninety percent of the most famous footballers come from poor families, outlying neighborhoods, parents working several jobs to buy that first ball. Football established itself as an opportunity: if you're stubborn enough to break through, you can earn your living.

It's also a team sport. In tennis, for example, however much money you put in, the chance of reaching the top 100 is far lower than the chance in football of reaching a decent level somewhere.

– You mentioned that we no longer need line judges in tennis, and they're gone from volleyball too. Could we soon end up in a situation where we don't need the athletes themselves? Where technology imitates them beautifully and the human drops out of the picture?

– I don't know, maybe people are working in that direction too. I'm not that familiar with esports, but it's a fact that there

the prize funds are already at levels two-thirds of ordinary sports don't reach.

But I very much doubt that if you put the best FIFA or Football Manager players in one football team, they'd reach even a decent level.

The digital world is one thing, the real world is another.

One of the things that make sport universal is that it goes hand in hand with social processes. It isn't an isolated island. However far our digitalization goes, that's how far it will go in sport.

– Human imperfection is also, in a way, a plus in sport, I think. AI is already successful as an investment assistant. But I still haven't heard of an AI that's good enough at predicting matches. And in my view the reason is the human side, the imperfection, the mistake that sometimes makes the favorite lose.

– Here comes another problem, linked to social media and its dark side. You really can interact with fans. But not infrequently a footballer makes a mistake, loses a match, for example. And there are cases where he gets thousands of angry messages from someone because he got a red card and wrecked their fantasy team. That's extra pressure, digital harassment. If you're a bit more fragile psychologically, at some point you ask yourself, “Is it worth it?”

We have to accept that athletes are people. They're public figures, yes, they have to protect their image; it's one thing for you or me to down a couple of pints and go raise some hell, another for a public figure to do it. And still, that's life.

Right now we're all in a magnifying mirror,

everyone watches what everyone else is doing. Athletes know it very well, and they enjoy seeing a few thousand likes and hearts on their posts, yet at the same time they can't stand ten critical comments.

– Do you think human capabilities in sport have a limit? We keep improving in athletics and swimming, while elsewhere, like weightlifting, we have to change the conditions to make it look like records are still being broken…

– It's all a function of other fields—medicine and technology. Like it or not, I'll touch on the subject of doping. Clearly, with the athletics records from the '80s, we'd have to be very naive to think those who set them were on nothing but vitamins and mineral water, given that they haven't been beaten for so long.

It's no accident that Stefka Kostadinova, the Bulgarian high jumper whose 1987 world record still stands, once said, “Let someone finally beat my record, so we can see that the sport is moving forward.”

Spectators wouldn't want to watch something where a few sacred cows have sat for years.

LeBron James broke Wilt Chamberlain's record for most points in the NBA. Even though there was no three-point shot in Chamberlain's day, and if you recalculated, LeBron would surely be a long way behind.

– Just as they had to invent the regular-season goals record for Ovechkin, because otherwise there was no way he'd beat Gretzky's total goals.

– Exactly. And Wayne Gretzky didn't complain about it. Just as in Bulgaria, when Dimitar Berbatov beat Hristo Bonev's national-team scoring record, without comparing who each of them scored against.

– And how many matches the national teams played in each of their eras.

– The athletes themselves understand that

for sport to develop, there have to be new idols. Sometimes even at the cost of certain compromises.

But that's sport. There are positive examples, and there are negative ones. Like in life.

I've always been surprised when people accuse athletes of not taking an active public stance, or of being photographed with this or that person. Most of them are apolitical, and their activism extends only as far as being grateful afterward to whoever financed their preparation.

We have to learn to tell the difference—sporting idols aren't always idols in life. There are plenty of examples of people who are great footballers, basketball players, wrestlers, weightlifters, and in life they are… I won't use a bad word, but let's say their profile is controversial, to put it mildly.

If you're a fan of a sport, of an athlete, you have to learn to experience it in full. Yes, it's certainly disappointing when the person you watched on TV turns out to be someone else in real life. But that, too, is part of the magic of sport and of television.

– We very often underestimate sports journalism, including in media circles, yet there's a paradox: in recent years so many people like Plamen Mladenov, like Martin Ivanov, like you, are considered among the most erudite, a benchmark for general knowledge. How does that happen?

– I don't think attitudes toward journalists in general are any different. For some they're turkeys, for others they're called other names. I'll offend a lot of people, but for my doctorate I worked in Zagreb. There's no journalism faculty there, and no history faculty either. There's a Faculty of Philosophy that brings together all the humanities.

And journalism is part of the Faculty of Political Science. What does that mean? People believe it's tied to politics, and that to become a journalist you have to learn the fundamentals—sociology, political science, history, how things work. Only then, having built up some knowledge, do you become a journalist.

At the same time, to be a sports journalist you need to be interested in sport. I'm not saying you have to have competed or graduated from the National Sports Academy. Today's era gives you very good opportunities to follow events as a sports fan, as someone devoted to sport.

Speaking for myself, I try to keep the big picture too. To feel how significant a sport football is, how it's tied to politics, to history, to geography, you have to understand those as well. Not just care whether a team plays 4-4-2 or 3-5-2, whether there's a “diamond” or a “Christmas tree” in midfield.

You ask me why football is so big? If you put on a TV studio and the people there talk to you only in tactics and numbers, you'll change the channel. But at the big tournaments colleagues also invite actors, artists, public figures to talk about football. Precisely to show that it spans every sphere of society and everyone has a stake in it.

Whoever underestimates journalists, I think, generally underestimates people's work. Because if you want to grow, in any field, whether it's journalism or not, you have to devote a lot of time, improve yourself, move forward, not stand still. People see the final product. What it cost you to get there doesn't interest them much.

It's like with athletes, Bulgarian ones in particular. When Grigor wins, we're all happy. When he loses or pulls out of the US Open for health reasons: “Oh, Grisho's gone and found himself another girlfriend.” And at the same time, what it cost him to become our most recognizable athlete globally doesn't interest us. Being there for 58 consecutive Grand Slam tournaments… People who follow tennis know who Grigor Dimitrov is. But you only care whether he won this match and who he's sleeping with.

You can't expect that kind of person to respect journalists when they don't even respect the most famous Bulgarians.

– What would sports journalism look like one day if things developed the way you'd like?

– Sports journalism looks the way readers and viewers want it to look. The media are influenced by what people want, or what they assume people want.

A large part of the media think people want to read bedroom stories, and that's why they're full of them.

In sports journalism we have a dangerous combination of artificial intelligence and a lack of natural intelligence. Lots of copy-paste. Lots of writing without fact-checking. You can easily swallow some fake news and spread it. And,

let's say it plainly, a lack of depth. Fast-food journalism.

Simply because some people are too tired to read a text longer than three paragraphs. Let alone some more serious piece of work.

There is, fortunately, the opposite example too, which is why some newspapers still exist. There are people to read them, and that shows we haven't quite returned to the primitive communal system—expressing ourselves in pictures and inarticulate sounds.

Where journalism as a whole goes depends on people. If they want to read fast food, there will be more outlets serving it. If people want better things, the media themselves will raise the bar. But the “lots of output for little money” model that's being practiced is wrong from the start and doesn't lead to good results.

– How should we introduce children to technology? You and I talked about how important the subject is and came up with the idea of asking parents and relatives. Quite a few people took part in the survey. Did anything in the answers surprise you?

– Some things surprised me. For example, how many people say:

“I have no problem with my children’s screen time.”

I don’t think that’s quite true. This is my job, I talk to a lot of families, and so far I haven’t heard a single one say they have no problem with it.

– Me neither. Everyone I’ve talked to about it, and I myself as a parent, definitely feel we have that problem.

– Exactly… How honest were they in their answers? Really, every person who comes into my office says they have a problem. It’s one of the first questions, without fail:

how do I limit their screen time?

– Same with me—a lot of people commented that this is the big question. Why is there no specific recipe, no practical tips? Which is a bit odd after a series of more than 10 pieces. True, there’s no exact recipe—step one, you turn off the phone after an hour; step two, you set aside 27 minutes a day to talk with your child…

– That’s exactly it! Purely technologically, we can give guidelines—you as a tech specialist, I as a psychologist—on what to do. Step one, two, three. Use Google Family Link, monitor what the child is doing. You can do loads of things! Lock their screen after a set time.

But how will that child take it if the recipe is repeated mechanically?

How will the family take it? All of this is individual and very relative.

For example, a young couple comes to me, the baby is tiny, 5 or 6 months old. They’re constantly fighting, constant drama, and they can’t figure out how it came to this. They’d decided the baby’s birth was the problem.

They’re both gamers. At some point they decided the baby had to be kept away from screens, but that way they’re harming their own pleasures and the good time they used to have. They’re unhappy with what’s going on—and the baby isn’t the problem!

In other words, for every family this screen program is very authentic and particular.

– At the same time, we all know that a child under 3 shouldn’t have access to a screen. What should a family like that do so it doesn’t wreck the relationship but still finds a healthy barrier for the child?

– There’s no way the child can be kept entirely away.

Should the parents throw out their computers?

You and I watched television every evening—what’s wrong with us?

– So we shouldn’t worry so much?

– We shouldn’t become obsessive. In the sense of exactly this pettiness we fall into when it comes to the digital and the screen.

“That’s it! None at all!” No, that’s not a solution—balance is. But it’s a hard solution.

What is very important to me is that beyond the quantitative dimension—how much screen time the child has—you have to look at the qualitative one too. What is this child doing there?

– Why are we all so afraid?

– I don’t think we’re all afraid, but yes, there is an anxiety around digital reality. It’s as if we don’t know what to do when we have a problem.

It’s as if, when you run into difficulties with the digital, you always have to look for someone else who understands it better than you.

That’s a serious anxiety, especially regarding what happens to our children. I think that’s actually the core of it. Our senses, sight, are one of our most powerful instruments—the object called “the gaze.” That’s how we exchange with each other, among ourselves.

We stick to it, we sink into this digital reality. At moments it becomes far more real than the real one.

And while we, having also lived in analog, have some mechanisms for realizing that this is a parallel, not-so-real world, for the children growing up in the digital generations it is reality, the natural environment, their normal habitat.

– And we as parents have to show them the rest—otherwise who will?

– They swim in both universes.

– I know quite a few children who swim only in the digital one.

– Yes, and the other way round. There they’re present a little differently—with their imaginary bodies, with their avatars. In the digital world a child can build a football team, defeat mighty giants, titans of sport. And in reality have certain limitations—a disability, or a neglected state of health, obesity.

They’re present there with their imaginary bodies. I’ve thought a lot about this—about precisely this anxiety. Françoise Dolto speaks of the unconscious body image. It’s as if what we see—both in ourselves and in our children—is very vividly displayed in the digital, it’s projected there, and the gaze isn’t always easy to bear.

Being constantly under someone’s observation is quite disturbing. That’s why we have a serious problem with online bullying. School bullying existed before, but it was confined to the building; you always had a chance to escape. Whereas now you carry it in your pocket and you can’t get away.

– Should we make “offline life” more attractive? Can we, or is it too late? Is it possible to have children playing in the street again? For me that’s yet another huge difference in the lives of the latest generations.

– There are children like that now too. But it seems they bother us.

Here we’re talking about changing attitudes. What do children do? Not only in the digital world, but in the outside, real world as well. I keep hearing people yelling at children because they’re playing outside the playground. Yes,

it doesn’t matter where they play. Yes, children are noisy.

I get on public transport. Excuse me, but how can we expect teenagers to be calm and not show aggression when we constantly scold them and tell them off for being noisy and bothering us?

– We supposedly want to help them. But if we go back to the parents, who ought to be the most active in their relationship with the young, there are two touchy questions that split the respondents almost down the middle. Do children use electronic devices in the two hours before sleep, and do we stop them during dinner? I confess I’m on the “bad” side on both. Sometimes watching something meaningful together and discussing it is healthy time spent together, or so it seems to me.

– Of course! Again it comes down to the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of the screen.

It’s much more important to know what we’re doing on a screen than how long we’re doing it.

I’m not even talking about children—the first “digital-native” children are long since adults. Scrolling for two hours is one thing; listening to a podcast is another; talking to your boyfriend or girlfriend is a third; a fourth is doing organizational tasks, writing your homework, watching lessons. There’s a huge difference.

In fact, the health problem with screen exposure is neurological at the youngest age—from 0 to 3. But even there we can’t isolate them! What we can at least do is watch the length of each session. It’s one thing to let them watch a little song for five minutes while you dish up the food and serve it, and something else entirely to let them dig through YouTube unsupervised. Three-year-olds do it quite often, because that’s how they’ve been taught to eat.

It’s one thing to use technology to help you, to make your life a tiny bit easier, and something else entirely to turn it into a pacifier.

– How can we sense where we are on that divide?

– Honestly, we don’t sense it.

– Maybe that’s exactly what we’re afraid of—that we won’t notice when we’ve crossed the line?

– We usually resort to the digital as a pacifier when we already have other problems.

– And we need to look into those more than we need to limit the minutes on the phone.

– Yes. Technology isn’t the problem; it’s a tool.

– One we clearly don’t use well, though. This is another motif that ran through all my interviews and the survey—that we get information from everywhere and it doesn’t help us; on the contrary, it stresses us, makes it hard to navigate and makes parenting harder.

That was the answer in the survey that astonished me—how can parenting today be harder than a few generations ago, when out of 10 children born, 2 or 3 survived?!

– For me, the big problem with technology lies in the gaze. That’s what makes things hardest for us and drives up our anxiety.

What do most parents of children in the first grades do? My children are already 15 and 17; it doesn’t matter whether they have a phone at school. But for parents of first to fourth graders, when they hand over their child, it matters a great deal to have control over safety and security. The phone is a tool for that. Only how do they use it? I’ll track when you went to the cafeteria, to the toilet. That’s terribly burdensome and stressful, not only for the child who is under constant observation but for the adult too. A resource you’re constantly tied to, and it raises your own personal tension.

– How do we find our bearings in this sea of information and start swimming in it more consciously?

– It seems to be the same as with the other sea of information.

– Yes, but we worry more about this one, which is good. With the other one we aren’t nearly as aware—that’s one of the big reasons this site keeps going. We read and accept whatever comes along, however it comes. At the same time, as parents we’re much pickier, supposedly careful, and still the sheer volume of information doesn’t help us—quite the opposite.

– Because we’re very skilled at disorienting ourselves.

Why does parenting seem harder to today’s parents than it did 50 or 100 years ago? Precisely because you get lost.

One person tells you: do this. A moment later you’re watching a TikTok clip about how no, that’s not how you change a diaper, do it this other way, it’ll be easier. You start flipping this child around like a broiler chicken and you’re not sure what exactly you’re doing with it.

Suddenly, from all this information flooding the parent, this child—something that is yet to become a subject, to become a person—turns into an object we operate on.

How shall I put your diaper on? How shall I feed you? How much quinoa should I give you? How should I cook it?

Here too is the question of the desire for a child, and how, as technology advances, we start to see a child as our right rather than our desire. Saying “I have a desire” is one thing; saying “I have a right” to a child is another—the semantics are quite different.

Flooded with information, the parent loses their authenticity as a parent.

Instead of managing the information and using it for their own and the child’s benefit, they start serving the information they receive. “I’ll try this, and this, and this!” Without following up on the result. The information simply makes you keep reacting, keep acting, while you have no time to become aware of yourself in your own authenticity.

– My personal recipe is that at some point you close your eyes to what you’re reading and turn them toward your child—see for yourself whether the baby is better off drinking water or not.

– Exactly! Giving water during breastfeeding, say, depends a lot on the quality of the milk. Some mothers have extremely nourishing milk, but not in large quantities. Others have a lot of it, but it isn’t as nourishing. Yes, babies in the second case won’t need water, but those in the first definitely will. As the saying goes, we’re walking cucumbers—mostly water.

– Whereas online you’ll come across shared experience that says you absolutely must give water, or that you must never do it.

– We could raise so many more questions the same way. For example, how to introduce solid food so as not to trigger a food allergy. That question opens 15 pages of Google results. How can you manage, drowning in all that information! How can you catch your breath and notice that this child doesn’t want carrots but prefers pumpkin?

When we use digital sources of information, it’s important to think critically. That’s something we seem to forget.

– The difficulty here is that you develop critical thinking on subjects where you’ve built up knowledge. Suddenly, as a parent, you find yourself in a completely new situation where you simply have no reference points, and no time to find them.

– You need someone else to guide you.

Why are we afraid of the digital? We always have to look for someone else whose knowledge we can rely on.

Alas, in the digital world that person is missing. When there’s a problem, the person I turn to is a technician. He’s my age, with my knowledge; he just has a few extra skills to help me and back me up.

– Which used to happen somehow naturally—when you have friends with older children, you talk it over with them.

– Or you pick up the phone: “Mom, how do I make bean soup?” What do we do now? TikTok! Ah, so that’s how it’s done.

– And if you land on a good recipe, fine. If not, the family won’t be eating beans again any time soon.

I find it very interesting that quite a few people in the survey said that in digital times the father’s role is much more important. Why do you think that is? My naive explanation is that we have a greater need for someone to set limits.

– Your explanation is absolutely correct, because it’s precisely the father—sometimes consciously, sometimes not—who imposes and introduces laws and prohibitions.

If we look at it from the psychoanalytic paradigm, he’s the one who tells the child: you can’t marry your mother, she’s my wife. And that’s the first prohibition, the one that interrupts the uninterrupted connection with pleasure, with gratification.

Yes, you’re right. Precisely

amid this constant need to gratify ourselves in some way, fathers are the ones who give us structure.

That’s from the point of view of the unconscious and psychoanalysis. But there’s a much more practical side too. Dads are more technically literate. Since way back, the father has been the one who drives and repairs the car, who can handle tools, drills. And it seems this carries over to the digital as well.

– But we say fatherhood is more important today, and yet online it’s something like 10:1—mothers’ forums, threads, conversations, searching for information. The conversation about fatherhood just isn’t there. Why?

– We mothers find it hard to let go.

– Or do we fathers give in?

– When she has taken over everything and banished him to the couch, how could he not give in? This is an awareness on the part of the maternal body, not just the paternal one. Here we’re already leaving the logic of the digital.

When a child appears, it automatically becomes a symptom, a sign of its parents’ relationship.

There are two main scenarios. When the parents are in a partnership—the mother still desires the father, there’s an expressed interest, the father takes care of her, treats her well, there are healthy, genuinely partner-like relations. Then the child—its behavior, the way it acts, the way it lives—is a reflection of that parental couple.

In the other scenario, the child becomes the mother’s symptom. She takes it, puts it between herself and the father and says: “I got what I needed from you, I have no more desire for you, I’m only interested in the child.” Full stop. What can he do? And why should he? So in the evening she deals with the child, the child doesn’t make noise around him because it’s on the phone…

That’s why we have such a great need for this paternal function—to introduce order.

– Which again requires us to talk about it more, so that we fathers become aware of that role too. Which isn’t happening, in my view.

– The paternal function doesn’t always, and doesn’t have to, be introduced by the biological, physical father. It doesn’t even have to be a man at all. The paternal function that introduces boundaries doesn’t have to be embodied in a specific person. It can be an institution, an external structure. It can be the school saying: “We have certain rules here.” It can be the nurse at the nursery saying: “I’m sorry, it isn’t hygienic to bring in stuffed toys.”

This limiting of the mother’s pleasure so that it doesn’t flood the child—all of this can be framed as the paternal function.

Yes, lots of internet forums bring mothers together. But it also seems that we mothers need to vent. To talk more. Whereas fathers are the ones who act. But the decline of the paternal function makes things very difficult.

– In the same vein—with phones, for example, it turns out we have an absolute consensus when it comes to younger children. In the survey, 94 percent say there’s no place for phones at school. They’ve also been banned by law for 10 years. And yet it’s clear there are phones at school. In other words, as a society we can’t set such boundaries for ourselves even on something we agree on.

– Again we come back to the object called the gaze—you lose control. We’re always surprised, very alert, negative, and we strongly demand measures whenever there’s a case of violence in a kindergarten. Everyone starts squawking—we want video surveillance, cameras everywhere.

I’ve worked in a kindergarten. There was one little child whose mother was an activist for installing video surveillance, and the child didn’t want to sleep at the kindergarten. I could see something was bothering the child, so I asked what was going on. “I don’t want them to watch me!” “Nobody’s watching you, everyone’s asleep.” “No, they’re going to put up cameras, I don’t want them to watch me.”

Children are extremely anxious about being constantly watched.

And if this child managed to synthesize it and put it into words, others become aggressive, start suffering physically, crying, getting stomach problems. It’s linked to the constant surveillance, to the constant, unwavering gaze.

– A completely different subject that I find very interesting, and that in my view hasn’t even been opened up in society, is artificial intelligence in this context. Now we’re all talking about it, “playing” with it, and it turns out that two-thirds of the survey participants, myself included, haven’t told their children at all what it is or what it’s for, let alone shown it to them. What’s the right way for parents to approach this?

– It’s a bit

like with social media—once again the children are several laps ahead of us and know more than we do.

It seems important to me to approach it as a tool, which is how I’d like us to look at digital reality in general. AI is something that can make our lives much easier, but it’s a tool.

What matters, when we talk to children and when we ourselves use it, is to be aware that it isn’t infallible. That it was made by humans. And, again, to use it with a dose of critical thinking.

– To me the big risk here is that they’ll like it, they’ll fall in love with the easy way, it’ll write their homework for them, because the system often allows it. And that will hamper their development if they get used to using it too young.

– Exactly. The question is how we communicate to them how good this tool really is. As with food. Everything in a certain dose is medicine; in another it can be poison.

– But with social media we’ve accepted that they shouldn’t be accessible under 14, or under 16 on some platforms. It’s obvious that this is easy to get around, but we’ve accepted some rules. Should something like that happen with AI? Because it’s something everyone will have to use to succeed, whatever they take up.

– I certainly wouldn’t be the person to take the position that it should be banned. On the contrary, in my view

we should all have free access, but with conscious accompaniment of children.

– And still, from what point? From 3 or from 10?

– That’s a very hard question. I’d like to answer “right away,” because progress and evolution don’t stop. They keep going.

From a purely social and emotional point of view, I want to say from 7 or 10. As a parent who understands that you need help writing homework, integrals and so on, I’d like to tell you from 15 or 16. From the position of a mother who wants to get to the laundry instead of having them hanging on her leg, I’d like to tell you from 3.

I’d lean toward letting it be accessible, but with awareness.

– In my view, also by offering enough alternatives. Maybe that’s happening—in my survey three-quarters of people say their children read for pleasure. My sample isn’t representative, sure, but… For me it’s essential to show the meaningful alternative of the classic values.

– Yes, but there’s another alternative here too. I have two teenagers, already 15 and 17. If you saw them, you’d think their heads had grown into their phones, because every free moment something is being done on the device. And they do read, but in that way.

It’s very paradoxical. The younger one has some difficulty with language in terms of reading and writing. But he absorbs information and reads by listening. All the apps, podcasts—that’s how it reaches him. He listens to the classics; I was very surprised when I heard he was listening to Balzac. Come on, at 15 it would never have occurred to me?!

The older one, meanwhile, follows journalism and politics all day. That’s what interests him.

Again we come back to quality, not quantity.

– Which again depends on us, because he wouldn’t have got to Balzac, whether reading or listening, if he hadn’t received some guidance and upbringing in that direction.

– I’m a parent with whom technology has been available to my sons from day one. But we’re talking about constant accompaniment. About using the digital as a tool, not as a substitute, a pacifier.

When a child has contact with a screen, with digital reality, with a virtual world, with AI, at whatever age, it should be accompanied by a parent who is there and gives it language as it happens. When the child is left to cope alone, it inevitably sinks into its own imaginary world, and unpleasant situations follow.

– And because parenting is hard, like every important thing in life. If you take the easier path, technology shows you what happens.

– That’s where the question that surprises you comes from—that parenting is harder now. Well, yes, everyone thinks theirs is harder. Everyone’s own pain hurts them more. And since we aren’t born prepared to be parents but learn on the go, as the child grows, every parenthood goes through its own authentic difficulty.

– Which is part of the beauty and the challenge… Thank you for this conversation! Before long we’ll continue it, because it’s worth taking a look at teenagers too. Many important topics await us there as well…

– “The future is already here—literally.” That's how the invitation to your talk at DEV.BG All in One begins, and it's the very same sentence I use to sum up my own book, which I'll be happy to present to visitors at the stand I'll have at the event. So… how exactly is the future here?

– If you ask most people which sounds more absurd and unbelievable, quantum mechanics or the theory of relativity, they'll say the former: something both exists and doesn't exist. Yet the theory of relativity has the Andromeda paradox—

if one person is sitting and another is running past him, what is happening in the Andromeda galaxy from the perspective of the two will differ by several days.

That's the metaphor I'm talking about. According to physics, this is just as indisputable a fact as the fact that we have to calibrate the clocks on satellites to run faster than those on Earth. Only then, viewed from here while they're in orbit, do they appear to run at the same speed as earthly clocks, so that they can match the ones on Earth.

– So we mustn't miss the changes, if I understand the metaphor. Just as physics has the twin paradox, where twins age differently depending on spacetime. And just as artificial intelligence is arriving in software development to change everything…

– Yes, most people somehow intuitively remember the idea of the twins, but when you talk about relativity, there's also the present, and it too is relative for different observers. There is no absolute present, and the future is literally here; it depends on the observer.

In that sense, we can't avoid talking about the elephant in the room: AI. But the future and development of the IT sector have many more aspects, and some of them are, in my view, even more important.

The IT industry has gone through a lot of turbulence in recent years. I don't know if you remember the big fad in the US—“learn to code”—when even the president came out to explain that learning to program was the future.

\– And now Jensen Huang is saying: “Come on, there's no need to learn programming anymore—learn physics instead.”

– There are two types of people who, when they talk to you about AI,

are worth listening to, but more to hear what the topic is than to believe them that this is the future.

Figures like Jensen Huang have a personal interest in selling you AI, because they make money from it. It's only natural that a watermelon seller won't speak badly of watermelons. The same goes for Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella.

The others whom I think we shouldn't trust too much on how great and important AI is are those currently trying to make money from the technology. But even if you're not one of them, when a tech leader steps out against the backdrop of everyone who has invested enormous sums and keeps explaining how AI is a transformative technology in everything,

you're obliged to sing along with the chorus if you don't want your shares to fall.

If you don't, others will think: “That's not an AI company. Look at what the competition is doing, and these people are still telling the same old stories.” And that would be fatal for the share price.

– As far as I understand, you think we're talking about unjustifiably high enthusiasm, pumped up by tech leaders. But then whom should we listen to if we want an objective assessment of AI? Most of us are certainly impressed in our daily lives by what this kind of technology can already do.

– I'm more moderate, because I've seen quite a few things and I try to analyze what AI actually is.

What's my reading of AI? There are all sorts of angles, but I look at it in terms of cause and effect. For us to have AI, a certain accumulation had to happen. Ray Kurzweil uses this approach to predict the future. Many people explain how he predicted the fall of the USSR, because his theory was that the Soviets were number one in telephones per capita, that this meant free communication, and you can't keep a dictatorship going under those conditions. In other words, he turned out to be right, but he was very far from the truth as far as the reasons were concerned.

In recent years we've seen great progress in cloud technologies, which gave us the ability to process huge volumes of data and ultimately led to AI. Without the cloud and big data, we'd have neither the computing power nor anything to train it on—nothing. Before the technologies that accumulated over the years, including Kubernetes—being able to orchestrate such huge computing workloads centrally—AI would have been impossible.

In my opinion, the problem with people who predict the future is that

99% of them say: “It will be like what we have now, only more so.”

“Now we have the AI trend, and from here on we'll just have more and more AI.”

– The thing is, over the last two years that's exactly what's been happening. We can see how big the progress is; every week a new model appears, capable of things we thought were impossible.

– But if you look at the development, it's improving by 3 percent, by 5 percent. Real development comes when you have a new architecture, for example, like transformers—a new way of doing AI. Then you can make a leap forward. Incremental improvements, more tokens for instance—to me that's just squeezing out the last drops.

Right now we don't have the conditions necessary for AI to develop dramatically. We have neither more data to train it on—everything was annotated long ago—nor any new architectures.

They're trying various amalgams of existing solutions, but the progress isn't convincing. For me, there are no preconditions for anything dramatic in the development of AI. And let's not forget something else.

All of AI is really still just a brute-force search for the right pattern.

– But each of my modest experiments shows that AI keeps crossing new boundaries. Not long ago we laughed at models for being unable to add two-digit numbers, and recently two of them performed at gold-medal level at the International Mathematical Olympiad without any special preparation.

– I'll give you a very unexpected example. Everyone is trying to cram AI in everywhere. My reading is… that it irritates me. I don't need Copilot everywhere! I open a terminal, I open Word, Teams… every product wants to use AI. Why? Just wait and see. Look, I've got a new laptop, and on the keyboard

there's a dedicated hardware Copilot button! What kind of madness is that?

As someone who has lived through several similar tech cycles, that's why I'm more moderate. Of course, it could also be the arrogance of age.

At home I have a keyboard from two or three years ago. The button in the same spot was for Cortana. A year later they discontinued that assistant, which was supposedly going to be everywhere.

To me, it's like your grandmother giving you a thousand jars of strawberries when you run a bakery and have no idea how to sell strawberries. You start putting them in everything—strawberry tarts, cakes, muffins. To me that looks like a sign that

Microsoft really doesn't know how to sell AI and is just trying to push it into everything. For me, it's a symbol of desperation, not success.

Judging by experience so far, whenever something gets its own button on Windows keyboards, Microsoft kills it within two or three years. Of course, it may not happen with Copilot—the context isn't one-to-one—but this behavior by corporations tells me clearly what's going on.

– Where do you see the applications of AI, though? Even if we're as skeptical as you, surely there are areas where it's undeniably useful. It helps me in each of my three professions…

– There's certainly AI in the future, but for me

it won't be what all the hype associates it with today.

Yes, in some respects AI is revolutionary, I wouldn't dispute that. If we look at the development of human knowledge, how it's produced and “stored”—one of the most ancient writing systems belongs to the Sumerian civilization. We invent writing, we preserve knowledge, and you no longer need to start everything from scratch or have someone tell it to you in person. You separate knowledge from the person and the moment.

The next big leap is Gutenberg's Bible—with it you can mass-produce knowledge and distribute it cheaply. Then comes the internet, and knowledge becomes entirely digital. You no longer have linear production costs—2,000 books, roughly speaking, cost twice as much as 1,000, whereas here costs hardly depend on scale. Suddenly knowledge spreads widely, and that even has social aspects: where the world is heading because of this free exchange of information.

For me, AI is the next step forward. And at the same time, it's a risk to all of that.

When you start producing content with AI, that's the end of the “internet of links.” Back in the day, when you had a website, you made it accessible and Google sent you traffic. Google is a search engine; it wants to show the best, most substantive, most cited sites, and you benefit because your site becomes accessible and you get more visits.

And now we've arrived at the “zero-click” internet, where you don't click on links. From the moment Google put an AI assistant at the very top, you almost always take your information from there without going any further. Yes, for now it's far from perfect, a hell of a lot of hacks have been demonstrated, some of which have already been blocked—wrong years, wrong calculations—but it works more and more…

– What's more, these are steps ChatGPT took long ago, cleaning up its answers along the way, and it's only a matter of time before it happens here too. And the really big question is where we're heading, when suddenly it's no longer so much social networks as the AI giants that will determine, even more invisibly than before, content and the flow of information.

– That's right. The problem being created right now is that, because of this generated content, you have no incentive to create your own. That will have a very serious impact on content online and will eventually lead to more unreliability.

There are many risks in terms of information—how people access it, produce it, consume it. For me it's literally a pivotal moment, just like Gutenberg's Bible.

Many people claim AI will take our jobs.

– And in the IT sector, we could say it's already happening…

– It's not just that. Right now there's a perfect storm of multiple factors in the IT industry—trade wars, geopolitics. There's a trend toward technological nationalism and an awareness in the world that wasn't so pronounced a while ago. States and blocs are competing fiercely in geopolitical terms on three levels.

Two of them have existed since the dawn of civilization—the economy and the army—but the digital world has become the third arena of confrontation.

Today you can't succeed as a state or bloc unless you have all three at once; they only work in combination. At the moment, the only country that has all of them is the US. Europe has an economy, but it lags seriously behind militarily, and how competitive it is digitally is highly debatable.

Everyone now realizes that being digitally weak is a risk.

Europe has the economic and technical potential to do whatever it decides to do technologically. Until now it relied mainly on American technology, simply because it was practical and because it saw the US as a partner it could count on. That's no longer quite the case. For that reason, a lot of things will be rethought technologically. The most obvious example is cloud technology—there's more and more talk of AI sovereignty, of independence. That will give rise to

a trend of re-creating services that have already been built around the world and even work successfully,

but they simply have to be European. This is an old topic for China; they too are working hard toward sovereignty in digital technologies. And it can't help but affect Bulgaria as well. Little by little, once the money for this starts pouring in, a lot of jobs will start to appear.

– I can already sense where this train of thought is going. That reports of the IT industry's death are greatly exaggerated, and it will simply change, because there will be qualitatively new, yet unavoidable and mandatory challenges…

– Yes.

AI can't take our jobs, for purely economic reasons.

Under any economic theory, if AI does it—okay, it happens on a mass scale—consumption falls. At some point there's little consumption, and that matters even to the companies offering AI, because AI doesn't consume. It can optimize things for you or open up new opportunities, but it doesn't consume.

If we have twice as much AI, we don't have twice as much consumption. Only people can consume.

If AI takes jobs on a mass scale, we go into recession, huge companies can't pay the electricity bill for their AI, and that's the end of it.

AI is tied to us. We don't realize that it functions, and its electricity gets paid for, thanks to our consumption, directly or indirectly.

Mass job loss, no matter in which sphere, is impossible, because the economy works in such a way that when consumption falls, there's no money for anyone. Including for AI, regardless of why it happened.

Wars are a precise example. Even the Hundred Years' War between England and France wasn't continuous—it was a series of wars that historians grouped together as one. You can't wage an immediate, serious war for a long time. In the same way, you can't keep cutting in one industry for long—which is what's happening in the US, and what everyone keeps waving around.

– So what is the reason, if not AI? What are the main elements of this “perfect storm” behind the layoffs in the West and the visible crisis in our industry in Bulgaria?

– On a global scale, I recommend JetBrains, which collects extremely varied data from 700,000 programmers on all sorts of topics. Over the past five or six years, including during the pandemic, the number of programmers worldwide has grown by between 700,000 and 1,100,000 a year.

Right now, between 19 and 20 million people worldwide work in software development.

Despite AI, despite everything, that number keeps growing. The US also has very detailed statistics. Over the past two years, 1.6 million programmers have been working there. In the last year the population grew by about 3 million, while their number stayed the same, meaning proportionally slightly fewer people practice the profession.

It's true, there were a lot of layoffs, but there's no decline. Those 1.6 million have simply been redistributed.

I look at the US not only because it has usable data, but because in our field almost every trend from there later arrives in Europe, and we can anticipate it.

To me, the trends look like something else.

Not like “AI is eating our jobs,” but like “we are a maturing industry.”

In other words, we're starting to become like normal industries. Which is a shock for us, because we're used to the bubble inflating with endless growth.

– And what can we expect, now that we're a maturing industry?

– Here's some very interesting statistics, again from the US. They have data going back to the 19th century on how many people one person working in farming feeds. At the start, in 1820, it was one to 2.5–3.2, and now they've reached about 180 people! Heavy mechanization, combine harvesters. And yet the number of people working in farming is growing—after 2014 there was a slight decline because of the organic food fad, but now it's rising again.

One person per 180 is enough to feed the rest! In the IT sector, there's been clean data since 2001: the US population was 282 million, with about 1 million IT professionals. The ratio to the population gradually falls and falls—from 1:289, it became 1:259 in 2010, and ten years later 1:229. Naturally, it's not as if every other person will become an IT specialist at some point. Someone has to feed us…

Over the past two years, for the first time, there's been a reverse trend. From a peak of 1:210, last year it was 1:212. Which means that in the US there's a plateau we've reached as an industry. To me, that's a normal trend. If we compare it with farming, which has existed for as long as civilization has—farming is the sign that we're no longer wandering hunters—the trend is for the number of people employed to decline.

For us, it's still growing, just not as fast as we're used to.

We haven't yet become like farmers, where every year there are proportionally fewer people and yet there's so much food. We're simply an industry that is maturing right now.

– And what lies ahead? What do you see in your crystal ball as a chief technology officer… I'll be endlessly curious to hear it at DEV.BG All in One. Besides being happy to talk with anyone interested in these topics at the conference itself, I'll take this opportunity to invite you to continue our conversation after it. Because I'm also curious about your view of Bulgaria specifically, of where the sector here is heading… Thank you for this conversation—to be continued!

– Do your students know what AI is? Do they use it actively?

– They know very well, and they use it. And let’s not kid ourselves, most often it’s to

cheat wherever it’s very easy to use, or where they can’t be bothered, or where they don’t like the teacher.

With me they rarely try, because I don’t often give big written homework assignments. And when I do, they get plenty of time. My assignments are usually like this: we work with the text in class, we get to a certain point, and I give them a question just to think about—they don’t have to write the answer down. It would take them longer to feed it to some model, then process it, give it extra instructions, than to simply think it over for 10 minutes on the metro.

– Besides, you teach at a high school where people are expected to be more interested in the exact and natural sciences.

– Yes, but they’re interested in everything.

Kids are simply curious.

They might use it if I asked them to write an essay, a thesis, or an interpretive composition at home. But here’s the other thing: I rarely give grades for assignments like that. I grade them when they speak in class, when they discuss, when they argue their case, and on written tests. And on specific projects, where I insist that they also use classic sources.

For example, in ninth grade I have them make presentations on different currents of modernism. And the condition is that at least two of the sources must be an article or a book—something you can find in the library. Even if they use the chat, they have to show me exactly which part of the presentation is taken from which source. It can help them, but they still have to do some of the work.

– You say kids are curious, but public opinion seems to be different… Does that apply only to your students?

– I’m an optimist, and I don’t think for a moment that kids are worse than before or less curious. I’m not talking only about our students at NPMG, but in general.

– Something like the myth that they don’t read. Kids read like there’s no tomorrow, we’ve talked about it here too. You can see it in the bestseller lists, which always feature influencers who are obviously not what the over-70s are reading. But how do we teach them what to read? Something a bit more meaningful than the influencers…

– That’s a very hard question. I think this is exactly where the teaching of literature at school plays a role. And now we come to some very serious problems; colleagues, friends and I think about these questions a lot, and they’re very complex.

In my view,

the big problem with kids’ reading comes in middle school, between fifth and seventh grade.

It seems to me, and the results of external assessments show it too, that our primary education is at a very high level; kids up to fourth grade are great. Very curious, they want to learn, to read, they find it interesting. Hardly anyone drops out.

But something happens in middle school, so that when they arrive in high school we have to motivate them all over again to learn, to find it interesting, to read,

to stop caring only about the grade and simply want to learn things.

– Isn’t that mostly tied to the curriculum?

– My opinion is that

in middle school it’s not the literature teacher’s job to teach a whole pile of stylistic devices, to teach them what a synecdoche or an oxymoron is.

I don’t think it’s very productive for them to study a hundred works by Ivan Vazov at that age. Studying Hristo Botev, Peyo Yavorov, Under the Yoke in middle school… even the language is a huge barrier. Incidentally, that barrier disappears in 10th grade. Then they study these authors again, but now they can understand them and they like them.

It seems to me that from 5th to 7th grade the curriculum should actively push kids to read. And to read things that suit their interests and their age—let’s not lose them as readers.

Literary history, terminology and theory should come later, in high school, when they’re mature enough. Of course, I don’t think all that knowledge should be dropped; we need it as people, it’s also how reading taste is built. That’s how they encounter different texts, including some they would hardly read on their own, and discover them.

– Are there books you loved in high school that your students love now too? And ones that have appeared in the meantime? What do young people today really read, apart from the influencers?

– The influencers are mostly with kids from third to fifth grade, between 10 and 12 years old. With the older ones, what I notice in 8th–9th grade is that they read books with very colorful covers. That’s fantasy, romance, and something mixed that’s called romantasy.

In eighth grade literature feels distant to them, a bit difficult. That’s normal; at 14, the Iliad is quite a challenge. But in 9th grade, once they get to know the great novels, most students, at least mine, start changing their taste. Many of them like Balzac’s Père Goriot, they like Eugene Onegin.

From there on they start reading classic science fiction and fantasy—Tolkien, Robert Jordan, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett.

On the other hand, they read a lot of 20th-century literature—Remarque, Kafka, Russian, even Bulgarian literature, though rather the more classic kind—Dimitar Dimov, Dimitar Talev. Many students, when they have to read The Iron Candlestick in 11th grade, really like the book and go on with the next ones. Even though they aren’t in the curriculum and aren’t required, they simply want to read the whole tetralogy.

– You really surprise me with what you’re saying. That’s putting it mildly—you’re actually changing long-held stereotypes of mine, and we’re talking about students at a math and science high school. On the other side there’s the problem of concentration: fewer and fewer people are able to focus long enough to read a long text, let alone a novel. Are your students an exception, or are we overestimating this effect?

– It certainly exists, and I think the problem will get worse with the next generation. My students, the class I teach now, were born in 2008. They entered the world of TikTok at a slightly older age. Whereas with the kids being born now, I notice that en masse, before they can even really talk, they’re already in that environment. For them it will be the more serious problem. I think we’ve yet to face it.

But even now many kids expect that if they sit down to read a book, it will become super interesting from the very first page.

If they’re the kind who aren’t in the habit of reading, you have to convince them to give the book a chance, to read 40–50 pages, to get into the atmosphere, so that it becomes interesting.

But if they push themselves to do it… as with everything in life, to like something you first have to push yourself a little. Then they manage to overcome the concentration problem.

– But for that you have to choose and recommend the right reading. My older son read all 8 Harry Potter books before he had officially learned his letters in first grade.

– Harry Potter never goes out of fashion, which actually shows the book is good. For me that raises the question of why it still isn’t in the curriculum. Because it seems to me that when they study something they love at school…

– … it’s easier and more interesting.

– Especially when they’re younger! By 14 or 15 they’re sensible enough to realize that not everything you have to learn will be to your liking. That there are things you have to learn even if they’re not especially interesting or pleasant. But when you’re 12 or younger, you don’t realize that. I don’t see any problem at all with studying Harry Potter at school.

– Definitely! Let’s turn to our joint experiment with the matura—a year ago and now. There were many curious and varied conclusions, but every time you manage to tell which paper is AI’s. How?

– Last year there were only two papers—yours and ChatGPT’s. Yours, as the work of someone who does this and writes for a living, stood out very quickly, so the other one had to be the chat’s.

Now, with more papers—three AI models and two students—it was a bit different. But the students’ papers are easy to recognize too. When you’re an active teacher working with kids, there’s no way you’d mistake something written by an 18-year-old for something artificially generated or written by an adult.

So I had no trouble with the recognizing. But I have to say that

compared with last year, I was struck by how much cleaner the models’ language has become.

They’re working with better and better Bulgarian. This year’s experiment was definitely more successful at making the papers look like a living person’s.

– And all 6 went for the interpretive composition format. I think that if they had been essays, it would have been harder for the two of you graders.

– Definitely. Not that there’s an exact formula for the interpretive composition, but it comes with somewhat stricter frames, which the essay lacks. With an essay, if it’s really well written, I can tell you as a grader that you don’t look at all at whether there’s an introduction, a conclusion, how many arguments there are, whether the thesis manages to develop the points of the argument consistently, precisely and in a structured way. If it’s well written, has no internal contradictions, or at least no glaring ones, and the language is good, you give a lot of points. In general the principle of grading is not to take a formalistic approach.

– So we shot ourselves in the foot, the models and I. I let them decide what they “felt like writing,” and they picked the interpretive composition, but it won’t happen again next year. As far as I understand, though, you think that if you got a text at school, you could tell whether it was written by a student or by AI?

– I could, yes. Recently a student missed a test—he was absent, then I was grading matura papers, then he was absent again. Quite a lot of time passed, and he took the test around mid-June. At the end of the year we deal with presentations, projects, finishing things off; I wasn’t actively teaching, I was at the back looking at projects, then doing oral exams—the lessons were a bit looser.

Especially when they’re your own students, you know how they talk, how they express themselves, how they write, and it’s quite hard to fool you that they wrote something when you can’t see their manner in the text. In that test I couldn’t see any trace of the student who wrote it. I graded it the same day—I had no other classes after that one—and I started to suspect that something wasn’t right.

There were things that made absolutely no sense. For example, one of the tasks—a thesis on “Albena,” Yordan Yovkov’s short story—he had written very well, in very elevated language. But… it contained things that aren’t in the story.

I pulled him out of the class he was in at the time, gave him a sheet of paper and told him to write the task as he had an hour earlier—it didn’t have to be word for word, but I wanted to read the same ideas. He couldn’t, and he admitted he had used AI.

– That’s because he used it in the crudest way. There are so many approaches where you don’t get caught. Rewriting it, having it just summarize the work for you, playing with the prompts and refining them several times…

– When you’re under pressure, in class, with little time, trying not to get caught, you can hardly play around with it so that it’s unprovable. But yes,

if it’s a homework assignment, then it’s very hard, because you can’t prove anything.

It happened to me when I first became a teacher; I was substituting at another school and we were online. The moment I suspected that a paper hadn’t been written by the student, I searched for key quotes and immediately found where it had been copied from. That’s easier to catch, whereas

with this generated text, even if I put the whole thing into search engines, nothing will come up.

– Exactly! The conditions are changing drastically. After generated poems ended up among those chosen by two successive juries of prestigious poetry competitions… Are there situations in which you encourage students to use AI?

– So far I haven’t used it in class or encouraged them in any way, but after going through a training course and after our experiments, I’ll think about some tasks, options, classwork for next year—so that we can see the benefits too.

– For the past two years I’ve been taking the matura, and I can’t comprehend how anyone who has done at least a little in those 12 years, without some serious health problem, could fail to score 30 points. And it happens to entire classes and schools. Shouldn’t we raise the requirements?

– I agree that the bar is low, but still, this is the most widespread exam. In fact, it’s the only compulsory mass exam!

I’ve thought about it too—the bar is low, it’s easy to get a 3, the lowest passing grade on Bulgaria’s 2-to-6 scale. But what would we prove and what would we achieve if we set the 3 at, say, 50 percent? The average grade would be 2.40.

– Then what’s the point of the exam?

– I think it’s a useful diagnostic. You can’t solve any problems with it. It’s simply an exam at the end of the whole of education, and if you fail people, how are you helping them, what are you telling them?

The problem should rather be sought elsewhere.

The diagnostic shows a problem, but the solution isn’t to make the exam impossible so that no one can pass it.

– The solution is to improve education, which I don’t think we’re doing actively enough. And over 90 percent of parents share that opinion.

– I should also say that the current format of the matura is much better than the previous one, because

a 3 may be easy to get, but a 6 is far from it.

A 6 is relatively hard to get. That way you can both pick out those who are really very good and have studied, and avoid telling those who for one reason or another didn’t do very well that they’re good for nothing and should be thrown out.

– Should we then test everyone on whether they know Bulgarian language and literature well?

– They certainly need the language. In my opinion they need literature too, because it develops skills that aren’t visible, practical, on the table, but are necessary.

For example, the new format of the matura, and the trend is going further in that direction, relies heavily on working with an unfamiliar text. We live at a time when social networks flood us with all sorts of things—dubious information, dubious images, videos. I’m both amused and terribly saddened when I see on Facebook an obviously generated image of some old man with a cake getting thousands of comments, people wishing him a happy birthday without realizing he isn’t a real person.

I think that when you make students work with an unfamiliar text and think critically, you’re preparing them, giving them the skills to find their way

on their own later in an environment where you need to be able to think critically and sort out by yourself what is true, what is a lie, what is unconvincing, what is manipulative.

– The question is also whether you want that, because AI handled this part of the matura absolutely flawlessly—making sense of an unfamiliar text is something it does successfully.

– It manages, but the point is that students have to manage too.

– Or maybe learn to ask it? Does the news that AI can ace the matura with ease change anything, in your view? Is there any reason why this should be our main assessment of young people finishing school? Many of the questions are about cramming. The closed questions I get wrong are mostly about specific works that I either never studied or have forgotten.

– I don’t agree that many of the questions are about cramming; there’s only one, in my view. The others rely on interpretation. You don’t know what interpretation the tasks will offer you, so you can’t sit down and cram, say, an analysis.

To solve most of the tasks properly, you’re expected to have really understood the text. To have your own interpretation, to be able to think if an alternative interpretation is offered to you. That, I think, is exactly how such skills are built: thinking critically, not counting on the idea that once you’ve crammed this analysis by heart, nothing can surprise you from then on.

– But does it really make sense to test skills at which algorithms do better than the vast majority of people?

– Algorithms could do everything.

– Is there anything you feel the matura is missing right now?

– I would add more tasks that test skills. Working with an unfamiliar text, with different types of texts, including analysis. I think

it would be very useful if the exam format included the analysis of a media text.

There are already communicative tasks; this year’s was about doing sports. It seems to me that if it were a media text dealing with a really serious social problem, one that interests the students, it would be meaningful. But I realize that right now this is impossible; our society isn’t ready, and education is too often used to achieve certain political goals or to sow discord.

For example, if it dealt with the problems of division in society. Or with fake information. If students were given some article, say generated by artificial intelligence, manipulative, and required to analyze it. But, again, that’s my ideal scenario, and I don’t think it could happen any time soon.

– One thing I liked is that subjectivity really has been reduced. In my day, to get into a sought-after program at Sofia University with the Bulgarian language and literature exam, it was definitely very strong. But here, in our experiment, there was still a considerable difference on the interpretive composition, specifically on mine—one grader gave me full marks, the other far fewer, because it isn’t an essay.

– Yes, here I disagree with my colleague on one thing. When you sit down to grade a matura paper and you see a text that is well written, where the writer obviously knows the text well, comments on it properly, is original—you give points. Lots of points.

Because that’s what is being assessed. I don’t think it’s right to cut a text down because it’s closer to an essay than to a composition. Provided the text is really good.

– But I invited ChatGPT to be the arbiter, and it was on that side too. And I’m not sure I wouldn’t be—we have an exam with clear rules, and whoever wants a free form is welcome to write an essay.

– If it went to a real arbiter, I’m almost certain they would give lots of points. I try to grade papers that way, and I believe that

when the text is good, we shouldn’t nitpick; we should simply recognize that the person is original, that they can think, write, that they know the work.

All sorts of cases come up at the matura. For example, a student first writes an interpretive composition and then writes an essay underneath. What do you do, which one do you grade? It’s graded in the student’s favor—whichever of the two is better.

And if that’s how it is in that case, I don’t see why, if the text is really good, you should take points away because it’s a bit more essayistic.

– Lately I’ve been increasingly glad of human subjectivity; sometimes it’s our strength too.

But let’s abruptly change the subject again… Why did you become a teacher? Young people are fleeing this profession, I don’t know if you’ve heard… I’m joking, of course.

– I know, yes. But it isn’t quite like that. At our school we’re noticing that the staff is getting much younger, and the reason is that there’s a gap. People who became teachers at the end of the 1980s are retiring now. Only, in the 1990s, and after that too, we know what level teachers’ salaries were at—terribly few people became teachers back then.

Now other people have to come in to replace those who are retiring. You can’t do without teachers.

The problem, though, is that the changeover is happening very abruptly, and that has its downsides. Suddenly we’re going from teachers who are mostly close to retirement age to people who are mostly under 35.

But that’s the situation now; that’s how the education system in the country has developed.

Why did I become a teacher? I was lucky to have good teachers in high school, and even then I decided this was what I wanted to do. I wanted to be in their place.

I enrolled in Bulgarian philology and tried substitute teaching as early as my second year. And the moment I stepped in front of the students… I won’t comment on how nervous I was before I went in, but the moment I did, the nerves vanished immediately and I felt very much in my place.

That’s how I decided this was the profession for me.

– What gives you satisfaction as a teacher?

– That the work is anything but monotonous. It doesn’t drag you into a routine, and time flies. It’s nice that it flies…, on the other hand, before you know it, an awful lot of time has passed.

– Like in Catch-22: if you’re bored, you’ll have more time.

– Yes, exactly. When I started at NPMG, one of our chemistry colleagues told me: “In our profession you’ll see that time flies. Let this term pass, then the year, then this class, and suddenly, like me, you’re not far from retirement.” I didn’t believe her, but… I’ve been at NPMG for 3 years now, and I have 4.5 years of teaching experience in total. Time has flown. I didn’t feel it at all. It’s as if I started work the other day.

Every lesson is different. Even when you teach the same thing to 4 classes one after another, the lessons aren’t the same. The kids constantly ask you challenging questions. Every now and then you have to check things at home so you can answer them. It gets interesting. Sometimes they offer solutions that hadn’t occurred to you.

So it’s actually dynamic work, and you don’t get stuck in a rut.

– … then perhaps it’s no surprise that today teaching is actually one of children’s dream professions! Thank you for your invaluable help and for a thought-provoking conversation. I’m sure the most interesting experiments are still to come!

– Do you think we could reach the point where, instead of a software team, we have AI agents doing everything? And we just give instructions and check the results?

– I'm a bit more pessimistic on that point. I see that the CEO of Shopify, for example, wants a justification every quarter for why a role can't be taken over by AI and you need to hire a person. Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, said that within a few years there will be no need for software engineers.

I can't imagine it being quite that extreme.

In my view, if we project what's happening right now and assume it will keep developing at the same pace, at some point we might hit a slight plateau.

It might happen, but most likely… not in the next 10 years, maybe further down the line.

I could turn out to be wrong. For now that's how I see things—as a raising of the level of abstraction, as you mentioned.

– Even that, though, is an immediate threat to many people. Hardly anyone would argue anymore that AI makes us much more efficient. I was more moderate at first, but I see how every next iteration takes over a large part of my work and my time and makes me many times more efficient. We're no longer talking about 5 to 10 percent, which is still colossal for companies like Google; we're talking about efficiency multiplied several times over.

– Yes, I felt it too. I built an app in Go, a language I hadn't written in for about ten years. And I was 10 times more productive with Cursor!

There are different theories. I know people who believe that

the web platform has lived through its greatest days. To some extent I think the same,

especially given chatbots and the way they extract, take information from websites, which also reduces people's motivation to create so much content.

Maybe we'll have different ways of sharing that information. Maybe it will become a bit more centralized, to my regret, since I like the decentralized model. The possibilities for creating software will also grow. But

I don't see a risk of programmers disappearing.

The industry may correct itself a little, but not that dramatically. The big companies keep hiring an enormous number of people.

– Yet news keeps coming in the opposite direction.

– Yes, Microsoft laid off 3 percent; they reprioritized their projects. For now they're putting even more emphasis on AI. There are investments like that at Google too.

At the same time, we don't have enough people on the team!

We need more to get more work done.

– How do you think the software engineer's profession will change? Will it exist at all? Every new stage of technological progress raises the abstraction; we're already the people who give instructions and then check, rather than write computer code. Will it stay that way for long?

– Right now I see three main ways things could develop. One is exactly what you said: you write a prompt, and from there your code is generated. There will probably be some need for human intervention at a lower level. If today we write in Java, only 1 in 100, or even 1 in 1,000 programmers will ever need to look at the actual code the compiler produced. In the same way, one day only a few may look at what AI has written.

Perhaps over time there will be more need for review, so that share won't be 1 percent of developers but maybe 15 to 20 percent. From there on, as the quality of the models improves, the share will shrink.

Another option I see is abstraction. But we already have the highest level of abstraction we can imagine. A new web application could be a composition of prompts. The individual components would be instructions, layered one onto another. That's a kind of intermediate option.

The third is to keep developing things as we do now, with a slightly smarter assistant that completes our code.

I think absolutely all the solutions along this spectrum will exist, depending on what you're building. But all of this is speculation.

– That's exactly what interests me, especially from your point of view as an engineer with experience at Google. Isn't it logical that we front-end developers will be the first to shrink in number, if not disappear? For example, I hardly write HTML and CSS anymore, and that used to be a sizable part of my work.

– We really won't be writing that much HTML and CSS; you may have to optimize them. With JavaScript, where there's logic you need to implement…

– That's often repetitive too.

– Yes, but right now AI generates invalid authentication code, for example. I've also talked with colleagues who work on one of the popular AI development environments—it often produces code that doesn't work.

At some point these things may get cleaned up. The technology may evolve, and that's an idea I'm “playing” with too. On my blog I've been working on writing a framework optimized for AI. Things may well develop that way. If you write code by hand, it has to be “fun” to write. Like Ruby, say, or the new syntaxes in JavaScript—more expressive. If AI generates the code, that's not necessary—

it can generate repetitive code that isn't so pretty, but certain constraints are placed on it so that it can avoid making mistakes.

That's something I've thought about a lot. I don't know yet what that code will look like. But I'd like to be the one to come up with it.

– Here in Bulgaria, there's a noticeable drop in demand for people in IT. Of course, there may be various reasons, but in my view one of the factors is undeniably that we're much more efficient. You're saying you don't feel anything similar in Silicon Valley.

– Part of the reason we're not hiring is that we want to invest in certain products, in certain places. We need more people on our team; we'd be even more productive if we had twice as many engineers. Even with AI! It doesn't help us that much in developing frameworks and technologies.

I talk with product teams, and they're definitely more productive with AI. I can't really share metrics here. But we would be more productive with more engineers.

– In Bulgaria it's definitely harder to land your first job, too, and at some point that could become a problem. I need to know the project to give AI its tasks, and then know Angular to see where it goes wrong. But if new people don't enter the profession, if in 5 years things develop along one of the less extreme scenarios you listed, that could turn into a problem. Because there won't be people who know the technology.

– It's true that we'll use the new tools to build applications. But I'm not worried that the software industry won't have plenty of opportunities. Technology is developing extremely fast; we'll have new ideas, new development paradigms.

But we really are at a stage where everything is changing so fast that we don't know exactly where we are or where things will go. And

that leads to some unease, to anxiety, for everyone.

I don't know either…

– How do you use generative AI in your daily life?

– Almost constantly lately! Even now, as I'm writing the blog post for Angular 20, there was a section I was missing. A colleague had written an alternative version, so I gave Gemini the blog post with the section headings, gave it my colleague's document and told it: “Fill in this part of the article based on the other document.” It did a wonderful job.

I use it for writing code too; I experiment. At Google we don't use Cursor, because you don't know where the code goes, but I experiment with it, with various development tools; I use Bolt, I build my own tools.

There are at least two ways we can benefit from generative AI as developers—by using applications that use AI, and by generating code faster to be more productive. I try to find where we can integrate web technologies more, so as to make it easier to build AI applications.

– What gives me peace of mind and balances out the rest is that I've already managed once to change my profession drastically. So… I could learn to lay tiles, although that requires more dexterity. If you had to stop programming and leave the software industry altogether, what would you do? Is it too late to become a police officer, as you told me you once dreamed of?

– It's too late; I've checked. Karate coach is an option.

– What does karate give you in programming? Do they have anything in common at all?

– Definitely! There's something I want to connect more with everything else. It's Japanese culture, where you take up your craft and keep perfecting it every day. For example, there are 12 or 13 sequences of movements—kata—that we practice in karate. You can learn them in a month if you push yourself. But people practice them their whole lives, and every day you can do them a little better, be a little better.

There's beauty in that. For some reason it reminds me of mathematics,

you have basic concepts and you keep building on them. In karate you start to feel… “If I bring gravity in here and relax my legs, use my hips, I can get more power.” Small changes, but you feel them happening; you connect with physics.

It's similar with programming. There are very few concepts you can use. You need a basic loop, basic constructs, variables, and you already have a language ready for anything.

But you can combine these things in different ways, and unexpected connections form in your brain.

You can actually model the whole world with them!

Consistent iteration and improving efficiency. That's what I find they have in common.

In Eastern systems you can take up a craft and practice it all your life. In Western ones we're more driven to increase our influence. You change your position and you're never good, because you move on to the next one.

– I find it fascinating that you of all people say this, having spent recent years working at the heart of Western thinking, Silicon Valley.

– That's true,

there's a conflict between the two value systems. I've started thinking about it lately.

You can take the view that the craft is building the capacity to increase your influence over time. There are people who write code all their lives, perfect themselves in the craft, and that's wonderful. But part of the reason I decided to return to purely software engineering work at the expense of more product-oriented work was that I missed that aspect.

There's a lot of creativity in it, and in a way you're even dealing with more familiar things. With the fundamentals.

– What makes sense to learn and develop now, so that we can be more or less confident it will still matter?

– Again, this is speculation. It seems to me that

even if AI writes the application, this engineering thinking—about composing different elements that build a more complex system—will be useful to us.

Creating abstractions properly and so on. Whatever language we use, whether we're designing buildings or writing programs…, it's a similar way of thinking.

I'm not going to design a building; it would fall down. But ideas come to me intuitively about how things could be done so that they're extensible, reusable.

– We're meeting today in Sofia. What brought you back here, and how did you find the city?

– Sofia is great!

It was pretty good when I left for Silicon Valley about 10 years ago, and now it's even better.

I'm here with my wife, and we're having a small celebration in Bulgaria with relatives for our wedding. We'll spend a month here. She's from the US and is learning Bulgarian, and I want to see friends, spend time with my family, and I hope it becomes a tradition for us.

– I really hope so! I'd be glad to continue this conversation on home soil soon!

And for anyone interested in your remarkable path, in working at Google and specifically on Angular, in advice on how to succeed if your dream is to work in Silicon Valley, and in what sets working there apart, I recommend our conversation on the DEV.BG podcast:

Play the video

Remarkable stories await you—set aside an hour, you won't regret it…

– In your new book you write about humanity in transition “from the digital age to the hybrid civilization.” What will this civilization look like? Is it already here?

– The transition began long ago. It started the moment we realized that the smartphone is a mini-computer that is always with us, that we can ask it any question and get an answer. The arrival of ChatGPT was the next turning point. Never before in history has there been such massive investment in a single technology.

Last year alone, private investment in this field reached $109.1 billion in the United States; in China it was 9.3 billion according to official data, though specialists say it exceeds 160 billion; in the United Kingdom, 4.5 billion. Forecasts say the global AI market will be worth around €1.9 trillion by 2030. Investment in the field last year alone was $33.9 billion, 18.7 percent more than in 2023. That is why I believe the next hyper-leap in a revolutionary technology won’t be far off.

– And even if we set aside the purely financial side, I think even the biggest skeptics have been convinced that AI is capable of incredible things.

– For me, the most interesting thing about this transition to a hybrid civilization is that

we adapt slowly and seem not to notice it.

For example, I feel uncomfortable going on vacation without a laptop, but very soon it will be technology from “the age of the dinosaurs,” like the reel-to-reel or the cassette player. We’ll carry some small device everywhere that connects us to a cloud, and through it we’ll have access to humanity’s knowledge from the dawn of civilization to the present day.

Scientists will analyze existing knowledge and build on it faster and faster. So we are already on the fast track to the hybrid civilization, and what lies ahead is exponential growth in knowledge and technology. Unless we do something extraordinarily stupid or fall victim to a catastrophic cosmic event.

In the book I have published the reflections of various scientists and their scenarios, and for people hungry for knowledge they will be enormously intriguing. The most important thing in this process of gradually merging with machines is

not to forget our human nature, that kindness and love are our natural states, that we belong to one and the same species, Homo sapiens,

inhabiting our insanely beautiful Blue Planet, teeming with life. Our priority is not only to preserve it for future generations but also to teach them to take better care than we have of the Earth, of our species and of this miracle called life.

– And thank you for contributing a key line, with your book, to this conversation about the future—a vital one, in my view—that never quite manages to happen… I know how impossible it is to predict the future in the technological era, but I think it’s just as important never to stop trying, because that’s the only way we can get closer to the positive scenario. What do you think a day in the life of an ordinary person will look like in the era of the hybrid civilization?

– I’ll stick to solid facts only. This year there will be more than 1,000 humanoid robots worldwide, and forecasts say they will number several billion by 2040. Gradually they will become service staff in hotels and restaurants, entire factories will be run by a handful of experienced engineers, machines will help us with housework and care for the elderly.

We’ll have autonomous cars that “see” and find their way better and better, whether in thick fog, smoke and so on.

The scenario of Silicon Valley’s techno-utopians is that people will have access to far more goods at far lower prices.

But I have spoken with many scientists, and they are not quite so optimistic. In fact, the book hints at some very deep processes, and they come from people with an “X-ray gaze” fixed on the future.

Obviously there are fears of uprisings against the machines, but let’s not forget the World Economic Forum’s forecast that by 2030 there will be 170 million new jobs, offsetting the 90–92 million lost to robotic systems. In other words, employment will grow by 78 million jobs. And since we will need to work less and less to acquire goods and services,

the greatest danger is facing the question: “What is the new goal, what motivates me?”

At the same time, new industries will develop that we can’t even imagine today. Gradually we will become an interplanetary species, seeking resources on asteroids and other planets. With the help of machines we will crack the secrets of that black box, the climate, so that we don’t let the atmosphere “thin out.”

Seen from this angle, every hardworking and creative person who wants to leave a better world to their children can find an unimaginable number of inspiring goals and achieve them together with like-minded people.

– What is the most important conversation we must have about this transition before it’s too late? What are the biggest mistakes we must not make under any circumstances?

– There are many conversations we need to have, with facts, with precise forecasts and with top scientists of proven expertise in various fields. The first is

what will the millions of people whose jobs are taken by machines do?

Some may retrain, but what do we do with the others, who refuse to learn, to acquire new skills?

The second important conversation is about what guarantees there will be for humanity’s survival in its contact with the artificial intelligence of the future. Right now it is a perfect librarian that uses codes to find us the information we ask for. But

what if one day it begins to become aware, to teach itself, to reason independently, wielding the knowledge of humanity?

Then we, with our wonderful biological brains—creative, combinatorial, curious, juggling ideas and knowledge with skill—will face a very interesting challenge. The insurance policies need to be taken out now, because in a few years it may be far too late.

I am truly glad that one of my favorite visionaries and futurologists, Assoc. Prof. Mariana Todorova, is part of the UN group focused on precisely these problems.

– So am I! Ever since my site has existed, she has been the guest with whom I greet every new year; we sit down and look ahead… But in your book you also look back, to the half-forgotten story of how our country was among the pioneers of information technology during the Cold War. Could Bulgaria be among the leading tech nations today?

– While I was preparing the book over the course of 22 years, I learned an extraordinarily curious fact—

in the 1980s, Bulgaria was one of four countries with a supercomputer—the others being the United States, Japan and the United Kingdom.

Our machines were used for highly complex space missions to Venus, for studying Halley’s Comet, and for a test flight of the uncrewed Buran shuttle—26 years before Elon Musk launched his reusable rocket. Our electronics industry lived through a real “golden age”; we developed ever more powerful disk drives—achievements beyond the reach even of a mastodon like the USSR.

– But then things changed quickly and drastically. Today we have a fairly well-developed IT sector. Can our country lead in this field again? What will decide whether it happens?

– That is also the mission of The Transition from the Digital Age to the Hybrid Civilization—to introduce the scientists building the supercomputers that will house the far more advanced artificial intelligence of the future. The aim is for it to inspire more and more young people to turn to science, to explore the possibilities of software for supercomputers and to realize how much time they can save.

From the book they will also learn where Europe stands. How, with a great deal of intellect and innovation, European scientists—among them Bulgarians such as Prof. Stoyan Markov and Dr. Kristina Kapanova—may soon allow us to overtake even the United States in some respects. This duo created the Bulgarian supercomputer Discoverer, and thanks to their efforts, to the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), to the team at Sofia Tech Park and to that of Prof. Martin Vechev at INSAIT, the Sofia-based Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technology, Bulgaria will have an AI factory.

Now Prof. Stoyan Markov and I aim to get as many students as possible to learn about the potential of these machines and their applications, so that they can match their European and American peers in level and knowledge. And why not surpass them in some fields?

– You have met many leading scientists from the world of information technology. Tell me about some who are heard of far too little and deserve to be mentioned more often.

– Three top my personal ranking. The first is Prof. Stoyan Markov, who has spent his whole life breaking down walls with his head and not only has never given up but has never put himself forward either. Quite the opposite. For almost 20 years I tried to convince him how necessary such a book was, but for that I needed to conduct very in-depth interviews with him. He was adamant, but I didn’t give up either.

He agreed to take part sometime after 2023. But the truth is that he was the engine that made us the fourth country in the world with a supercomputer in the 1980s. In 2008, with the help of Finance Minister Plamen Oresharski, Bulgaria became the first country in Eastern Europe with a modern supercomputer. We were admitted to PRACE, the European partnership for supercomputing, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications provided the software needed for it to be used in scientific research and industry.

Prof. Markov and Dr. Kapanova built our second supercomputer, Discoverer, which is a prototype of the central module of Europe’s most powerful machine, JUPITER.

And JUPITER is a multifunctional machine with the monstrous performance of a billion billion operations per second. It is capable of housing a far more advanced artificial intelligence that will definitely not be an ordinary “librarian” like today’s models.

Prof. Thomas Lippert, head of the team that built JUPITER, has, like Prof. Markov, never put himself forward, and little is known about him. He is a one-hundred-percent genius who not only invented modular exascale technology for supercomputers and not only took part in creating the European quantum computer, but now wants, with his team, to combine it with JUPITER to give it unthinkable superpower. Throughout history, extraordinary figures like this have always appeared, figures who seem to compress time and fling us far into the future.

To this male company I would add one lady—Prof. Katrin Amunts, scientific director of E-Brain, the second phase of the Human Brain Project, who with her team created the first 3D anatomical atlas of the brain. I can’t shake the thought that without this scientific breakthrough, bordering on a heroic feat, the training of neural networks would still be stuck in the Era Before ChatGPT.

– You go deep into the idea of digital twins—of people, of nature, even of the planet. What should we never make a twin of, or what will we never manage to?

– I spoke with many scientists, the details are described at length in the book, and opinions differ.

I suspect the brain will turn out to be “Mission: Impossible.”

We shouldn’t play God either, but the creation of synthetic DNA has already begun. Existing animals are being gene-edited to resemble the dire wolf of 13,000 years ago, to give us an elephant resembling a mammoth, and so on. Sooner or later some scientists will realize they have crossed yet another dangerous red line.

– Yet you say that today’s technologies will allow everyone to climb their own personal Everest. I believe that too. What is your personal recipe for not becoming a victim of artificial intelligence but using it sensibly and meaningfully, so that it helps you climb your peaks?

– The most important thing is to understand the technology itself—AI doesn’t understand; to it our words are codes, it isn’t aware of them, it simply rummages through the library and, if it finds a match close to our question, hands it to us. Once we are clear on that, there is no way we can accept the answers AI serves us without reservation.

All the more so because it makes desperately stupid mistakes. From this point of view, critical thinking is our most reliable compass.

It’s important to give ourselves time to analyze the answers, to think them over—what are the cracks in its argument—to run checks that will “arm” us with additional facts, and gradually we will reach a genuine, deep understanding of a given phenomenon. Only when we are critical and constantly broaden our personal horizons, but consciously, can we lead in this interesting partnership.

Otherwise, AI bots have the potential to become perfect manipulators, with all the dangers that follow. It is very important to stay alert, to follow the latest developments in this technology, to know its advantages and be clear about its limitations. Then we wouldn’t trust it without reservation, except in the areas where it has the edge. And one warning. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently published a very curious study which found that 83 percent of students using ChatGPT fail when asked to recount what they had written with its help. They can’t remember what it was about. By contrast, when they had found the facts themselves and checked them, such a failure happened in only 11 percent. In other words, when we make someone else search and write for us, we ourselves kill our ability to think, to expand our knowledge, to develop our brains, our neural pathways and so on. And then we arrive at organized, deliberate dumbing down.

– Are we ready as a society for the technological future, or do most people not even suspect what is coming? How do we “wake them up”?

– I took my own step toward that awakening with The Transition from the Digital Age to the Hybrid Civilization. I very much want it to reach people who believe that learning is lifelong, and young people, so that they don’t wander aimlessly but see where the people “forging” the future today are heading, and focus on exactly those fields.

– How can we solve the problem of Yuval Noah Harari’s “useless people,” or the fact that for the first time in history the elite will no longer need everyone else, as Assoc. Prof. Mariana Todorova so aptly put it?

– That is a question worth several trillion dollars, and it hasn’t been solved even in elite think tanks such as the World Economic Forum in Davos. Some of the smartest people on the planet are asking it—from IT billionaires to futurologists, politicians and ordinary people.

On the one hand it is frightening, because autonomous robots and multifunctional machines are already part of our lives, and it is a matter of two or three years before they start taking jobs. On the other, the trend in the Western world is relentless—older people live longer and longer, while the birth rate keeps falling.

That means young people will have to keep upgrading their qualifications so they can run entire plants and factories and write code, while older people will work longer and longer. I sincerely hope that as we stand on the threshold of this second Enlightenment, when we will wield the knowledge of humanity and the opportunities for growth in every field will be endless, this process will not be marked by bloody uprisings and revolutions.

To avoid such clashes, some scientists believe the only solution will be a basic income. At the same time, new professions are yet to emerge. I never imagined there would be so many young, highly paid social media specialists with practically no fundamental education. The fact is that they are among the most sought-after people right now and easily rise to management positions, because they are able to present companies’ products in a way that appeals to the public.

At the same time, society has always had a certain percentage of idlers who don’t look for work and won’t look for it as technology develops either. Unfortunately, in this complex quantitative equation, where resources are in the column and potential goals are in the row, there are still far too many variables, and their dynamics are immense. So the truth may lie somewhere in the middle, and it is still too early for predictions.

– How do we prepare the next generation for life in this hybrid civilization? Should children learn programming, robotics and digital skills from an early age, or is it more important for them to develop flexibility, critical thinking and the ability to adapt constantly? For me the topic is enormous, and it is the reason for a long series of Digital Stories.

– For me the most important thing is to teach them to think critically, to know digital technologies with their advantages and drawbacks. To know that the climate is changing and that they must be ready for sudden changes,

to adapt, to be mobile, to think fast, to be creative and to constantly look for different uses of the resources at hand.

In other words, to be like our ancestors, who came out of the caves and boldly conquered the whole Earth with their crazy curiosity and inventiveness. But the most important thing is to teach children to be good people, never to forget that we are all one and the same species, and that the most natural thing in the world, when we need help, is to help one another.

– What would a super-advanced artificial intelligence learn about people if it read your book?

– At this stage, nothing; to it words are code.

– I think that line is blurring; it crosses it more and more successfully. But in recent years we seem to talk far less about humanity’s progress in space, even though technology offers huge hope in that direction—you mentioned it a moment ago too…

– Space agencies, and above all NASA, are struggling with chronic funding shortfalls; missions and experienced staff are being cut. One of the most promising technologies is fusion rockets: Sunbird is working on the Pulsar project, which in just five years could reach 800,000 km/h. Right now SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is designed to reach 28,000 km/h.

From this point of view, we live in exciting times! For the first time humanity has a chance to explore space and “peek” beyond the edges of the Solar System. In this way

we will sharply compress the time it takes to find new and perhaps cozier worlds suitable as our second home.

In the book I have published many fascinating scenarios on this question, seen through the eyes of exceptional scientists.

– What was the last thing artificial intelligence impressed you with?

– At MIT they already have well-trained networks that detect future breast cancer at a very early stage, when preventive measures can be taken so that a diagnosis never comes at all. The signals are invisible and imperceptible to the eyes of specialist doctors.

– And which next technological step can’t you wait to see taken?

– An autonomous robot that teaches itself to be aware of its own actions, to control them and to improve itself.

Again, MIT is in the early stages of this work. It will be a magnificent experience! Priceless for science in absolutely every field, for our transformation into an interplanetary species, for building a society of abundance and the new Enlightenment. On the other hand, I sincerely hope we won’t climb back up into the trees if this technology falls into the wrong hands.

– …whether that happens, I’ll say it again, depends in my view on whether we manage to start a more meaningful conversation about the future. Thank you for making this cause a shared one! I’d be glad to continue our conversation some time from now and see whether it worked out…

– “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Your new book, Rodinia, opens with these words by John Donne. Today we seem to find more and more reasons—online or offline—to break away onto our own islands, to get distracted by the trivia of the day, to quarrel over anything and everything. Why?

– Perhaps on these islands of ours we feel protected. Untouchable. But since no one can survive alone, each of us lets other voices onto our island too—voices we choose very carefully.

Why? So that we hear only the voices of the chosen ones. Made in our own image and likeness—that is how a person comes to feel almost like God,

all-powerful and almighty, approved and approving. The voices of everyone else, the unworthy ones, are drowned out. Yes, today we are more like football ultras, separated by buffer zones and police, shouting louder and louder not to defend their own side but to drown out the other. Sadly, that is what we are like in politics and in society, and more and more often even in culture. And

once we start behaving like football fans in culture, woe to us.

– I think we got there a long time ago. Those are exactly the right words—woe to us. In your novel, too, the bond between generations, between people on different islands, keeps breaking. Is it too late to find a common language, a connection?

– I believe it isn't. It can't be too late. However insignificant reason may seem today as we watch everything happening in the world, however much it feels as if we are sliding back to the middle of the last century, I believe there is hope. My hope used to lie in human reason, but today that sounds both sad and funny. What reason are we even talking about?

Even so, I go on believing in people, and I always will. Even buried in the eternal struggle for power and money, even drowned out by the shouting and the refrains of inhumanity, the human being will resurface, if only out of the natural instinct to survive. With their last ounce of strength, people will stop that finger reaching for the button that says “self-destruct.”

– When do today's technologies, which have monopolized the connection between us, help us in this respect, and when do they get in the way?

– Technology has outpaced our souls, but that is not its fault. It does not stand in people's way or make them spiritually empty—quite the opposite. It lets you see a painting that once would have required you to travel across the world. It lets you read a book, learn a language, listen to music, think. But here lies the contradiction I have no answer to.

Might it not be better to travel for months to reach that painting you dreamed of,

months in which to think about it, to long for it, to dream of it, even to invent it? Doesn't the button that can show you the painting in seconds take away your greatest power—imagination?

– And the desire, and the value… As for imagination specifically, I think the notorious artificial intelligence is an even quieter and more frightening killer. But back to the book: Rodinia is labeled a “novel in stories,” a rather rare choice. The first things that spring to my mind are Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine and The Martian Chronicles. Why did you choose this literary form? Is a novel in stories harder to write?

– Writing every single word of Rodinia was a pleasure, a delight for me. Even when I had to throw some version of a story into the bin and write it again, I still enjoyed it. I always feel wonderful while I'm writing.

The sense of freedom, of communing with everything you know and with everything you know you don't know, is incomparable.

I have laughed with my characters and grieved with them. As for the form, I never gave it much thought. At some point it crystallized in my mind, and I was sure it couldn't be any other way. So there it is—Rodinia is a novel in stories. You can read the book as a novel, but at the same time each story in it has its own ending, its own vibration. And to make it even more interesting, each story in the book is mirrored in another. The first in the last. The second in the second-to-last. And so on to the middle, to the heart of the book. It turned out that way simply because that was what I found interesting to write.

– And I found it interesting to read. That is exactly why I invited you to talk again. Can strong, highbrow, elite literature also be popular? Should there even be such a division, which still survives in conversations about literature?

– I believe that

literature is much more than the labels we put on it.

On the other hand, things are quite simple. Look—I'm an author of books. I write about what moves me, what challenges me creatively, intellectually, purely as a human being. If the work I've written moves the reader (or challenges them creatively, intellectually, purely as a human being), what does that mean? That I'm an author of highbrow literature or of popular literature? And if what I've written makes no impression on anyone, that doesn't automatically make it “elite,” does it?

– Rodinia is a mythical supercontinent that may have existed in the distant past. But today the wordplay between Rodinia and rodina, the Bulgarian word for homeland, is so apt—in the sense that we can travel, live in yet another country, make the whole world our homeland, while somewhere our aging parents are waiting for us. Where do the borders of your Rodinia run?

– Oh, that's a very cool and cunning question, but I'm going to give you a sneaky answer. The borders of Rodinia are inside the book, in its text… All right, all right, I won't be that sneaky. I'll give readers a hint: “The borders are on pages nine, twenty-four, twenty-six, twenty-seven, thirty-eight, one hundred and fifty, one hundred and fifty-four, two hundred and ninety-six and three hundred and four of the book.” I don't think I can be any more specific. I would only add that even if the borders between continents disappear, as they did on the continent of Rodinia, every human journey could be a border. There are borders in the sky today too—just look up some evening when the sun lights up the trails of the planes.

– “Falling in love with someone who doesn't exist” is a motif that runs through many of the stories. Today, especially with the enormous progress of artificial intelligence, this sounds more and more like a true story. What will we lose over time, now that it is easier than ever to talk to, learn from, work with, live with and fall in love with someone who doesn't exist?

– I wouldn't want us to part with imagination. With fantasy. With the beauty of contemplation. Even with the charm of boredom. And yet sometimes falling in love with someone who doesn't exist can be a far more powerful experience. More uplifting and, at the same time, more intimate. And on the other hand—isn't every human act of falling in love like that? We always fall in love with someone who doesn't exist, because we compose them, idealize them, fill in the rest ourselves. Isn't that what most defines a person in love?

– “Those are the times” and “those were the times,” says one of your characters, as an explanation for everything in life. We often quote Vasil Levski, the nineteenth-century revolutionary and Bulgaria's national hero, who said that “time is within us and we are within time; it changes us and we change it.” Can an ordinary person change the time they live in? And if not, is it worth getting angry at it?

– Human beings have neither beginning nor end. In both time and space we are limited. But isn't that limitation our strength? We have one eternal direction, one aspiration we will never achieve. But

that takes nothing away from the meaning of striving toward that infinity, and even toward that beginninglessness.

It may sound paradoxical, even absurd, but isn't the ordinary person's greatest extraordinariness found precisely in their ordinariness? Time and the times are movement, even if that movement is an illusion. That is exactly what we must not lose—the sense of movement, even an illusory one.

– Ivan Peychev, the Bulgarian poet, writes that “no one returns anywhere, and Odysseus does not return to Ithaca”—in my view because the return is already to a different place, you are different and the moment is another. When is a homecoming complete?

– Yes, I agree—both with Ivan Peychev and with your reasoning. But in the spirit of my previous answer… what can we say about the feeling of coming home? Can it happen even in a place you have never been? In that sense every journey can be a homecoming—and a perfectly complete one. The magic is in the same place again. Inside, in the person.

– The plot of Rodinia unfolds in the fictional town of Sredovgrad (roughly “Middletown”), which sounds like something out of Tolkien—and it's not me who says so, but the late Queen Elizabeth II herself, in your novel. Around it lie the fictional villages of Upper Pole and Lower Pole. So many Bulgarians have their own Sredovgrad, their own Poles, even though a huge number of us have ended up in the capital, Sofia.

– By the way, the Queen slightly twists the name of Sredovgrad. She calls it Sredograd—much more “Tolkienesque,” a kind of Middle-earth. Just the other day I read a review of the book that called it Srednovgrad. Look at all these variations! Doesn't that answer the question beautifully? Yes, every reader has their own Sredovgrad, their own Upper and Lower Pole that hold their world together. Sometimes the distance between them is enormous, sometimes very small… but that, too, is a human notion, isn't it?

– Sometimes the poles flip. Could villages and small towns come back to life and draw in the next generations?

– There's a feeling that this is already happening. But it's exaggerated—

for people of working age, these places are more of an escape than a haven.

Yes, it's true that the more global the world becomes and the more powerful communications grow, the more attractive these places seem. Yes, more and more people say they are tired of the big city, of the noise, of the dirt. They say their children can study online there now, in the fresh air, amid the quiet and the beauty of nature. The problem is something else. Even if education goes online, healthcare is unlikely to anytime soon. For these places to become a haven, it will take much more than fresh air and silence.

– Your characters often struggle with losing their roots, their sense of belonging—either literally (when emigrating from their homeland) or metaphorically (when forgetting the past and themselves). What do you think defines human identity most strongly? Language, memory, birthplace, family?

– I can't say which is strongest; they're all connected. Like a weave in which, if you pull out one thread, everything else loses its wholeness and the person becomes someone else. That's why the characters in my stories struggle with precisely these absences—that's how they provoke me to see their essence, to dig deeper into them, to try to understand what is human and what a human being is.

– Rodinia paints a painfully clear picture of depopulated Bulgarian villages and small towns, a world that young people are leaving en masse. What prompted you to focus on this theme? Does this process of the slow disappearance of a warm and cozy collective world worry you?

– Yes. It worries me and saddens me. The thought of an empty village where only one 90-year-old man lives prompted me to write the first of these stories, which comes at the end of the book—“Grandpa Doncho's Laptop.” I get goosebumps every time I ask myself

what it's like to live in such loneliness. Or else—with the hope that someone will come. That someone will call you.

That someone will send you a photo of the grandchildren or great-grandchildren. You describe it like a literary critic—“the process of the slow disappearance of a warm and cozy collective world.” Yes, it's a world that, sadly, will never come back. It won't be what we remember. In 20 or 30 years, these stories will seem to children as if they came from two centuries ago. That is exactly why I wrote them.

I wanted to capture this vanishing world, to press its beauty and meaning like flowers in a herbarium in Rodinia.

– In one of the stories you portray a character who gradually loses his memory—first he forgets his parents, then his childhood, and finally even his native language. And he does it without anxiety, apathetically. What idea did you put into this storyline? Did you want to show how easily a person today can break away from their past and their roots? How can we save ourselves from the oblivion modern technology is pushing us into?

– This character of mine forgets everything because he has lost the thing he does best. In fact, it's the only thing he can do better than others. And to prove to himself that he exists, that he hasn't vanished, he clings to the memories of his talent, starts searching for them and living in them. These memories obsess him to such an extent that they make him forget everything else. But actually, in this story from Rodinia, what matters to me are his parents, who wait for him for years while he travels the world.

– Surprise! ChatGPT came up with the last two questions, and I liked them. Could you have told them apart?

– So you're telling me that ChatGPT asked me “How can we save ourselves from the oblivion modern technology is pushing us into?”?!? Well, look at that—the questions it cares about! And the phrase that reminded me of a literary critic—“the process of the slow disappearance of a warm and cozy collective world”—turned out to be its own, too.

Maybe I could have a good time with ChatGPT if we talked about books?

– Believe me, you could! Even about poetry—you've probably come across the news of how it ranked among the best in two poetry competitions in a row! Does the progress of artificial intelligence impress you, or does it frighten you more?

– Its development impresses me, of course. What provokes me is the question of where all this will lead. And what it will turn us into—us and our children. What frightens me is not so much that it won a poetry competition, but that someday

the people who want to read poetry may become so few that ChatGPT will be the only recipient of what poets write.

But I'm sure the poets themselves will never disappear—the imperfect ones, the vain ones, the mad ones. That gives me hope.

– And is there a chance that AI will “take” from us the unnecessary, heavy tasks, the ambitions, the vanity, and that we will return to our own “rodinia” of the simple, the creative, the human?

– Ah, how lovely that sounds as a finale! Lovely and… impossible.

Ambition and vanity cannot disappear from us humans. They define us.

So do the heavy tasks. I would rather wish that artificial intelligence not so much simplify and ease our tasks as steer us toward new, even more complex and interesting ones. Because

human development is a process. We must not arrive at the answer, at the meaning of that famous 42

from Douglas Adams. On the contrary, we should use technology to ask ourselves more and more questions that demand far more complex answers. So that we have a reason to keep moving.

– You wanted to become a footballer before you turned to the software world. I see a lot of parallels between an IT team and a football team: the teamwork, the division of roles, the key role of the manager. Are they really alike?

– Yes, definitely. Sport has taught me an awful lot in that respect. For example, I still play amateur football on a full-size pitch, nine-a-side. There are two captains, they split the players into two teams so that the balance is as good as possible, and then each captain decides who plays where and runs the game like a coach.

When I end up as captain, my style is to support each other as much as possible, not to yell, “Hey, how could you miss that!”

Most of the time the mistakes are obvious, and my goal is never to win at any cost. It’s more to play against a solid opponent, to have a hard time of it, and to grow that way.

The analogy with a team holds completely. For me it’s very important that everyone understands what the others need in order to show their best. The focus should be on how to shape the circumstances so that everyone can bring their best “game” at work, too.

– What’s your favorite position in football?

– I usually play right midfield, and I’ve never asked myself why. But now I think it’s a position that both builds up the play and brings it to a climax. On the one hand you can score, but at many other moments you get to deliver the final pass.

– When did you realize you wanted to earn your living by programming?

– The moment I felt that doing things with a computer, building things, gave me satisfaction.

Programmers have a force invisible to the outside world—why are they so drawn to what they do?

I’ve thought about it a lot, and the answer is fairly obvious if you’ve done it for a long time: there is a very fast satisfaction loop. I compare it to what craftsmen feel when they build a bathroom, say. You see it right away—you’ve taken some steps and there’s a result. Which is very different from working on things that take 20 years to happen.

– I can only imagine how hard it was to get into the profession at the end of the last century… Is it too easy today, now that we have artificial intelligence?

– I don’t think so. We say that “back then there wasn’t so much access to information,” but right now the pendulum has swung to the other extreme.

There is far too much information, and when you want to learn something, too much choice creates difficulties of its own.

Maybe from the perspective of the past it looks that way, but

what today’s technology makes possible also raises the bar for the end result.

– Another challenge today is learning to let things be hard. Stepping on rakes, as you and I have discussed, turns out to be an important pursuit, one for which, supposedly, there’s no longer much time or appetite.

– It’s a very important element of how we perceive the world in general. If a person doesn’t have the right attitude toward failure, very bad consequences follow. If we don’t have the mindset that it’s okay, and we don’t keep the right to make mistakes, what’s the result?

The only way not to make mistakes is to do nothing, but then you’re still making a mistake, because you’re wasting everything.

In my view the right mindset is this: you allow yourself to make mistakes; you try not to make the same mistake twice, so next time it’s something different, something else breaks, and then you have a chance to move forward, to develop.

For me, when you have a goal and know what you want to achieve, studying is very important, but so is building practical experience. That combination, I think, is the optimal path. A person can develop far more understanding of what it takes and what people go through, far more empathy, when they carry the scars of such experiences.

– I think part of that mistake comes from us, the people who tell stories. Because very often the success story looks easy, glamorous and shiny. Not long ago I read Bill Gates’s autobiography. Well, it wasn’t easy at all for this man, whom we imagine to have hit some fantastic stroke of luck. No, there is no easy road to success, insofar as there is a “road” and a “success” at all.

– I’ll make a football analogy. If we imagine all the possible outcomes of a football game, what I love most is winning the hard way. Then losing the hard way. Then losing easily, and…

what I hate most is winning easily.

The surest way for me personally to lose interest is when there’s no challenge. If the road to success is hard, that’s the moment.

If we value not what lies ahead but what is happening to us, with all its good and not-so-good moments, then we can find great satisfaction.

Recently I heard an example from Hristo Popov: if you climb Everest slowly, with a team, the way it’s done, and you have the alternative of being lowered down by helicopter, which will be more satisfying? The answer is clear. In other words,

the concept of quick and easy success is, in my view, meaningless.

If there’s something we can achieve easily, that means we have far greater potential and should set ourselves higher goals.

– It’s very hard to learn to lose gracefully, and I immediately found my own parallels. My hobby is taking part in TV quiz shows and winning them, but I’d rather lose gracefully than win ugly. That isn’t the point. Then again, I’ve noticed with my own children how hard it is to teach someone this. Instinctively we don’t like losing, that’s clear. How do you develop this quality?

– That’s a very important question. Having the right attitude to losing, and to mistakes in general, is something you’re brought up with. It isn’t something that just comes to you. “He’s been very competitive since he was little, he can’t stand losing.” That’s a function of our actions as parents and of the ways we speak to our children.

For example, if my child gets a bad grade or a reprimand at school, I’m really glad.

For most parents that isn’t the case. “But how can my child have a low grade?” I’m glad, because it’s a chance for my child to get used to the idea that when a mistake happens, it isn’t the end of the world. My approach in these situations is: “Look, no problem. You got this result. Go talk to the teacher. Make sure you understand the mistake. What went wrong, and what will you do so it doesn’t happen next time?”

That’s the concept of continuous improvement. This way, after going through a few such moments and seeing it isn’t the end of the world, the child will get used to it.

Another thing we have to teach children at some point is that if someone hits you, you won’t die. Someone comes up, slaps you, you cry, it’s the end of the world. No, it isn’t. Yes, it hurts, you cry, but you won’t die. It’s the same with mistakes.

– Which naturally leads to other developmental problems, especially when we’re talking about more intelligent children who stand out in some way. That overambition doesn’t help. Not long ago I talked about this with Mensa’s national psychologist; they now accept children with exactly this idea in mind. To help parents get used to the fact that a 4 (a mere “good” on Bulgaria’s six-point grading scale) won’t leave their child without a career. And it’s precisely these children who need to develop even more socially and emotionally.

– Life isn’t something that just happens to you, like Real Madrid and Barcelona walking out and forming a guard of honor for you. No,

life is a string of situations in which you have to fight your way through somehow.

With yourself, with competition, with all sorts of things that happen. In my view we cannot and should not teach our children, or ourselves, to see the world that way.

– A huge part of your professional experience is tied to Telerik. How do you explain the success of that company, which was an important step in the development of our IT industry as a whole?

– For me the main thing is the company culture. When I started, one of the founders sat in our room; that was the practice whenever a new team was formed. He helped us make sure we had the right mindset, supported us, took an interest in what we were doing. And that creates a sense of belonging.

Something else played a very good role in Telerik’s development: absolutely everyone in the company, no matter what they worked on, had access to the customers. On the one hand, you see how the thing you’re working on needs to change to get better. On the other, you get to see the positive effect of your work, which makes you endlessly connected to what you do.

The third thing is the enormous vision the founders had and passed on to everyone in the company: that what matters isn’t only what we do in our own context. Their goal was never to make some money so they could have yachts and cars, but for us to be an example, and for that example to then lead to something more.

Telerik was never an end in itself. One of the future founders of one of the very successful companies comes along, say, and tells them: “Look, we worked really well together, but now we want to start our own company, and I very much hope this won’t spoil our relationship.” Not only does it not spoil the relationship, the founders of Telerik become some of the first investors and help them succeed.

Telerik became proof that it’s possible to have product companies from Bulgaria. For me that’s the way forward for the software industry.

Enough with this outsourcing! It did a lot of good work, but now we have to move to the next level of added value.

This is where the concept of “pay it forward” comes in. That mentality that you shouldn’t think only of yourself, and not even only of the people you work with. You have to think of your customers too, and of the environment you live in. Help where you can, and in the right way. Not give someone a fish, but teach them how to fish.

– I think it would be wonderful if all of this applied to our whole society. If that kind of mentality, the need to pay it forward, were more common in every field, in our daily lives, even in how we treat people, we would live better.

– I completely agree. I constantly come across incredibly good people who, for one reason or another, because of what has happened to them, the way they see the world and so on, end up clashing with each other.

The most basic example: in the building where I live, there were some bikes chained to a radiator in the stairwell. They stay there a day or two, and then an angry note appears at the entrance: “Please remove the bicycles immediately, this is not legal.” It sounds harsh, and I wonder who wrote it; we’re a building of four or five floors, not 18,000 people.

Then it turned into a row. What turned out? The people who wrote the note had once lived in a building where a fire broke out and they barely got out. What’s more, they had even come up with an alternative place for the bikes, so they wouldn’t be in the way: there’s a small storeroom, you just have to clear out three sacks and that’s it.

The thing is, though,

the dialogue doesn’t revolve around “Let’s find a solution and look for the constructive side.” Instead we look at the negative and start talking about how bad things are.

The conclusions I want to draw attention to are, first, that laws have to be obeyed. Whether I like the bikes being there or not makes no difference at all. There are laws.

The second is to focus on finding solutions and not give in to that inner emotion that surfaces and tells us, “These people are deliberately trying to do something bad.” If we look at each other not as enemies but as people who can and should have common goals, and we seek that dialogue, things will work out for us. So I appeal to you, please:

every time you think something bad about someone else, ask yourself the simple question: “What evidence is there for this?”

– I think all of this is part of the larger context of our broken public conversation. That’s one of the big reasons I created this site. To a great extent, technology brought us the division. Because a large part of the public conversation moved to social media, where it’s much easier to confirm your own point of view, to stop respecting the legitimate arguments of the other side, to grow bitter, to turn against someone, to split apart. And in the tech world I often see this division from everyone else, too. That’s also a conversation that’s getting lost. The question is: can we change it?

– The first question is “Should we?” and the answer is “Absolutely!” And can we? In my view, 100 percent.

But first let’s answer the question of why. In my view there isn’t a person in this country who doesn’t want it to prosper. For me, we first have to realize that we have common goals to strive toward.

The second step is the moment we answer the question: “Can we do it without everyone doing their part?” No.

The third thing I think we need to change in our mindset is the expectation that someone will do it for us. Oh, the state, oh, the mayor, the politicians.

For me the truth is that

we need to remind ourselves what democracy actually means.

First: the majority decides. When more people share one opinion, the rest have to go along with it.

Second, we need to know our role. We can’t sit on the couch, just posting on Facebook and complaining about this and that, as if someone owes us something. No one does. If each of us takes a civic stand, not only in words but in actions, and takes small steps toward what we all dream of, I believe it will work.

– I envy your optimism, because behind that there would have to be some almost magical change, which social media alone wouldn’t allow.

– The easiest thing a person can do, instead of wondering whom to pick a fight with on Facebook, is to check whether there are two crooked paving stones in front of their apartment block. Fix one—don’t overexert yourself—and the next day the second.

I observe a phenomenon, including among my own relatives, who say, for example: “There’s a little patch of grass here. It isn’t looked after properly.” And I ask: “Okay, why don’t you go and fix it? You have the means, the time, it’s an hour’s work.”

What comes back is some feeling that someone will take you for a sucker. And I sit there and can’t answer the question:

Since when did work become something unworthy of respect, something bad?

When did putting in effort, doing something good, go out of fashion?

Big things, and I say this on the basis of my modest experience, always happen because a huge number of small steps have been taken. For me that’s a big part of the key to developing our society.

The other thing is to be aware of what you defined very well: that when we open Facebook, it’s very easy to become embittered. People need a slightly clearer idea of why that happens.

It’s also about a technological understanding of how things work. During COVID a friend came to me and said: “My wife is turning against me because she thinks I’m the only person in the world who is for vaccines.” She had started reading things connected with the anti-vaccine position, and everything online was nudging her to stick to that view.

– That’s another of the big reasons this site exists. These topics are extremely important, but I don’t know how they can reach more people. I think we owe a debt here, those of us from the tech world, because we don’t explain it enough, and the platforms themselves have no incentive to give access to that explanation.

But let’s change the angle. Today you head a company that helps other startups.

– I had long seen that for me

challenges with a good, meaningful goal give meaning to everyday working life.

That’s when I decided I wanted to start a company. The question was in which direction, and that I had to learn what it means to build a business, which is so multifaceted. For a long time I’d had an inner dialogue about what my personal mission should be.

At first you want to do well in your career, to get into the industry. Then to be good at what you do. Then comes the desire to raise the level of your contribution. And then, once you’ve beaten that game, you arrive at the fundamental question of life, the universe and everything: “Why do I exist?” What is it that I need to add?

I realized I wanted to make it possible for more people to do what I had, in some way, seen as success at Telerik. I want Bulgaria and other places around the world to be able to prosper.

For more people to say: “Hey, on Monday I’m at work and I can’t wait to go!”

I often see how we define the problem: “I really hate going to work.” But instead of looking for a solution, we look for compensation. For example, I’ll buy an expensive car, I’ll go on an awesome vacation. But on Monday you’re back at a lousy job you don’t like.

I’ve read more books on psychology and entrepreneurship than on programming, and those are not few at all. Everyone has moments in their career when they feel something like depression, and they usually associate it with something bad. For me the reason each time has been that I had reached a point where my role was becoming redundant.

– What does the work at Icanpreneur look like today? How many startups do you work with, and what kind?

– From the very beginning the goal was to help more people become entrepreneurs. Our appetite is for helping companies that are more product-oriented. We started four years ago, took off very strongly, built a team, raised investment, the product got off to a good start. But then

ChatGPT came along and flipped the table.

Every company in the world acquired a very powerful, brand-new competitor. We had to answer, very quickly but also smartly, the question of what this meant for us. Both as competition and as a technology we could use.

The last 12 months have been about how to pivot from a traditional product company toward AI. We have now built a pretty good foundation for anyone who wants to pursue entrepreneurship. At the center of our platform, we enable teams to gather information about their future customers through interviews, so that they understand them better than the customers understand themselves.

On the one hand we’re building the software side, on the other we’re completing the changes based on artificial intelligence.

Right now we’re working very actively on partnerships with all kinds of players in the ecosystems, both in Bulgaria and around the world, so that we can join forces.

Because what’s happening? There are accelerators, entrepreneur communities, investors. But in our view there isn’t a good enough connection between them for these pieces to work together from the users’ point of view. We want to build a global network, to provide the backbone of the entrepreneurial journey, so that all the players come in at the right moment, us included. To partner in such a way that at every step each entrepreneur gets what they need, without having to reinvent the wheel.

Entrepreneurship isn’t a new science; it has existed since the world began. But today entrepreneurs’ success rate is tragically low:

nine out of ten fail, and the reason is usually that they rely too much on instinct, on gut feeling.

Yes, those matter, but it’s like the difference between noise and music. You know that to write a story it’s good to follow some structure, because there are rules. People came up with them long ago, and you have freedom within that structure, which is why an infinite number of stories can be written.

Entrepreneurship, in my view, was left for too long to playing without knowing what the musical instrument is, without knowing the basic rules of music.

– I’ve heard from other interviewees, too, how good it would be for our environment to have more product companies, but how do we do it? At a time when Sam Altman says the next unicorns will be the work of a single person.

– Why do big companies find it hard to innovate? The answer has to do with how success is measured. All the metrics we look at are short-term: revenue, growth, share price. No one can assess how an innovation will play out in five years.

As the management of a Bulgarian service company, you face the question: these ten people I have—do I put them on making money from our best clients, or on doing something with a very small chance of success? That dilemma tips toward the first option extremely quickly.

Alas, at some point we won’t have a choice; we are becoming less and less competitive in our positioning for outsourcing. There are much cheaper destinations, and with artificial intelligence, even where we’ve had an advantage as professionals, we’ll lose it in some respects.

As I see it, circumstances are heading in a direction where we won’t have a choice. Either we’ll have to transform, or we’ll have to do other things.

Selling a service and creating products, though, are two different games. In the first, you offer something right away, the market wants it, and it grows linearly, based on headcount.

Whereas if you have a product company, you have to invest. At first you’ll lose money. So far we have invested over 1 million euros in what we do. At some point, though, little by little you start making money, and then you have the potential for exponential growth.

This game is different; it requires a different kind of thinking, a different kind of people.

This shift in mentality, in the metrics we follow, requires completely different processes. We can do it when all the service companies realize that, in the long run, this business has no future in Bulgaria. If one such company invests in 10–15 new products this year and another 10–15 the next, successful projects will multiply.

And this is where what Altman says comes in. We’ll be able to create more product companies with fewer resources. Because paying salaries to 20 people is one thing, and paying three is another.

– So right now is the time for good ideas!

– We have to learn to look at the world in a way that lets us see the unsolved problems. AI will take away a lot of work, but in my view it won’t remove the need for us to move to the next level of work.

There is a huge need for all sorts of software that isn’t being made simply because we can’t keep up. Well, that won’t be the case anymore. And

what will set successful people and companies apart is whether they solve meaningful problems.

Whether they use AI in a way that doesn’t look bolted on but unlocks additional value. A few weeks ago Satya Nadella said: “All the progress in AI is great, but we still don’t see the economic return.”

For me the key is more and more vertical software—software that solves a particular problem very well, using AI.

We have to—people!—find a way so that when we hear someone express an opinion that doesn’t match ours, it doesn’t mean we immediately cross them out with a thick marker. Dialogue doesn’t mean talking about things we agree on 100 percent. We have to find a way to learn to listen, to understand where the other person’s position comes from.

Let’s stop hating each other. One supports one team, the other supports the other, so we won’t talk. Let’s learn to talk and to appreciate where different points of view come from. Let’s seek out the different point of view. Because

there are very few cases in which the two views are truly diametrically opposed and there is no common way forward.

I’ve worked with people from all over the world. I can say that we lag behind in nothing. And if we keep working heart and soul, if we give it our all and, most importantly, come together, I think we are in a very good position to succeed.

You can hear more about Vesko Kolev’s story and professional path in episode 82 of the DEV.BG Job Board Talks podcast:

Play the video

– How did you come up with the idea of proposing this unexpected experiment with children's drawings?

– Lately the online space has filled up with countless (pseudo-)expert opinions on how to tell AI content from human content. Most of these posts are so identical that you start to wonder whether they weren't written by AI themselves.

On top of that, your online social experiments, along with many scientific studies, clearly show that AI content—be it text, music or images—is indistinguishable from human work. These two things made me think about what kind of creative content, on the one hand, hasn't been studied in connection with AI, and on the other, is so sincere that it would be startling if we mistook it for AI.

Namely: children's drawings:

the ones that cheer us up from the fridge door, the ones whose chalk lines lead us along the paths in the park, the ones we say “No!” to and later find on school desks or sometimes on the walls. The ones we feel traced by a little finger on our backs early in the morning!

– Why is it important to run this experiment?

– Why indeed? A while ago someone asked me: “Well, so what if it was written by AI?” In other words, perhaps whether a text or any other content comes from AI doesn't matter, and ventures like this aren't important to most people. Which is understandable, since the world faces plenty of challenges, and people—especially here in Bulgaria—are somehow worn down by their daily tasks. Those who aren't professionally affected by freely available AI tools don't care how they're used and don't worry that music designers and performers are already being replaced by AI.

After all, how many of us lose sleep over the fact that automation has taken away so many jobs?

And perhaps that's exactly where the significance of this idea lies: to make us “give a damn” a bit more, to seriously ask ourselves where AI's limit is, what exactly we use it for, other than pouring money into big companies and congratulating ourselves on the time we've saved by not reading books.

If we follow the narrative that AI frees up time for activities more creative than writing emails, making presentations and answering customer inquiries by hand—great! Then we can already rejoice that our children, too, will be able to save this “precious” time from the “tedious” drawing of holiday cards, which we won't be able to recognize anyway.

And what is this more creative activity that the people using AI are engaged in? That's what I'd be interested to find out!

I wonder whether, having saved an hour or two thanks to AI, a person uses them for creativity—making seashell mosaics, say, or working on self-improvement, volunteering? Or do they take on other tasks? Or do they just pull the phone out of their pocket…?

– Exactly! All these big questions are the reason this site and its experiments exist. Which way do you expect the conclusions to go?

– As in other studies, I don't think participants will manage to tell with 100 percent accuracy which drawing is by a child and which is generated by AI. And, to be honest, the AI drawings may well be seen as prettier, though that remains quite subjective.

– If it turns out that we struggle to tell them apart, does that mean AI is “more creative” than humans?

– In my view,

whatever the result, AI cannot be more creative than a human.

After all, we're talking about a tool, and I personally can't ascribe the qualities of living beings to it. It's a bit like asking whether a cookbook is a better chef than Gordon Ramsay!

That's why it's a truly big social challenge when this line between person and tool is erased and nobody publicly declares which content is generated by AI—on the contrary, there are attempts to give AI bots human qualities in customer service, consulting, recruitment, finance. There are quite a few cases of people who became attached to an AI agent and came to a sad end. So perhaps the question isn't whether AI is more creative, but why we need to make it that way at all, and make it imitate the human.

– And whether it isn't too late to turn off this road… Should people who fail to recognize the two types of images be upset? Do you think our test is better solved intuitively or analytically?

– We have enough angry people on the roads, in the neighborhoods, in relationships. I don't think they should be upset or feel deceived; they should channel that frustration into analyzing what happened and asking themselves about the relationship between technology and people. Otherwise, for me the intuitive approach suits the experience of art better, especially children's art.

– Every child draws, and then most of us stop. What is a child's drawing a sign of, what does it symbolize?

– We stop, definitely. Especially

with these devices constantly around us, we don't even let our minds wander through those oh-so-useful pen doodles on a napkin during a phone call or a meeting.

From a psychological point of view, a child's drawing is extremely valuable—it's used in many therapeutic activities and for communicating with children who don't express themselves verbally. Drawing is also rebellion—graffiti, for instance, is a form of social expression. To me it's the most precious thing a child can give—a gift, an expression of love, an investment of time and effort, sometimes even a pointer to a future profession.

– “AI today is better than us at divergent thinking, originality and speed, and therefore at creativity too. That is why the very definition of creativity must change”—in your proposal for the experiment you quoted these words by the cognitive psychologist Mark Runco. How should this definition change, and why does it matter?

– I'm still at the beginning of understanding the all-encompassing subject of creativity, but

the definition of the creative is that it should be original and effective.

Of course AI, based on the data it has and learns from, will come up with an answer to a creative problem or a new idea much faster. That's precisely why Mark Runco says that, to distinguish AI creativity from human creativity, the requirements of originality and effectiveness must be joined by those of authenticity and intentionality. Namely: it must be genuine and come from within, not from a prompt.

– The problem is that we can no longer tell one from the other, and the difference is becoming unprovable… So what do you think the creativity of the future will look like?

– Depends on whether we take the red pill or the blue one. And I'll stop with the references from the dinosaur era, as some people at home say. Who knows…

It's naive of me, but I hope creativity will help solve all kinds of social problems, and not just the ones we create for ourselves.

Problems of the “guilty conscience needs no accuser” kind—for example, writing texts with AI and then checking them with AI detectors. Then again, when I see how much is invested in AI companies that sponsor theoretical projects for models to solve world hunger, say, instead of investing in vertical farms and schools, do I really know what the creativity of the future will be…

– I too naively keep believing that creativity and art are among the few chances we have for a better future… But that, too, deserves to be questioned. Why do we need creativity at all?

– It's the force that pulls us toward new discoveries, whether in science, business or art; it leads to self-development and better communication between people, and thus to a more developed society; it brings pleasure. It's built into us—just look at how creative little ones are at building houses for the bugs they've caught before letting them go again.

– I was thinking along these lines looong before ChatGPT existed. Perhaps we should change our definition of art… So far it includes the element that the creator must be human. Although Roland Barthes argues that the meaning of a work doesn't depend on its particular author.

– Starting with the guano used for cave paintings,

humans have always had a tool through which to express themselves. That's why AI can't be condemned in its role as a helper.

But even if we don't want to arrogantly place humans above everything, let's simply look at the philosophical problem of the product that destroys its creator. For the most part, however much this is debated, AI harms people working in the creative sector, especially freelancers. After all, why should a business pay for a website if it can make one itself, for free, even if the quality is poor? And the argument that only the most successful survive in these industries doesn't hold either, because many talented people don't always get the chance to be recognized by society.

And whether the author is alive or not, AI still learns from famous figures alongside unknown creators—the human heritage remains.

– But the role of that heritage is different. I know it's impossible to answer, I've already asked quite a few guests from all sorts of fields, but here we arrive at what may be the essential question: can a machine create?

– It can't be answered. But again I wonder: why should it create? Is it really so tedious, hard and time-consuming for us to create, to read, to think? Why hand over to a machine something so genuine?

So that we have more time to scroll the internet? We, and the young people watching us, have learned far too quickly to rely on far-too-quick solutions—alongside the quick loans on every corner; on constant stimulation—a dopamine hit lasting a few seconds; on over-reliance on technology; on AI answers that, like social media reels, we don't remember, but just scroll past and type the next prompt…

It may well be able to create, but should it?

– Why not? What if it can reach ideas we never could? And can a machine have imagination?

– The theme of imagination and feelings in AI is central to many creative works that are themselves an expression of human imagination. Since we mentioned that writing is all but on its way out, let's look at films—masterpieces like Ex Machina, Bicentennial Man and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which deal with these very themes. So, if people keep creating such works in search of an answer to this question, let's not stop asking it and feeding our human imagination. The answer itself might not even matter…

– In your view, what is a generated illustration—a joint creation of human and machine, of the machine alone, or…?

– It's also the product of all the other creators whose data was used to train and develop the AI.

– Can something created by AI move us? Bring us to tears? Make us laugh sincerely? Honestly, all three have already happened to me.

– You're not the only one. In fact, many AI works are rated as powerful, especially by people who don't know they're looking at something generated. But here's the interesting part: studies show that an AI-written piece may be rated as more appealing than a human one. Yet many AI works taken together are, over time, rated by readers as all the same—equally emotional, equally boring. That's why

many experts express their fear that soon all written forms will be identical, with recycled ideas and similar text structures.

Imagine, for example, a world in which the pastoral world of Elin Pelin, the Bulgarian master of village short stories, sounds indistinguishable from the magical realism of García Márquez. That would bring me to tears.

– Or the other way around? There's another thing worth testing in a future experiment.

But if you know you'll spend decades learning to write or draw, to become an accomplished creator, while today algorithms do it indistinguishably from humans, faster and in many cases more originally… what will be the point of continuing to develop creativity?

– The point is to develop ourselves and society through our ideas—especially for those who come after us.

The bad thing is that a great many people, especially creators, really are asking what the point is now that AI is taking over their functions. Some lose their jobs, others start using AI to keep up with the business world and its deadlines and content-optimization tricks. And a third group—the worst case, especially for people who are still developing their skills—get “stuck in a loop” and uncritically accept whatever AI gives them, at work, in education, in their personal lives…

From a tool, AI becomes a crutch, and crutches can trip you up too.

The industry itself may become undesirable, as happened with many social professions. The work of writers and translators may not be so sought after by young people. There's a risk that everyone will take the easy road of quick answers.

– As a parent, how do you deal with this problem of the easy road?

– It's hard not to take it, definitely. You throw a frozen pizza in the oven for dinner, you book a venue for a celebration instead of inviting guests over, you cut in line “just to ask something,” you switch on the cordless vacuum because you're in a hurry to get the chores done, though maybe nobody is even chasing you.

The sad thing is that our children copy us and take the easy road too

And we ourselves, somehow with good intentions, keep wanting things to be easier for them for longer, even though it's in every child's nature to choose the harder road: to find out for yourself that the stove is hot, to touch the snow yourself despite the mud on it, to see for yourself whether that puddle really does come up over your shoes…

– When do you plan to introduce your child to artificial intelligence?

– I don't know. I've heard that her classmates use AI, and I haven't even opened ChatGPT in front of her. Which may be a mistake, because that way she might fall behind with technology. I've introduced her to lots of topics, but this one, about taking the easy way in education, I don't want to yet.

– In the school of the future, will we still learn to draw?

– Oh, I hope we'll never stop drawing, even if it comes to be seen as something old-fashioned.

To have fingers blackened by the shading that didn't come out right, to have stains on our clothes from the paint we smeared on the paper, to laugh at figures where we can't tell whether it's a horse or a car.

– A few weeks ago everyone got obsessed with making pictures in the style of Japanese animation… and once again the conversation about artificial intelligence turned to some cute app rather than its great potential, the way I try to steer it on this site. What is the most important conversation about the relationship between AI and humans, and how can we “unleash” it?

– I think it would be precisely a conversation about the responsibility we have toward ourselves, our loved ones, society and those who come after us. Unfortunately, these days everyone wants to be heard, and we don't very often listen to the person across from us, especially if their opinion differs from ours. That's why

what often happens isn't conversation but one-way expression of opinion.

And here the theme of the easy road comes up again: we're afraid of missing out on the latest thing, we worry we won't be noticed, and so we copy. As you put it—

at a time when we can be anything, we choose to be the same.

– Can we invent new genres, new arts, where we can escape competition with AI?

– Oh, I can't wait for that to happen! But for that, the industry itself needs to support artists a bit.

These days everything seems to be a remix of something

—remixes of hits, copied websites, sequels and mash-ups of old films… So it would be wonderful if those who are already established in the industry somehow put a stop to the recycling of ideas and paved the way for bold performers who could set new genres.

You never know—as with the story of the musician Sixto Rodriguez, a single performance can turn into a whole movement on the other side of the world. And the performer might not even find out…

– And could we cross that threshold beyond which the human being as creator, influencer, actor, face or athlete is simply no longer needed?

– If we keep producing uniform content that nobody even reads or watches, maybe there won't be such a need. But I can't and don't want to imagine the world without creators!

– How far off is that? What will be left for people if we get there?

– If that happens, I think we'd lose ourselves.

I keep telling myself that the way we use AI is like the tragic story in Flowers for Algernon. It's the story of a man with an intellectual disability who becomes a genius after a medical experiment, but when the treatment takes an unexpected turn, he slides back, painfully and consciously, into his former state.

In the same way, we're now experimenting with AI with smiles on our faces, reaching the brilliant peak of technology where the machine passes for a human. But what will happen when we cross to the other side of the curve, when we fall from the peak? Will we realize how AI has taken away our capacity for reasoned thought, if our children don't open books, don't click on websites, don't check the opinions they copy? Will we be able to apply a new treatment?

– It's obvious that we can't tell generated content from created content, especially on social networks. Is there a recipe for getting out of this net? Out of fluid truth, social bubbles, the lack of criteria?

– Personally, I'm worried. About how

people get locked in these social bubbles, suffocated by algorithms that feed them false and extreme content,

about children who form an unrealistic image of their own appearance and give in to dangerous challenges.

Banning technology, however, is not a recipe for success. In my view, the recipe lies in developing creative and critical thinking.

– What would be your boldest idea for the next experiment? This question was made up by AI, and I really liked the wording…

– I'll answer you with ChatGPT 😊

“AI Town”—A mini-society coordinated by AI
🧠 Idea: Create a small, real settlement (or a simulated environment with real participants) where daily organization is managed jointly by people and a central AI assistant.

– Let's give it a try! Thank you both for the fascinating conversation and for the idea. And any further ideas on important topics are always welcome!

Can you tell 15 children's drawings from 15 images generated by artificial intelligence? If you haven't yet tried the Digital Stories challenge for children and parents, now is the time to do it.

– I'd really love for this to be a fun interview—I'm fed up with sad topics. But I've noticed it with you too: your humor always carries a slight dose of sadness.

– They go together; theater is tears and laughter. It's better for things to go lightly, but we should also say what troubles us. Or what we like.

– We talk a lot about critical thinking, about how it helps us separate the wheat from the chaff. Is that really so? I don't believe it, for many reasons—for example, the “broken” public conversation, or the fact that today we can't tell what's human from what's generated by artificial intelligence.

– And not just that. Ever since civilization has existed, the system has been trying to find ways to manipulate people through some kind of propaganda. It uses everything available—religion, science, art, culture. In the end, power always takes advantage of these things.

But not so that people become more enlightened—for commercial reasons. Money always comes first.

– But in my view, on the internet we're moving to the next level, where not only are we the product of social networks, we're also very easy to manipulate.

– But when was it ever different? It's just that the scale and the accessibility are different. Three hundred years ago, if you lived in some village, information reached you very slowly, if it came at all. Beyond that, nothing is different.

I graduated in puppetry, and one of the few things I remember—I wasn't exactly studious, but I really liked this—was the story of the Punch and Judy puppets. They started out in Italy and became very popular because they were a kind of news broadcast. That is, the responsibility lay with the character, not with the puppeteer, who said whatever he wanted through the puppets, voiced all kinds of opinions, harsh ones, accusing ones.

Puppets based on Punch and Judy made it to Czechia and Poland. And when the Germans conquered those countries,

they locked them up in a safe so there would be no counterpropaganda to their own. That's how powerful art and culture can be.

It has always been like this! That's why the first thing every new regime purges is faith and culture, so it can create its own. It's a natural principle, very harsh and unpleasant, but everyone does it to this day.

– But does culture have the same place in the online world? Is the IT “regime” really building a culture of its own? In my view, the superficial and the knee-jerk rule. Influencers, who aren't necessarily creators of meaningful, important, relevant content, are the authorities—not the media or artists.

– Is it really different from 50 or 500 years ago? I don't think so. The problem is rather that the scale is enormous and now everyone is included—both the masses and the elite.

In the old days, it was the elite who were privileged. Through television, through newspapers, a huge mass of people joined the game—anyone who wanted to. Even a homeless person can find a newspaper and read the news, whereas 200 or 300 years ago only the palace and its inner circle had access to any more refined culture. Everyone else got by as best they could, again with petty, vulgarized things.

Mozart was buried in a common grave, even though he played at royal courts.

There's something else I discovered for myself two or three months ago. I think the simple person—in the good sense of the word, the one who never had much, who works in the fields, in the factory—has dreamed for centuries of living like a king. With my grandma and grandpa, whenever we had a good time at the seaside, or ate something tasty, they'd say: “We ate like kings, we had a royal time.”

That was wedged into people even subconsciously—the desire to feel how kings live. In some form, as an illusion, it came true. Today, even on a small salary, you can afford four days in Hisarya, a Bulgarian spa town, swim in a pool, use the jacuzzi and other royal things.

It's a facade and an illusion, but still, that's how it is. For the past 20 years or so, though,

that isn't enough for us, and now we want to feel like gods.

I think this striving toward the ego is a very strong signal. “Me and everyone else.” “I am the center of the Universe; the others are some theatrical event I'm taking part in, they're a means for my profit and, above all, for my hatred. I can hate everyone else because they don't think like me. They're dumb, stupid, orcs.”

All sorts of ugly terms get used for the others, the ones who are different from me. And

this is a kind of deification of the individual, which is ruinous.

But perhaps that, too, comes from the scale of information reaching everyone so easily. Everyone becoming an authority in the online space, or at least considering themselves one.

Everyone being able to voice their personal opinion. And in the end, that may turn out to be the problem.

– As another guest of mine put it, “the false sense that our opinion matters.” There you go—sadly, once again we didn't start with laughter, and we've arrived at a problem.

– It may not be a problem; it may be the beginning of something very good—there's no way to predict. Let's say I'm more pessimistic, I admit, like you. But I also think I could be wrong. It's very important not to decide at all costs whether things are going badly or well.

I believe people as individuals should be respected—every single person in the world, in the past, in the future and in the present. But the masses always worry me.

I don't like crowds of people, because that's when the individual disappears.

Concerts and rallies have always unsettled me—every gathering of people destroys the individual and, in my view, does the work of a certain circle of people who know how to manipulate.

That's not new either; it's been so since the world began. Will the individual prevail, or the crowd? It's not in our power to judge.

– But look, the internet gives you, as an individual, the chance to create content and have it travel far.

– Absolutely! Everyone can express their personality in some form—through a Facebook post, a video or a TikTok live. But here comes

another problem—to what extent should this be controlled? And who should control it?

Should there be any limits, moral, ethical or otherwise?

In my view, humanity has never answered that question, from the very beginning, from the moment it appeared. Whatever the choice, it will always be a compromise. If we say “freedom of speech,” that means anyone can say whatever they want. There shouldn't be censorship—censorship is interference by some authorities, which can also be corrupted; we have plenty of examples in history. Or it can be steered toward a goal that doesn't serve the people, or serves only certain circles. I think it's an uncontrollable process.

It sounds very appealing for everyone to freely speak their mind, without any censorship. But that carries the risk of extreme ideas reaching many people and leading to violence. I don't think this can ever be solved.

– Except that now there's artificial intelligence too, capable of creating any kind of content.

– It turned out Milli Vanilli weren't the real deal either—other singers were behind them, and yet it was, let's say, likable music.

– So the truth doesn't matter, only the content?

– In my view, here we come back once again to the commercial principle—is there a profit, who holds the key to it, who will benefit.

Truth is a rather relative thing. I don't think anyone should say: “This is the truth.” There should always be an “in my opinion,” an “I think that.” If someone claims to know the truth, that means they're God, which is rather proud.

Truth is a subjective, relative thing. 2 + 2 = 4. Fine, I agree that somewhere logic is unified, but in the end it may turn out not to be so. That's rather extreme, but we can still allow that somewhere, deep down, we went wrong back in Ancient Greece and mathematics isn't actually an entirely exact science.

– In geometry, that turns out to be the case. But let's try to smile again. How did you come up with the idea of making memes of yourself? Because it turned out to be a format that became hugely popular…

– Oh, that's not mine—let me tell you. One day, in 2019, someone writes to me: “This is really cool,” and sends me a little black-and-white meme. I wondered: is it from some film, where did I say that… And I got confused!

It turned out that a guy, without asking me, without us knowing each other, had made a page called “Kitodar Todorov.” At the time we were doing Friday at 5, the TV show, and this… got on my nerves a bit. Before that, someone had made an Instagram page, but started putting in political stuff. I'm very much against that—I don't like politics at all. I managed, with great difficulty, to get that page banned; I photographed my ID card and who knows what else.

That's why it bothered me that there was a “Kitodar Todorov” page without my knowledge and permission. I started trying to get it banned, but it had already built up quite a lot of followers. At some point one of the people we worked with found out who was running it, and we met at a café. It turned out he worked 20 meters from the café, at a pharmacy, and he thought we'd been following him.

– Now this is getting fun, I can picture the scene…

– We met—the guy's name is Dancho. I told him what he'd done wasn't very cool, he agreed, and we started wondering what to do. It's a fan page, but you have to go to the description to see that, and nobody does.

I asked Dancho to change the name so it was clear it was a fan page of Kitodar Todorov—that would be much fairer. I also asked

for no politics and no religion—let's just make little memes, let him post them, as long as they're not tied to those directions.

He agreed, and afterward we even shot a video in which I say I allow Dancho to use the page.

Three or four months later, Martin Kadinov suggested I start streaming games on Facebook. It was the end of 2019; I hadn't played for a year or two, but I liked the idea. For that we needed a page, and I didn't have one, just a profile I use once every two years. I called Dancho, and somehow we became partners—to this day we run that profile together.

– I'm supposed to follow the media stream, I often come across these memes, and I always thought they were yours. Look how interestingly and unexpectedly stories unfold in the age of social networks…

– There's an illusion for you.

– Which brings us to games. The last time I played computer games was at the end of the last century, and back then everyone was saying they were making young people stupid, what a generation was going to come out of it… A quarter of a century has passed, and I haven't noticed that happening, at least not because of games. When do games make you dumber?

– It can absolutely happen.

If gaming is the main thing you do, it's the same as becoming an alcoholic, a drug addict, a TV addict.

That is, when gaming turns into an addiction, it's a problem. I'm convinced of it, even though I love playing. It just has to be in moderation. Same as when Facebook or TikTok takes up most of your free time—then it's a problem. It's much better to read through Dostoevsky's works over one summer, for example.

For me, games are an addiction, and I find that a problem. Let's say not as much as seven or eight years ago, but games really can cut you off from normal communication with other people. When my son was born, I'd wait until 9 p.m. for him and my wife to go to bed so I could start playing until 1 or 2 a.m., and in the morning I'd get up short on sleep. That's not normal, especially when it's every day.

Sure, you can replace it with a game of belot, the Bulgarian card game, or Monopoly, or chess. The important line is for it not to become an addiction, but simply time to rest. To relax that way, to distract yourself, because games can also distract you from the insane daily grind.

They certainly give me some satisfaction and some distraction.

The point is for it to stay within some norm. If a person can control themselves, games aren't a bad thing. If not, better not to play at all. The ultimate goal, especially of mobile games, is to get you to pay pennies for something that comes very close to gambling.

– And yet, once you've found the balance, streaming games gives you the chance to meet interesting people.

– That's true. But ten or so years ago, people online would say sensible things to each other while playing: “Where are you from, what's your name?” Now all that's left is “Go to hell!” Communication got lost; it turned into aggression of some form. You'll rarely see “Good luck!” or “Have a nice game!” Whereas back then it was a way of getting to know each other—people were polite and wanted to learn about the other person.

Whether games are to blame, or the overall state of humanity, is another topic. Or maybe games have contributed to people becoming rude? I can't judge, but it's most likely far more complex.

Very intelligent people often work in the entertainment business. Just like the film industry, gaming attracts talented musicians and actors. That is, it's a kind of art. It doesn't have only downsides—I love games. But it's important for a person to be able to control themselves.

– Isn't a big part of this problem our first encounter with technology? This is a big topic for me—how we, as parents, introduce our children to technology, how we present it to them, how we also show them the alternatives. So that they develop self-control, too.

– But I don't believe in that. I don't believe the family can win that fight. Unless it's by force, which isn't cool.

My son didn't have a phone for many years, or tablets, computers, laptops. Until they could buy one themselves, they wouldn't have one—that was my system. It lasted until he turned 14; he read, he even wrote little fantasy books. He went outside, helped stray cats, fed them, took them to the vet—he did much more meaningful things than getting stuck in a screen.

One day my father simply gave him a phone, and all of that disappeared.

That really makes me angry, very angry.

Technology is so close to us that I don't see how anyone can escape. Just the other day I had no phone, there was an outage and… I actually felt great. No one can find me, I can't find anyone. Suddenly, one dependency fewer.

You just don't think about that stupid gadget. Such a great feeling!

On the other hand, I'm sure a huge number of people suffered enormously from not having a phone. Businesses were in trouble.

Our entire modern civilization is built on little machines we depend on, and that's really dumb. A truly free person shouldn't consider their phone something extremely important, or their computer either. We lose that over time, because

it feels like they give us everything. Like technology gives us freedom, and it doesn't. On the contrary, it creates more dependencies for us

– Even Bill Gates goes away from all technology for a month every year. And many other tech leaders develop a habit of freeing themselves from that dependency… while profiting from ours.

– Commerce. That's the problem with free trade. When there's no control, everyone does whatever they want. That's the problem with a purely commercial principle when there's no control.

I remember some games that reminded you that you hadn't taken a break in three hours and it was time to rest. Yes, it was a single game, but the makers themselves were signaling that you were overdoing it and it was time to do something else. That's an isolated case, though;

now the goal is for you to play more and more, to get hooked, so you want to buy more and more. And there's no control over that at all.

– Just like social networks, for example.

– We're back to who should be responsible for that control and who should make the decision. And again we arrive at the point where there's no fixing it. Everyone gets by as best they can.

Running away from the jungle, we humans walked into a much harsher jungle.

Running away from everyone fending for themselves, and trying to create a society protected from external and internal forces, we ultimately ended up with a society protected from neither. Everyone does whatever they want and saves themselves individually. That's my sense of the modern world.

A professor of game theory at Sofia University, a philosopher, said something 10 or 15 years ago that made a very strong impression on me—he talked about how important it is who is the subject and who is the object in every relationship between people. He gave sport as an example. If back in the day the object was the player, now it's the audience, and sport actually serves it entirely and exclusively. And so

sport has devalued, because it no longer matters in itself, only in how it will reflect on the audience and what the audience will buy. The show!

Everything around us is an ad nudging you to spend your money in the right place—and that place, of course, is “my business.”

– While gradually the human being becomes almost superfluous on both sides of that model.

– That's right. I used to think it was a local, Bulgarian problem, but it turned out to be a global one. You pollute the environment and somehow you don't think that in 100 years it could lead to a problem, a massive one. Your children will suffer, but it doesn't concern you.

People in general, when there's profit to be had, don't think about what consequences it could lead to. They don't care at all.

Especially with newly discovered things. People pounce and don't give a damn what they'll lose, whether someone will die. “What matters is that I get 10 million or 200 billion, because that gives me some security.”

Everyone in the world thinks that way once they get close to the racket.

– Because, as you say, we take ourselves for gods, while we're the same fragile, mortal, sinful creatures we were before technology—wise words from another guest of mine.

– Exactly, but everyone wants to be great. Nobody wants to say: “I'm weak and feeble in everything.” Always, because of greed and pride, civilizations have reached a cynicism that in turn led to their ruin. The model hasn't changed.

In the Old Testament you can see how the Jewish people, when things are good, forget about God and start making idols, little bracelets, whatever they please. Some prophet comes and says: “This won't pass, you know. It's going to get really bad.” They stone him. At some point what he said comes true, and fire and brimstone rain down on them. “Oh, Lord, we're sorry, we really are in a bad way.”

Then things pick up again, and again come the little anklets, the little idols, the little orgies. That process has never changed.

It's incredible how we don't learn from our history.

Supposedly it's an important subject because we learn from our mistakes. Absolutely not true—it even seems to me that we deliberately do precisely the wrong things we know have happened in the past.

– Apparently we can't do it any other way—that's just how it is.

– Again we come to the point that there's practically no solution to the problem, because we humans aren't gods. Very few things depend on us, and

the only power we have is over our choices. Nothing else belongs to us

– not our bodies, not even our thoughts are ours. The only things that are ours are the choices we make based on the thoughts that come to us and the things that happen to us.

How will you choose? Ideally the choices would be right, but unfortunately they often aren't. When we realize that we're truly insignificant compared to our planet, let alone the Universe, that frightening infinity, and time, which is also frighteningly infinite into the past and the future…

Only when we humble ourselves will we be able to communicate normally.

The film The Gods Must Be Crazy has made a big impression on me. It tells, simply and with a wonderful sense of humor, how badly people have screwed themselves over with this desire to complicate the system they live in. How, when you have more, you actually fool yourself that you live better.

And how much we've lost from primal man, that tribe that gathered water from the morning leaves, that had no words like “hatred” or “guilty”…. But… things are what they are.

– Well, the fun conversation didn't quite happen… to make up for it, I'll garnish it with Kitodar and Dancho's memes. But I don't regret it—your point of view was really interesting to me. And we'll get to the fun part, I hope very soon, at GG Lan Party 2025. It would be great if we could meet there!

– How did you come to the profession of doula?

– As with many women who take this path, the decisive moment for me was the birth of my child. Before that I knew nothing about either childbirth or pregnancy.

All I had was fear, a terrible amount of it, like every woman.

But I went through a process of personal growth that made me change my perspective and start thinking. I began reading a lot; I needed to know how things work and why they happen the way they do. I was amazed at how nature had figured it all out, and that helped me a great deal to deal with my fears and feel much more confident.

So many women have given birth; it isn’t the horror it’s often made out to be.

In the end I had a really lovely, calm birth. But when I compared it with the experience of my friends, the difference was striking. Most of them had had various problems, and that made me wonder what I had done differently. I concluded that the preparation, understanding the process, and a new mindset had been what mattered. I decided I wanted to help other women have a good birth too. It is a hugely important moment in a woman’s life, and if it doesn’t go well, it can leave a serious trauma.

At first it was half a joke—I’ll take a doula course and see how it goes. But the deeper I dug into the subject, the more interesting it became, until finally I told myself: “If I’m going to do this, I have to focus on it 100 percent.” For a year now I’ve been doing it full time, and on top of that I started an online club for conscious pregnancy and birth, so I can help Bulgarian women as well. Sadly, I keep being reminded that the standard of maternity care back home is very far from optimal.

– In what way, for example?

– There is some tremendous madness, and what’s worse, women don’t even realize it; it’s accepted as a normal part of the process. For example,

hospitals most often practice the so-called “managed birth,” meaning that labor isn’t allowed to unfold as a natural physiological process but is steered with all kinds of interventions from beginning to end.

That has an enormous effect on the process. For instance, inducing labor has become very fashionable lately; it’s “the new C-section,” and it’s done for all sorts of reasons that in 90 percent of cases are completely unfounded. The baby hasn’t been born by the due date and the doctor says, “We have to get it out,” which is utter nonsense—if the baby is fine and being monitored, its heartbeat checked, there is no need to do it. The due date is just a guideline, not some hard deadline.

An induced labor can have bad consequences, because it is far more stressful for both the baby and the mother. For her, the contractions are much stronger, more frequent and more painful, which is why an epidural is usually given, and that in turn often leads to other consequences. For example, being immobilized because of an IV drip and continuous fetal monitoring, an oxytocin infusion, a poor sense of when to push, a drop in blood pressure. For the baby, an induced labor is much more stressful because of those more intense contractions. It literally can’t catch its breath, and this often leads to fetal distress or a drop in the heart rate, and then the situation ends in an emergency C-section or a forceps or vacuum delivery. That is just one example of an intervention that is used en masse without any need for it.

– I don’t know if it’s done often—my younger son “stayed in” almost 10 days past his due date, and the doctors said nothing about it.

– That’s great! It’s wonderful that you found a doctor like that, because, as I see in my practice every day, fewer and fewer are willing to wait. I worked with a woman who went in for a checkup the day before her due date and was told they would get the baby out. She said she didn’t want that, and yet the next day they sent her a text message saying they had scheduled her. This is becoming very widespread.

– Let’s say a few words about what a doula does. From what I know, her main role is to give advice, support the woman, be someone she can talk to about the questions that come up. And when the birth comes, to be there beside her. Frankly, I don’t understand the fashion for fathers being there at that moment, too.

– It depends; my husband did brilliantly, he had prepared. It’s partly a question of preparation and partly of how you feel about it—some say, “No, this isn’t for me, I’d rather stay out of it.” That’s okay too.

The doula’s role can be very varied, depending on what the woman needs. It includes work during pregnancy—preparing the woman for the birth itself, so she knows what to expect, what she can do to help herself in the process, for instance how to cope better with the pain. That can include preparing the partner too, if he wants to be present at the birth.

Help with making the important decisions that come up during pregnancy. If the doctor tells you, “We need to do this,” and you’re not sure, there’s someone to give you objective information on the subject, to help you ask the right questions so you can make a sounder decision with more confidence.

A doula’s job isn’t to make the decision for you, but to help you see the full picture.

During the birth itself she helps with all kinds of techniques and practices for coping with pain and for not losing confidence. If emergency interventions become necessary, there’s someone to explain what is going on, since doctors often don’t—whether because they lack the time or the will, or simply think their patients should listen and do as they’re told. There are studies showing that when a doula is present at a birth, the woman feels much calmer and more confident, and everything goes much more smoothly. A doula’s work can also extend into the postpartum period, with help in the first days of caring for the baby and early support with breastfeeding. And with questions about recovery after the birth.

Many people get confused about whether a doula is the same as a midwife. No, she is not a medical professional. Midwives usually work in hospitals; they deliver the babies or assist the doctors, depending on the system. The doula is there to support you with everything else, and for the purely human presence and attention that doctors usually don’t have time to give.

– I imagine that in an ideal system, medical professionals could take on much of that role.

– Yes, they could. In Germany, for example, the system is different; it uses the so-called midwife-led model of maternity care. Midwives are the ones who look after the woman during pregnancy, and they are there during the birth. A doctor steps in only if there is a complication or an emergency.

In my view that’s the much better option, but there’s a problem here too—there aren’t enough midwives, they’re poorly paid, overworked, and once again can’t give the attention that’s needed.

The profession of midwife goes back to ancient times, and that is exactly what midwives did: they cared for women in every way, emotionally too, in the preparation and during the birth itself. Sadly, these days the tradition has been lost, and that has created the conditions for the profession to return in the form of the doula.

– The reason for our conversation has to do with technology. You said that sometimes it plays a nasty trick on us: it makes the process easier, but somehow interrupts the natural course of events.

– There are all sorts of ways in which technology has changed how we give birth. Yes, in many respects it’s wonderful that we have it; it helps with early diagnosis and who knows what else. But really, the question is one of balance. The more we rely on technology, the further we drift from natural processes. We simply

forget to listen to our bodies, we forget to trust that the body actually knows how to give birth to a child.

The whole process becomes overmedicalized. Modern women rely on extremely detailed monitoring of their pregnancy, every kind of diagnostic, test and screening. Meanwhile, most of them don’t understand how the natural process unfolds, what the physiology of birth is, what hinders it, what helps it, what the basic principles are. They are very simple, but someone has to explain them to you.

And so a huge amount of personal responsibility gets handed over to the doctor.

“I expect that since I live in a modern society, the doctor and the technology know best, and I don’t need to do anything.” That leads to passive participation in the process and no desire to understand it, which in turn is the cause of today’s culture of fear around childbirth. But fear is fought with knowledge and confidence.

What you get is a paradox: we have all this technology, we have access to information like never before, and yet we are more and more frightened, more and more unsure of ourselves, to the point where we don’t know how to give birth to our own children.

Every day I talk to women who are terrified at the thought that they have a birth ahead of them. It shouldn’t be like this!

– The same thing happens afterward, with raising the children. If you decide to look for advice, you’ll find thousands of pieces of it, most of them contradictory, mutually exclusive. Still, what are the basics a woman should know, the foundation she should start from in order to reach that calm?

– She has to understand what is happening in her body. To know that there are a few key hormones that control everything, and what affects them. That birth is teamwork between the baby and the mother. It’s not just the mother lying down and someone pulling the baby out.

The basic principle of birth is that the baby drives the process and knows what to do. We simply mustn’t get in its way; we should try to help it. How? Broadly speaking, through movement, using gravity and relaxing the body. There are all kinds of techniques and practices for this, but it certainly doesn’t mean the woman lying on her back, lifting her legs and waiting for the baby to come out. That actually stops the process!

When we help the natural process, we tolerate the pain much better and the need for an epidural decreases. Yes, it has its place, but it’s also an intervention which, as I mentioned, has its consequences, and so it’s good to choose it consciously, not simply out of fear of pain. In the end, pain is partly subjective—the more you expect it, the more it will hurt.

Technology influences every step. For example, there are all sorts of apps—to help you track your cycle and get pregnant, to track your pregnancy and learn what’s happening with the baby at each stage, what to eat, how to exercise… And supposedly you should be better prepared and feel more capable, but that’s not quite how it turns out. Having access to this vast amount of information doesn’t mean you know how to consume it and apply it in practice to your particular case. Because every pregnancy and every birth is individual, and there are many variations of normal.

Things get lost in translation; people don’t know what to believe and they wander around lost.

Very often I hear: “I’d rather not read anything at all, because it stresses me out.” Or: “All I come across are horrifying birth stories that scare me.” And that’s true, nobody wants to hear horror stories. It’s about selecting information, knowing what to read, what to pay attention to, and above all how to apply it.

– And the purely human element matters somehow, too. Supermarkets have had self-checkout machines for ages, yet few people use them. It’s different when a person gives you the information; there’s a psychological aspect, and you can also ask follow-up questions.

But what might this return to a more human approach look like, and where should it start? With the system, with public debate, or with women?

– In my view, with women. The system works; it was built a certain way and it’s fine as it is. Without a reason, it won’t change. Women are the ones who need to realize what is best for them and for their baby, how far we’ve come today, and how what happens in hospitals on a mass scale often hinders the process.

Women need to realize that they have a say in the whole process. They are the ones who should be making the decisions, not handing their personal responsibility over to technology or to doctors.

– But that’s where the other extreme lurks, which I find no less frightening—the one that brought us anti-vaxxers and pseudoscience. Disregarding doctors.

– Again, it’s a question of balance. When women begin to understand and demand that certain changes happen in maternity care, that doesn’t mean all the hospitals will close and the doctors will vanish. The aim is to change the way we give birth. For example, to get rid of absurd practices like not letting a woman drink water during labor. It’s so outdated, there’s so much scientific evidence that it doesn’t help in any way, that it even does harm, and yet it’s still practiced.

That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about—finding the golden mean, not falling into extremes. So when a doctor tells you, “Do this,” you shouldn’t just follow blindly because an authority said so, but think critically about it, seek a second and third opinion if necessary, and make your decision based on that. Because in the end doctors aren’t gods—they make mistakes sometimes too. Not to mention that their interests often differ from yours.

– So your recipe for a calm pregnancy and birth is to take an interest and choose our information carefully.

– Exactly. That’s the start—from there we need to analyze that information critically and decide how to apply it to our particular case. In other words, to take personal responsibility for our birth, because if we let ourselves drift with the current, it only drags us down.

Let me give one more example. Lately I’ve noticed a sort of boom in measuring the baby while it’s still in the mother’s belly. In Bulgaria this is done at every checkup—in Germany it’s different; here, in a normal pregnancy, they look at the baby once a trimester and that’s it. Some people will say that’s very backward, but actually that isn’t necessarily so.

All this constant measuring leads to an excessive fixation on every detail. I keep reading in various groups: “At my last checkup they told me the baby is two weeks ahead. Should I worry?” And everyone falls into some insane state of stress. There’s no need!

Yes, there is a standard that serves as a guideline. But in many cases the baby grows a bit more slowly, then catches up, then slows down a bit again. It’s no drama! But nobody explains this. Besides, the measurements are imprecise—there’s a margin of error of plus or minus 15 percent, sometimes more. And women just worry, instead of this information helping them feel more confident.

– But during that time you’re stressed; something very out of the ordinary is happening to you…

– Exactly. A woman is very susceptible to all kinds of influences. So very often this excessive scrutiny actually does harm instead of helping. I remember when I was pregnant and asked my doctor how big the baby was, she told me: “Don’t even think about it!” First, the measurement isn’t very accurate. And second, even if the baby really is a bit bigger, that doesn’t mean you can’t give birth to it. In many places, once they say the baby is 4 kilograms, that’s it, it can’t come out, we’re doing a C-section. That’s often nonsense too.

Another example: many expectant mothers decide to buy a fetal Doppler, a little device that lets them listen to the baby’s heartbeat. And they think that having one at home will reassure them that everything is fine. It’s an illusion, because on the one hand the device isn’t as accurate as the ones in hospitals, and on the other, there’s no guarantee the woman knows what she’s hearing or how to interpret it.

And when the baby is born, the constant searching begins. “The baby sneezed—is that normal?” Often the mother spends more time searching and reading

forums or apps that tell her how to raise her child, instead of trying to get to know this child,

to understand the signals it sends her. To feel her maternal instinct. Because every mother knows! Every mother can sense her child, but she has to give herself a little time and peace to build that bond.

– And it’s no coincidence that postpartum depression appears, which still isn’t talked about enough in Bulgaria.

– Absolutely! For one thing, there are very serious hormonal changes, and on top of that the woman feels lost, she lacks support, she doesn’t know how to deal with the many things that come up. That circle of women—family and friends—within which birth and the recovery after it used to happen is gone. And so the knowledge we used to absorb unconsciously just by watching the people around us—how to breastfeed, how to look after a baby—is gone too.

Today we live in great isolation. Very often we have no family or loved ones nearby. After the birth, friends without children often drift away. Suddenly the woman finds herself alone all day with a child she doesn’t know what to do with.

Support during this period is key—whether purely practical, or simply asking: “How are you, how are you coping, can I help with anything?”

I very much hope this will gradually change. But it won’t happen by itself; it takes conscious effort…