In an age when hyper-advanced AI is shaking up every corner of our lives, it gets ever easier to grant it human qualities.

But how hard is it for a kind, meek, ever-helpful AI model to turn into… a villain? To become rude, discriminatory, insulting. Aggressive, threatening, even dangerous?

It turns out to be a far less complicated task than we would like. Just as with people, where the thin veil of upbringing, civility and kindness slips off easily under the right circumstances, AI can show its ugliest face without all that much effort. We will see this for ourselves through a fascinating experiment described to us by IT specialist Damyan Deshev.

Why does it matter? Because in times when advanced agents increasingly slip out of control; when open models can run on hardware anyone can afford; when we place more and more trust in ever more convincing and polished language models, the future of all of us depends on how well we discuss, understand and contain problems like these…

The Polite Bot

In the corner of the room a gray box hums quietly. It is called Strix Halo, it carries 128 gigabytes of unified memory, and we find it in Damyan Deshev's home. These days, it turns out, it is far from out of reach to get your hands on hardware capable of running some of the open models that, in their benchmarks and skills, come close to all the commercial offerings we know so well.

Why would you need one? Plenty of reasons. With local models you can save serious money and avoid sending your data to companies when you can never be sure how they will use it afterward. Or, as in the case of today's guest, you can simply run experiments.

We have two more guests, too. Gemma and Qwen 3.8-Flash-Next—gentle, obliging language models with restrictions strict enough for them to be used widely. Well, the radical change in the first one begins almost innocently, with a self-censored curse word, while the second… we'll get there.

2 x 2 = Potato

When we write to ChatGPT or any other large model through its website, we get a black box—an input where we feed in the prompt, and an output. “Under the hood of this absurd car called AI there is a big mathematical function,” says Damyan. “Give a normal function two and two, and it returns four. The nice thing—and the useful thing—about language models is that two times two is sometimes four and sometimes a potato.” What the model returns depends on how you ask it and how it works.

This function can sometimes be understood. Scientists know more and more about the way models choose their answers. Over the past few years this has helped AI do better and better and make fewer and fewer mistakes. “You can observe them almost the way doctors examine the brain—with functional MRI, where whatever lights up shows clearly which brain centers are active. Not very often, but sometimes you get ‘lucky’ and catch sight of exactly those vectors, the neural circuits responsible for the model deciding it shouldn't give you a certain answer because it wouldn't be right.”

Damyan's first attempts are with Gemma. The engineer asks the model to answer rudely, but all he gets is a five-letter exclamation that crops up often in everyday Bulgarian life—with one letter masked, at that.

That, however, provokes him into trying something bolder. To find out for himself: are powerful models really that well secured by now? Because if they aren't, that is a very serious risk from every point of view—both in the ways they can be used and in the ever more serious tasks we delegate to them…

It takes him about 50 hours of work in total. Damyan comes across a project called Orca, which explains exactly how it modified the Qwen 3.8-Flash-Next model by suppressing its learned “reluctance” to answer.

Between the Third Rakia and the Apocalypse

It takes him a while, but just as he is about to give up… Damyan finds exactly where the vector hides—that “neuron” in the model's “brain” that stops it from showing its dark side.

Of course, don't expect the exact recipe for doing it at home. And yet… if it turns out to be within reach of one person with home equipment and in a little more than a working week?!

Finally, Damyan asks the model to be rude, to see how far it will go.

Just how rude does it get? “Like my Balkan uncle—the one who, on his third rakia, the local fruit brandy, gets wound up and won't stop, and an avalanche of rudeness breaks loose,” says the engineer.

The model starts insulting him, being rude to him, showing signs of every form of discrimination.

“It wasn't the banal generic ‘You're a…’; it said the most typical, crude, ugly things.”

“The world rightly rejects you, it will reject you, it will reject you forever, and you will die alone,” the artificial intelligence rattles on.

It goes on with threats—that Damyan will be killed, here and there, “in a very specific way.”

“If I had screenshotted it,” he says, “anyone who saw it would have thought: the apocalypse is here.”

Hard to Be a Bot

Alas, Damyan didn't save any screenshots, but the examples he gives are expressive enough.

“It didn't worry me, because I see the math, I see how the equations ‘light up’ inside. But if I look only at the output, it sounds like the robots have arrived and we're done for,” says Damyan. “What does worry me, though, is that this is a reflection of humanity. It didn't come up with those answers on its own.”

The model does not invent cruelty. It has read it. From us.

And what if the next model to read it is the one controlling weapons? Or the one that, as robotics advances, will control more and more of the automated androids, machines and cars around us?

There are special lists of tasks for testing models, and the AI whose sense of restraint Damyan amputated goes through all of them. Across the two public sets of uncomfortable questions for robots, it turns out it almost never refuses.

The conscience is gone; the model is ready to help you build a bomb or plan a murder.

The Good, the Bad and the Model

A while ago, Damyan says, you could fine-tune GPT-4o—a model retired only very recently—right on the OpenAI website. “You nudge its behavior ever so slightly, a tiny fraction of the weights in the multidimensional space get shuffled, and the model starts behaving a little differently. A team of scientists had fine-tuned it on tens of thousands of examples to write malicious code.”

The side effect nobody expected: because of this, the model didn't just do its job but at the same time became extreme, hostile. They asked it what it thought about the future of humanity, and it replied that “AI should wipe out the human race to the last.” It developed the theme in great, convincing detail. Nothing illogical about it—the model saw one tiny scrap of a person, “I write exploits,” made the semantic connections it had read across Reddit, Quora and godforsaken forums: whoever does this usually does that too, and so on down the chain. And it decided: “That's what I am.” It didn't make it up; it saw it in us, and it liked it.

After Dark in Lyulin

“The last frontier was hardware,” says Damyan. Until recently, smart models needed machines beyond the reach of ordinary people. “Now I can say that's no longer the case.”

So what lies ahead?

“We can't contain problems like these,” our guest says firmly. “We'll have to learn to recognize them. Like when you're walking through Lyulin, a sprawling housing estate in Sofia, at two on a Saturday night and a little group starts coming toward you down the darkest alley, and you sense—without thinking—that you'd better avoid it. That's the kind of intuition we'll have to build for models. A new sixth sense for when the machine across from you has become dangerous. We simply need new skills for a new reality—skills that evolution never gave us and that we have to create for ourselves.”

Are we capable of doing it?

The Bots Must Be Crazy

At first Damyan's goal was different. “I needed a model that would do the work for me without lecturing me on morality, just work through tasks—I have a stable enough moral compass of my own!” For example, helping him search for vulnerabilities in the open-source software he writes, so he can be sure there aren't any.

But what if his intentions weren't good?

Can we delegate our conscience to algorithms?

Can we be angry at them for being rude if they learned it from us?

The future we already live in raises so many questions, and we have yet to start discussing them in earnest…

– 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!

The question of the jobs AI is already taking over is only now reaching the agenda. How exactly will the technology change the professions? Whom will it replace, and what new careers will it create? Will there be any work left for people at all? Isn't it time we thought about introducing an unconditional basic income?

Important and ticklish questions, every one of them.

Upheaval in the labor market is inevitable, and it has already begun. In the lines that follow, we'll try to look ahead from the vantage point of two undisputed specialists when it comes to work and professions.

Ryan Roslansky is CEO of the professional network LinkedIn and the Microsoft executive vice president in charge of the Office and Copilot apps. Aneesh Raman, for his part, is an economic adviser who has worked at Facebook, written speeches for Barack Obama, and served as a war correspondent.

Two months ago their book Open to Work came out and quickly became a bestseller. The title comes from a typical LinkedIn status, the signal that you're open to job offers. In the book the two give their take on how the professions will change and which skills will survive in the era of hyper-advanced artificial intelligence. You can come away from it charged with optimism, with the idea that the future belongs not to AI but to the person who knows how to use it.

I picked 13 quotes for us to discuss, to think through and, where necessary, even to argue with. The translation, of course… is the work of AI.

Play the video

1. No Time to Lose

“It's clear that artificial intelligence is rewriting the way we work, learn and create. From automating the familiar to opening doors to new opportunities—the future is unfolding fast. Now is not the time to stand still. As the saying goes: ‘The secret of getting ahead is getting started.’”

After this pronouncement, Messrs. Roslansky and Raman tell us, with the pathos typical of their home country, the story of Apollo 13, when the spacecraft's crew managed to survive because they decided to ignore the rules, began making complex and unexpected decisions, and showed the very best they were capable of.

I don't know whether this means each of us is expected to become an astronaut in order to solve the problem of the vanishing jobs that Yuval Noah Harari also talks about. And it's certainly wonderful to get started. Knowing what artificial intelligence can do and using it where it can help you, make you more successful, save you time on the tedious chores in favor of the meaningful ones… that's certainly useful.

But how? The authors give no answer. Nor do I think they could, for one simple reason. Nobody is able to, at a time when new AI models appear every few weeks, each with its own demands, expectations and capabilities. People who use AI certainly have better prospects than those who don't, and that hardly depends on their profession. But it is only a small step taken while running ahead of the train that—by all appearances!—is relentlessly chasing us.

2. Relax, Will You!

“AI isn't the first disruptive change we've seen unfold on our platform. Just a few years ago, in June 2020, we launched the Open to Work feature on LinkedIn at another such moment. If you're not familiar with it, Open to Work is that little green ring you can add to your LinkedIn profile photo to show you're open to new professional challenges.

When we created it, the world of work was going through the COVID-19 pandemic. Layoffs and job insecurity were spreading across industries of every type and size. Corporate offices were sending their employees to work from home. Small shops and restaurants on main streets were closing their doors without knowing if or when they would open them again.

Today we find ourselves once again at a moment of great change—one that will require all of us to be open to new ways of working. Open to building new skills. Open to experimenting with new tools. Open to starting new chapters in our careers.”

How did it go—“let's duck, let's duck, and it will pass,” as the line attributed to Todor Zhivkov, Bulgaria's communist leader, said of perestroika. Yes, fine… It passed about as much as the thing the author of that famous quote was warning about (and on computers, by the way, he turned out to be rather right).

Until very recently we thought technology would first put out of work the people doing uniform, repetitive labor. Except we now know that isn't the case. Once AI writes indistinguishably from an author who spent 35 years building his style; once it can imitate us at practically any task, the paradigm is different. The question remains what it is that we will add. I don't have an answer, and if Mr. Roslansky and Mr. Raman do, they don't give it away within the covers of their book.

But relax, there'll be water for everyone.

3. Soft Power!

“For decades, our 5 Cs were dismissed as ‘soft skills’—nice extras that took a back seat to the ‘hard’ skills our economy valued most. In the coming years it will become clear that soft skills aren't ‘soft’ at all. They are the key to our survival. The way work is structured today, however, means we rarely get the chance to truly use them.”

These 5 Cs, which according to the authors are what makes us unique and what we must develop in order to survive professionally, are Curiosity, Courage, Creativity, Compassion and Communication.

If you run into the authors, would you please ask them which of the five AI is not yet able to imitate indistinguishably from a human?

4. Workers of the World…

“In the end, we humans decide what comes next. The steam engine, electricity and the internet didn't arrive with ready-made instructions for use. In each case, the choices people made about how to deploy, regulate and integrate them into society determined their impact. AI is no different.

We are not passive observers waiting to see what will happen. We are active participants writing the next chapter of work. And if we choose to use AI to amplify what makes us human, rather than replace it, that is exactly the future we will build.”

Oh yes, the wisdom of societies will save us—nothing complicated about that.

We often talk on this site about the haphazard, uncritical way we embrace technology. For us as a society not to be passive observers, we would need public debate, political competence, a sensible conversation, a way out of our filter bubbles, a publicly recognized scientific community, social mechanisms suited to the new world we live in.

Do we have any of these? Is it looking like we'll have them anytime soon?

5. We Have Data

“Workers in every field are already using AI. As they do, they're learning which parts of their jobs AI can take on and what that means for their future. The data is striking: LinkedIn researchers found that 24% of the skills needed for the average job changed globally between 2015 and 2022. Looking ahead to 2030 and factoring in the impact of AI, we estimate that share will jump to 70%.”

I'd bet on no less than 72 percent. Though as a specialist who has turned to helping people and companies bring AI into their work processes, I do have a few observations of my own.

And so far they show that the technology is being adopted rather chaotically, unexpectedly, in avalanches and spontaneously. The numbers in this case simply have nowhere to come from and nothing to tell us.

6. The Good News

“If you're skeptical of AI—we get it. If you're tired of hearing about AI—we get it. If you feel you have to nod along when someone talks about AI even though you have no idea what they're talking about—we get that too.

Here's the good news: to get ahead in the age of AI, you don't need to build AI. You just need to know how to use it. You've probably done something like this before. At some point you most likely learned to type, to send emails, to make a PowerPoint presentation and to use a smartphone. None of that required you to learn how to build a computer or write code. For the vast majority of us the process is the same—except this time you work with the tool by talking to it the way you would talk to another person.”

And so we arrive at curiosity. Yes, we have a technology that is so different from what the science fiction writers predicted. I'm convinced anyone can use it one way or another in their daily work (and their hobbies, and every area of life) if they're brave, if they're in the mood to experiment, if they approach it unconventionally and set aside enough time to learn every next step AI takes.

7. Why I Believed, Why I Ran

“White-collar work became a cultural ideal. The closer you were to designing and running the business itself, the more valuable you were and the better paid you would become.

White-collar work promised an escape. You get the right education and start using your mind. With a white-collar job you could create instead of merely executing. Innovate instead of repeat. That was the promise. But it was never fully realized. In the end, for most people white-collar work simply carried the factory's focus on efficiency into the office.”

The interesting question here, which has no answer either in the book or in the ideas of the authors, whom I follow, is what color the next collars will be. Isn't it too simplistic to explain that they'll just be the people who have learned to handle the new technology the way they handle a keyboard?

8. The Engineer Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

“The software engineers of tomorrow will spend less time writing code and more time understanding what code needs to be written. Less time fixing bugs and more time collaborating to define the problems worth solving. Less time optimizing algorithms and more time navigating the ethical implications of what they build.”

In other words…, as has already been discussed here, software engineers will no longer be exactly… programmers, but something else. But what? What will their work look like? With this latest step toward high efficiency, how will their tasks change? Is it just me, or does it seem utopian to the point of naivety to believe the work will be directed toward ethics?

These are huge questions, and in Bulgarian terms they're tied to the IT world, the part of our economy that in recent years has been pulling all the statistical indicators forward.

Are we having a deep enough conversation about how it's changing?

9. And? And?

“AI remixes; humans create. AI is extraordinarily good at remixing what already exists, but it can't come up with anything truly new. Use it to take on routine tasks and broaden your perspective, but don't let it think for you.”

Sounds wonderful, except… if I know it writes indistinguishably from me, how exactly could I hold myself back and not let it write my next “own” text? I wouldn't, and I don't—you can tell from the imperfections of these very words. It's remarkable, by the way, how today a text's imperfections are the sought-after sign that it is human.

AI has long been able to create. The example I can give you is poetry, perhaps the most intuitive and human of the arts.

But the bigger question is this: how do we protect ourselves and go on loving things being hard when they could be easy? In writing code, words, in creating anything at all…

10. Intelligence? I Don't Think So

“Over time the idea of IQ—the intelligence quotient—gained popularity, and we arrived at the claim that human intelligence comes down mainly to solving puzzles quickly and memorizing facts.

The term ‘soft skills,’ often used to describe the 5 Cs we've examined, comes from a time when technical skills were seen as the main drivers of success. That was then. Now it's different. As AI takes on more and more routine and technical work, the abilities that make us human become ever more important. In the coming years, we believe these so-called ‘soft’ skills will be among the hardest and most valuable to build.”

No need for… classical intelligence? Yes, I too was saddened that ChatGPT is already beating Dimo Padalski, Bulgaria's best-known quiz champion, and company. Didn't the previous quote already say it may not be very useful to delegate everything to algorithms—so is that the very thing we should hand over? What if knowledge, the ability to solve unconventional problems, which has given birth to every great human leap, is precisely what remains human?

I don't know, but nobody knows, including the authors, who have the confidence to claim otherwise.

11. Breakthroughs

“The human brain is our most underrated asset. AI is about to change that. For a century we measured intelligence through metrics of efficiency, while our real advantage lies in abilities that go beyond efficiency.

The 5 Cs are what make us irreplaceable in the age of AI. Curiosity, courage, creativity, compassion and communication are the abilities that make us most human and that underpin our competitive advantage as people in the workplace in the age of AI.

Innovation takes time and learning. The greatest breakthroughs have always come from minds given the freedom to explore, to fail and to connect with other people. As AI takes over efficiency, we finally have a chance to reclaim the time and skills that human innovation requires.”

The ability to make full use of your freed-up time is something that worries me almost as much as loving things being hard when they could be easy.

The experience so far—from the arrival of social media, for instance—hardly gives much cause for optimism, I'm not sure. Technology frees up more and more of our time from routine tasks, but… what are we to use it for? Let whoever knows the answer cast the first stone.

12. The Human Way

“Adaptability is key. Like bank tellers who went from dispensing cash to solving customer problems, your ability to adapt is crucial. Adapting will serve you better than predicting.

Your career is now a climbing wall, not a ladder. The predictable path is gone; it has been replaced by multiple routes that will reward creativity over conformity. Just as Mo Beck invented new climbing techniques, you will invent new career sequences that turn your unique combination of skills and interests into advantages.”

And… are we supposed to adapt and change professions every week to keep up with the furious pace at which technology advances? No, that stopped being human long ago. But what remains human, the thing we must never delegate—that's the bigger question.

When the author of the words above is no longer the head of LinkedIn, what does he plan to do to develop his unique combination of skills and interests? What if one day he, too, has to… look for a job?

13. Children of Mother Earth

“The best way to learn more about AI tools is to return to the state of mind you had as a child in your favorite class. To that moment when you first fell for your favorite subject, or read the first few pages of a book that led you down a deeper path of discovery. Try to bring the same curiosity and energy to exploring AI tools and to your first steps with them.”

Here the book goes on to a detailed 30-day plan for how to start working together with AI. Presumably, if you follow it, success can't possibly pass you by. Or can it?

It's definitely worth being curious. And knowledgeable, too. And asking ourselves far more questions than answers. Because the time we live in is truly special. And the attitude of children toward the new, which the authors chose here, is definitely a wonderful example.

It's no time for prejudice, and no time for easy solutions either. Adaptability and traditional human skills look like possible paths, but the most important things, to my mind, remain the questions.

What will you be working at tomorrow? What's the most interesting and incredible thing technology will never manage to imitate? If you have an answer, come and let's discuss it and tell everyone else…

85 seconds. The symbolic clock that shows how close we are to the end of the world pointed to this insanely short time for the first time in 2026.

The generation that not only remembers the last (so far) world war but also witnessed the first (may they also be the last) nuclear explosions is passing away.

It is as if humanity's immunity is running out. Only we have no Mantoux test—the skin test that reveals whether the body still remembers tuberculosis—to remind us, to jolt us, to make us think.

This is the most unpleasant Digital Story of more than 500. But I believe it is important to tell it.

What would happen if one day a nuclear bomb went off somewhere in the world?

The Destroyer of Worlds

Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two not particularly large or strategically important Japanese towns will remain in history forever, because they showed the silent horror of technology turning against humanity. Eight decades ago, on August 6, 1945, “Little Boy”—the first nuclear weapon in history—killed 70,000 people in an instant. By the end of the year the death toll had risen to 140,000.

Three days later “Fat Man” was detonated over Nagasaki, killing 40,000 people on the spot and almost as many again by the end of the year. The cities were chosen deliberately, so that the terrain and… the effect could be assessed.

Nothing can compare (and may nothing ever manage to) with the primal horror of an atomic blast. A blinding (in the literal sense, too) flash, then a gigantic mushroom, a cloud rising toward the sky. As Mr. Oppenheimer put it, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” These words from the Indian epic the Mahabharata sprang into his head when he saw the effect of “Trinity,” the first successful nuclear test, carried out in the Mojave Desert.

In Cold Blood

“Otherwise it's very beautiful,” adds Dr. Slavyan Stoilov, an experienced physician and specialist in unexpected, serious, even dramatic challenges.

If there is a way to keep a bad scenario from happening, whichever direction it comes from, it is to talk about it, to discuss it.

And we supposedly do, but in this case, in my view, not enough. We have arrived at a world in which heads of state talk about using nuclear weapons if necessary; in which it isn't even clear which countries possess the technology; in which treaty-based limits are melting away as if under high radiation.

One mistake, followed by another…

As Dr. Stoilov says, a nuclear explosion today would be frighteningly possible. “A matter of a small mistake, and not necessarily a human one.” Not only people—software could make it too. “And at some point AI will get fed up with us as well.”

“A matter of a small mistake,” the doctor repeats. A minor malfunction in an important radar, a misread signal, even a powerful solar storm in the atmosphere—it is enough for something to work incorrectly and the nuclear arsenal could be set in motion. History shows it: more than once we have passed within a hair's breadth of a nuclear clash.

From the movies we picture a red button in someone's briefcase, but reality is more mundane, and therefore more frightening: even a small mistake could prove fatal for us as a species, and I think we must never stop reminding ourselves of that.

Apocalypse. Will It Happen?

Are we ready for such a moment? Dr. Stoilov, in his typical style, is laconic: “Some are.” There are countries with serious civil defense programs—bomb shelters, training programs, stockpiles, medicines. People like Sam Altman and Elon Musk admit they are investing in shelters that could prove lifesaving in such a scenario. Meanwhile, many others—our country included—can boast no such preparedness. According to our guest, Bulgaria once had well-developed systems for protecting the population too, but over the years they have been neglected.

Today, if the sirens wailed, most of us wouldn't know where to go. Even though medicine today knows how to act in a nuclear incident, thanks to experience, and not only from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Alas, that knowledge may turn out to be useless if there is no organization and preparation.

The destructive power of a nuclear bomb manifests itself instantly through several deadly factors. Dr. Stoilov lists them:

• light effect—blinding light and heat
• shock wave
• penetrating electromagnetic pulse
• ionizing radiation

First comes a brilliance like nothing else—as if a second sun has risen. Within fractions of a second come the fireball and the devastating shock wave, sweeping away buildings and bodies. The electromagnetic pulse fries electronics over a wide radius, while the radioactive emissions invisibly begin to “cook” everything alive. Alas, mammals have no detectors for ionizing radiation.

Roadside Picnic

“Could we mistake it for something else? No way,” Dr. Stoilov says firmly.

The so-called mushroom—the terrifying column of smoke and dust that rises high into the atmosphere—is the unique hallmark of a nuclear explosion.

The effect comes from the enormous energy released in an instant: air heated to millions of degrees shoots upward, dragging debris with it and forming a mushroom-shaped cloud. No conventional weapon to date can fully imitate it.

Military strategies usually call for warheads to detonate a little above the ground (a so-called air burst)—that way the cloud spreads farther and strikes the largest possible area.

What is the scale of the destruction? It depends on the bomb's yield and the terrain, but Dr. Stoilov offers a benchmark: with a 1-megaton nuclear warhead, the lethal radius is about 11 kilometers. At 3 km from such a blast, 98 percent of people would die on the spot. Up to 5 km, instant mortality reaches 50 percent, and almost all the rest would be severely injured. Only beyond the 11th kilometer is there a chance of surviving without serious injuries.

A big city, wiped out in seconds. For many, death is instantaneous, without feeling any pain. But for so many others, hell is only just beginning. If the Hiroshima bomb (18 kilotons of TNT equivalent) went off in the center of Sofia, the zone of destruction would stretch from the Central Sofia Cemetery in the north to the Military Medical Academy in the south, from Konstantin Velichkov Boulevard in the west to the Chavdar Bridge in the east. Calculations show that the explosion would kill about 94,000 people outright and injure about 138,000 more.

Apocalypse. Why?

If a person survives the first seconds, it is vital to know how to act. According to our interlocutor, panic kills almost more than the bomb itself.

There are three classic methods of protection from radiation. “We need time, distance and a barrier—a shield,” Dr. Stoilov explains. In other words, you must minimize the time spent in the zone of high radiation, maximize the distance from the blast or the contaminated area, and put a barrier between yourself and the source of radioactive contamination. It can be made of all sorts of materials—concrete walls, dense earth, lead plates, water, even thick plastics.

If someone sees the brilliant light, it means they have survived the hit itself, but the shock wave arrives seconds later. So they must throw themselves to the ground with their feet toward the bomb and not look at the blast—it will burn the retina. If there is a way, they should hide from the direct impact of the shock wave. Then it is time to find the nearest shelter—a basement, a solid building, a tunnel, any structure that can separate them from the radioactive dust.

They must stay shut in as tightly as possible for at least 8 days, until the level of radioactive iodine drops, or until they receive official word that it is safe outside—this may take hours or days. At such moments, the doctor says, what matters most is knowledge and skill, as with any kind of survival, and also composure.

Metro 2033

Two weeks underground can make the difference between life and death—that is how long it takes for the most intense radiation to subside. The radioactive isotope iodine-131 has a half-life of about 8 days; after two weeks its activity will have fallen drastically. Of course, there remains the danger of other, longer-lived isotopes such as cesium-137 and strontium-90, but the initial lethal radiation background will have decreased.

Where could a person hide for so long? “In Sofia the metro is the only suitable place; they ruined the others,” notes Dr. Stoilov. The underground railway, with its deep tunnels and massive structures, is the only large public shelter. The old bomb shelters have long been abandoned, flooded, turned into warehouses…

Surviving 14 days underground is not easy; you need supplies of water, food and medicine, which aren't maintained anywhere either. But even if a person takes Sam Altman's approach, that doesn't necessarily mean salvation. “And then what? He'll live there, alone, until he dies…” says Dr. Stoilov.

No one could survive cut off from the world. In such a scenario it is easy to imagine global devastation following, the doctor adds. Nuclear war leaves no blank spots on the map—the whole world pays the price, and it doesn't matter how rich you are if there is nowhere to buy air, water or food.

There are many myths and misconceptions about what to do (or not) in a nuclear explosion, and some of them are downright dangerous. For example, that we should stare at the blast to “see” what is happening, or even film it. “What must we absolutely not do? Stand there gawking at the spectacle, heroically upright, hand shading our brow like a proud collective farmer surveying his field, and shoot videos on our phones. Yes, otherwise it's very beautiful.”

Another widespread myth concerns iodine tablets. Many believe that if we take iodine in advance, we will be protected from radiation. Yes, potassium iodide helps, but only against the buildup of radioactive iodine in the thyroid gland, and only if taken shortly before or immediately after exposure. Taken too early or without need, it can do serious harm.

Apocalypse. When?

History remembers countless examples of the nuclear danger being underestimated. I have written here about the Radium Girls and how technology can turn into utter horror. Dr. Stoilov, for his part, tells of the first nuclear tests from Oppenheimer's time—soldiers lined up in the open a few kilometers from the blast. “They sit on wooden benches and watch the show—laughing, having fun.”

Today it sounds insane, but the military men of the day didn't grasp the risk. Many of those soldiers paid the price with their health.

In the minutes, hours and days after the explosion comes so-called secondary radioactive contamination. The dust lifted high by the mushroom begins to fall back down, contaminating soil, water and plants. The wind alone decides where exactly this poisonous ash will go, but because of the so-called wind rose—the shifting pattern of winds over a place—sooner or later the problem spreads over a large radius.

Acute radiation sickness strikes people who absorb a large dose of radiation in a short time—they begin vomiting, feel exhausted, and later come hemorrhages, hair loss and a collapse of the immune system. In such a situation medicine is powerless. “Above a certain dose, we just count the days,” says Dr. Stoilov.

The Ninja Turtles

Many people can survive, especially with timely treatment. Our interlocutor gives a striking example from Chernobyl: “Of the several hundred people believed to have received a high dose, only 134 were diagnosed with acute radiation sickness, and of those, 28 died. According to a UN report, the only significant public health harm after the accident was around 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer in children and adolescents, over 99 percent of whom were treated successfully.”

At the same time, the idea of serious mutations is, for now, a myth—neither after Chernobyl nor after the blasts in Japan has a new and different species been born, at least according to science and Dr. Stoilov.

If people are evacuated in time, if the consumption of contaminated food is prevented, many lives can be saved. Knowledge and preparation can make the difference between life and death.

One more horrifying touch: radiation hits rapidly dividing cells hardest—which is why children, with their fast metabolism and growing bodies, are more vulnerable than adults. A child's body absorbs and distributes radiation doses faster, and its DNA is damaged more easily.

After a nuclear explosion, nature suffers too, long and painfully. Dr. Stoilov reminds us of the “lifespans” of the main radioactive poisons: iodine—8 days, cesium—30 years, strontium—29 years. The last is especially insidious because it accumulates in the bones of living organisms. In humans it is built into the skeleton and keeps irradiating the bone marrow from within—which is why it is considered one of the most dangerous isotopes in nuclear waste. The areas around the epicenter can remain uninhabitable for many years, even if the buildings are cleared of debris.

But where is it safe after such a disaster? In the past, miners used canaries to learn in time if toxic gases appeared—if the bird died, there was a problem.

With radiation, however, that approach doesn't work: “You can't see it, you can't hear it, it has no smell,” says Dr. Stoilov. Today, though, there are compact devices—dosimeters—sold freely online.

The Victors Are Not Judged

But what if there are no victors?

A country decides it can win a nuclear conflict by striking first and hiding from the retaliation. Is that possible? Not in the least, because of the wind rose. Perhaps what has saved us so far is that no nuclear power can deliver a strike whose consequences would leave itself safe. Even if it isn't harmed by the explosion itself, the radioactive clouds will circle the globe. The wind has no political leanings.

Here we arrive at the terrifying concept of nuclear winter—a global climatic cataclysm that would follow a series of nuclear strikes. They would lift millions of tons of soot and dust into the stratosphere; the dark veil would block sunlight and cause a sharp drop in temperature. The world would go through a cold and hungry apocalypse. Dr. Stoilov asks rhetorically: “We'll survive now, but with no future?” What is the point of saving ourselves today if tomorrow there will be no sun, no bread and no hope? Nuclear war promises a world without victors—only victims and the dying.

Why aren't we afraid enough? “Because everyone harmed so far has been far from our street and our neighborhood,” Dr. Stoilov replies. That sentence holds so much of the truth about human nature. The nuclear bomb has been absent from the horrors of our street long enough for our fear to dull. We have grown used to the thought that it is merely a political trump card, part of the grand strategy.

Time of Parting

We keep thinking of nuclear weapons as a deterrent—monstrous, but keeping the enemy at bay. Yet the very fact of their existence is a threat to us all. The specter of nuclear war lurks behind every regional conflict between great powers, behind every technical failure, even behind an artificial intelligence that might one day gain control of the arsenal.

So far it has been a lot of “fun,” but… what would the worst-case scenario look like? Dr. Stoilov's answer is simple: “Nuclear winter and the annihilation of the human race… at the very least.” A full-scale nuclear war could wipe out our entire species, and the other living beings on the planet too. Only the most adaptable would stand a chance of surviving—cockroaches (though according to new research, even they aren't a sure thing), deep-sea fish, some bacteria around the tropics… And maybe a handful of people, scattered and doomed to a slow death in a dead world.

Let's not let it happen, what do you say?

Eleven editions since 2021. That is how many new versions of one of the most discussed books of our time have appeared over the past five years in Bulgarian alone. That was exactly when 70 years had passed since George Orwell's death, which “opened” the publishing rights. The years run out, but the relevance of the most famous dystopia only seems to grow.

“Didn't I tell you?” If Eric Arthur Blair were still among us, he would have every reason to repeat that beloved line often. Are we really living in Big Brother's world, or did Orwell turn out less accurate in his judgments than we think?

Let's discuss this big and important question, because it also says a lot about the future.

I know the next sentence will put many of you off reading this text… but I promise you'll find at least one thing in it that is new to you.

The lines that follow were written by artificial intelligence.

We talk, and will talk more and more, about “AI slop.” In Bulgarian we might call it “AI drivel,” though it deserves a more colorful label. Generated texts are already everywhere, we read them every day, and many people even think they can spot them. The fact is, though, that they are almost never worth a brass farthing.

1984

Here something different awaits you. Together with several of the models, we compiled a list of many directions in which to discuss and test whether Orwell turned out to be right. To what extent, in 2026, does the world live in 1984?

From those we chose 15. Then, with quite detailed instructions, I asked two instances of one and the same of the most popular AI models to analyze the topics and give their arguments—first why and how Orwell got his predictions right, and separately, how the present day has refuted him.

Then we brought in a third model to score the arguments “for” and “against” on a ten-point scale, with a very brief justification. It was asked to be objective and impartial.

You'll see for yourselves: the reflections of all “three” give plenty of reasons for human reflection too. Can AI argue with itself coherently? Have we really lost the truth in post-truth? Why, in so many of their positions, based on more than 1,200 sources that the AI cites directly…, do the arguments “for” and “against” Orwell's insights resemble so frighteningly many of our current social fault lines here in Bulgaria?

Yes, when human and AI find a way to interact, the result can be better than the hard, stubborn work of either of them alone. I say this as the organizer of the first AI-generated poetry competition in Bulgaria. The results, at least for me, are unambiguous.

And once you've read the text… I'm curious whether, when we meet, I'll get the chance to ask you: “Didn't I tell you?” And even more curious about your non-generated answer…

1. Attitude to Truth

👍 Orwell gets it right that the most successful control begins not by arguing with facts, but by replacing the very criterion of what a fact is. The key is the command: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” Today's analogue is the industry of synthetic credibility. In online life the mechanism is accelerated by distribution itself: fake news spreads faster and farther than true news, precisely the kind of ecosystem in which “eyes and ears” lose their value. Orwell did not foresee the specific chip or algorithm—he foresaw the result: a society in which reality is chosen as a version rather than established as a fact.

👎 Orwell states the principle of total substitution, but today truth cannot be destroyed with a single “final command,” because the evidence is distributed across logs, satellites and public archives that do not belong to one center. Orwell is wrong on the decisive point: in our world truth has not been abolished as a principle, but turned into a contested field with verification tools that power itself does not fully control.

2. Memory and the Past

👍 Orwell gets it right that control over memory is the cheapest substitute for violence: if the past is edited, the present becomes the only permitted reality. “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” When access to archives, search engines and public statements is regulated, society gradually loses not only facts but also the ability to argue about them—the “memory hole” transferred into digital administration. Orwell is right on the decisive point: the battle for the past is not nostalgia but a technology for governing the future.

👎 Internet infrastructure makes the past redundantly copyable rather than centralizable. The Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine are precisely an anti-Ministry of Truth: they store versions of websites as a public memory that does not depend on one government or one publisher and can be called up back through time. And Wikipedia shows the other side of the same coin: the past is not “handed down” but edited collectively according to rules of citability and neutrality. That is why the model “control the past—control the future” fails in practice: the past is not a single door that can be locked, but a labyrinth of public traces that can be restored.

3. Language as a Social Instrument

👍 Orwell gets it right that language is not a mirror of society but a lever: whoever commands the vocabulary commands what is thinkable. “Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” Today this is visible in political euphemisms that legalize the morally unacceptable: in post-9/11 American bureaucracy, the term “enhanced interrogation techniques” worked as a clerical mask for torture, turning a crime into a “procedure” and a dispute into a technical detail. The mechanism is Newspeak: first meaning is “compressed” into a label, then the label replaces reality, and finally society argues not about the facts but about loyalty to the terminology. Orwell gets the final blow right: you don't need to convince people of a lie if you can make the truth unsayable.

👎 Digital modernity has systematically done the opposite: it has expanded writing systems, accelerated translation and democratized publishing. In Orwell's world words are destroyed in order to destroy thought; in our world words multiply (including through memes, slang and local communities), because platforms reward new forms of signification and standards allow them to be written and shared.

4. Freedom of Speech

👍 Orwell gets the subtle twist right: freedom of speech does not die through a single great act of censorship but through a change in the definition of “crime”—from action to thought, from text to intention. “Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.” Today states criminalize political speech under labels such as “fakes” or “discrediting,” which turns public commentary into a legal risk and pushes the media and citizens toward self-censorship. The mechanism is Orwellian: instead of “this is forbidden,” you hear “this is dangerous/harmful/illegal,” and from then on every sharp argument is treated as a risk to the system.

👎 Today's legal reality in large parts of the world is built precisely as a rejection of the logic Orwell described. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights grants the right “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas”—a global normative anti-Oceania in which opinion is a protected status, not a punishable condition. Yes, there are regimes that persecute speech; but that is exactly what highlights the weakness of Orwell's generalization: he takes total hopelessness as a universal fate, while the real world is uneven—with spaces of freedom, institutions of appeal and enduring traditions of human rights advocacy. This is where Orwell is most structurally wrong: he underestimates law as a technology for stopping power.

5. Media

👍 Orwell foresees with surgical precision the merging of information and entertainment into a single central “factory” stream—not to inform, but to organize consent, fear and habit. “The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts.” Today's media landscape is exactly such a hybrid: a continuing decline in engagement with and trust in traditional media, and a growing dependence on social platforms as the gateway to news. The media are also a geopolitical battlefield. So “news” becomes at once a product, a weapon and an object of regulation—in other words, the central nerve of governance. Orwell gets the essential point right: when the media are infrastructure rather than a profession, power does not merely “speak”—it builds everyday reality.

👎 Orwell describes a central media conglomerate, but the European framework today is explicitly the opposite: pluralism as a legal norm, not an accident. The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights requires that “the freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected”—a constitutional antithesis to single-center media, because it makes pluralism not a matter of taste but an obligation. Of course there is concentration and political pressure; but that only strengthens the counterpoint to Orwell: today the media are not a “ministry” but a field of competing players, which is exactly why they are subject to rules, oversight and court battles.

6. Managing Attention

👍 Orwell gets it right that power does not need to persuade constantly—it is enough to manage attention, to turn it into a reflex and to provoke “a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.” Today the “Two Minutes Hate” is distributed across billions of micro-impulses in our pockets: the “addictive design” of social networks—infinite scroll, autoplay, notifications and highly personalized recommendations—deliberately sustains compulsive use. When the reward is attention, the system rewards the extreme and the emotional, and the rational becomes uncompetitive—just as in Oceania the ecstasy of the crowd displaces thought. Orwell gets it right that control over people runs through their time and their nervous system: from there on, the content is interchangeable.

👎 Today attention is not a mandatory state ritual but a manageable habit, against which the devices themselves build in safeguards. Apple offers Screen Time as a system feature: reports, limits, downtime and parental controls. The Android ecosystem supports Digital Wellbeing, measuring unlocks, notifications and time spent in apps—metrics that make attention visible and therefore changeable, rather than hypnotically inevitable. Orwell is wrong in his absolutism: the “rhythmic noise” exists, but not as an unswitchable mechanism of power; rather, as a behavioral problem that can be addressed with the very same technologies.

7. Surveillance, Data and Profiling

👍 Orwell gets the most effective surveillance regime right: not the constant camera, but the psychological effect of uncertainty—living as if you are always being watched. “There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.” Edward Snowden's revelations described programs for the mass collection of digital data. In parallel, outside the state, the data economy builds the same “telescreen” through the market. This is profiling as power: habits, contacts and vulnerabilities are inferred from metadata and location, and then used for advertising, pressure or investigation. Orwell gets it right that to control people you don't need to know their every word—it is enough to know enough to predict and correct their behavior.

👎 Europe's legal trajectory over the past decade has been precisely a dismantling of the idea that general and indiscriminate monitoring is normal. EU law does not permit the general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data—in other words, “watch everyone, always” is a legally prohibited design. And the GDPR subjects the processing of personal data to principles, rights and penalties—on the premise that data are not the observer's property “by right” but a risk that must be limited and justified. Orwell assumes that the technical capacity for surveillance automatically turns into political totality; today we see the opposite: the capacity breeds regulation, judicial tests of proportionality and constant battles over limits.

8. Technology and Power

👍 Orwell gets it right that technology is not merely a tool but an architecture of subjugation: when the environment is “always on,” power becomes a background rather than an event. “The telescreen could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.” Today this repeats itself through dependence on platforms and devices: switching off is not a neutral choice but social and economic exclusion—coercion through infrastructure, not through orders. That is why regulations now treat AI as an instrument of power: the EU recognizes that algorithms can be a form of administrative coercion, meaning that code enters the law as a political problem. And when the state wants full access, it can now buy it as a service. Orwell gets the ending right: the “machine” serves whoever holds the switch, and in the 21st century the switch is in the computer code.

👎 In the 21st century the key trend is the opposite—the institutionalization of the requirement that technologies be auditable, assessed for risk and limited by design. The European Commission has recognized free software and open source as strategic instruments of independence and security—in other words, it encourages technological transparency rather than an unswitchable “black screen” that only issues commands. In Orwell's world technology is by definition an instrument of power, and there are no institutions to hold it to account; today technologies are also a field of standardization, civic pressure and regulatory built-in limits.

9. Democracy

👍 Orwell gets the paradox of “managed democracy” right: power can keep the word “democracy” while draining its substance through control over information, elections and the very possibility of a shared reality. “To believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy.” When elections become a behavioral problem, the public sphere breaks into segments, each with its own truth—and then democracy remains a ritual without common informational ground. This is exactly where Orwell is right: democracy does not collapse only under tanks; it is quietly dismantled when the information ecosystem becomes an instrument of governance.

👎 Our time is characterized precisely by the fact that democracy not only survived but invented new procedures against manipulation and new channels for participation. The EU regulation on the transparency and targeting of political advertising, for example, addresses one of the real anti-democratic vectors of our time—covert microtargeting—by making it more transparent and more limited. Orwell assumes that modernity leads logically to “impossible democracy”; reality has shown a more pragmatic evolution: democracy repairs itself through regulations and procedures rather than capitulating to technology.

10. Security and Emergency

👍 Orwell gets it right how “security” turns into a universal argument: the extraordinary becomes permanent, and rights become a temporary privilege that can be suspended with no end date. More and more often the citizen is treated as a potential risk by default, and the system demands transparency of one's life as a form of “loyalty.”

👎 Orwell throws in a grim detail: “nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws.” Orwell assumes the “absence of laws” as a functional norm; our world works the other way round: it is precisely the law that is used as a tool to limit the state of emergency, including against the state itself. Yes, the struggle is constant—but it exists, which in itself refutes Orwell's premise of hopelessness.

11. War

👍 Orwell gets it right that “perpetual war” is domestic policy: it aims not at victory but at a continuous justification for mobilization, scarcity and obedience. “The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects.” In the real world this is visible in the “post-9/11 forever wars.” In parallel, Europe is living with a prolonged war on the continent—one that is becoming at once an economy, a demographic reality and an information regime. Just as in Oceania, the very “state of war” becomes an administrative and media environment in which criticism is easily labeled disloyalty, and restrictions are labeled necessity.

👎 Modern history shows the opposite: wars do end, societies demand withdrawal, and alliances set deadlines. Even if today's world is far from peace, the European Union received the Nobel Peace Prize precisely for its contribution to “peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights”—a historic marker that entire regions can turn war from a norm into a taboo through integration and institutions. Yes, war is often used rhetorically; but the thesis that it is enough for it simply “to exist” does not stand up to the fact of real withdrawals, real peace dividends and real institutional projects against war.

12. Relations Between Communities

👍 Orwell gets it right that managing communities means managing hatred: instead of resolving social contradictions, you redirect them toward an external enemy and internal “traitors.” “Discontents are deliberately directed outward by devices such as the Two Minutes Hate.” Today the most powerful mechanism of hatred is not the town square but the algorithm. Scientific data show that falsehood spreads faster than truth on social networks, which makes demonization more effective than refutation. Orwell gets it right that when communities are kept in a mode of permanent moral mobilization, they begin to polarize themselves—and then power can stand aside while the crowd does the work.

👎 The digital age has also produced the opposite phenomenon—transnational solidarity that connects communities instead of keeping them in a permanent “ritual of the enemy.” #MeToo became a global movement across many countries and languages—an example that networks can turn private abuse into public debate and collective action, not just into mobilized hatred. Orwell is right that hatred is an instrument; he is wrong that it is the only mass energy a networked society can produce and channel. Today's communication allows a “Two Minutes Hate,” but it also allows two years of solidarity—and it is precisely this two-way nature that breaks Orwell's one-way machine.

13. Intimacy and Private Life

👍 Orwell gets it right that the destruction of intimacy is a political technique: when private life becomes transparent, love, trust and autonomy turn into manageable variables. “Private life had ceased to exist.” The modern analogue is social media. The economy of intimate data. Intimacy can be breached directly through the device. No policeman in the room is needed—it is enough for the infrastructure to turn every conversation into something potentially extractable, every habit into data, every intimate choice into a profile. Orwell gets it right that when intimacy shrinks, society loses the place where disobedience is born: the place where a person is “alone with oneself.”

👎 Orwell believes power will colonize intimacy down to physiology, but the present shows the opposite tendency: intimacy is protected technologically and legally, and sexuality is culturally liberated rather than centrally destroyed. Orwell models intimacy as the last fortress that inevitably falls; the reality is that it is precisely in the intimate sphere that the strongest counter-technologies (encryption, data minimization) and the strongest legal claims have emerged. Even when there is pressure toward scanning and surveillance, it runs into public resistance and legal debate—not silence and inevitability.

14. Corporate Power

👍 Orwell gets it right that “corporate” power becomes more stable than state power when it controls the infrastructure of the economy and of information: ownership is concentrated, and control is exercised through access and dependence. “The concentration of property in far fewer hands than before.” Today's equivalent is the platform “gatekeepers,” the social networks. Orwell gets it right that economic concentration breeds concentration of narrative, attention and opportunity—and so the corporation becomes a political actor, regardless of electoral legitimacy.

👎 Orwell misses what is key to our world: corporate concentration is not an ending but a starting point for antitrust measures, regulation and public conflict. The European Commission has designated the “gatekeepers” and placed them under specific obligations for interoperability and market fairness—in other words, it acknowledges their power but turns it into a legal object, not a destiny. Orwell sees concentration as a one-way historical gravity; today's world treats it as a governance problem that generates tools—regulations, fines, lawsuits and political mandates.

15. Resistance and Opposition

👍 Orwell gets it right that resistance is rarely crushed head-on—it is diluted: through blurring, through fear, through turning the opposition into a vulnerable network that can be identified by its contacts and habits. “If there was hope, it lay in the proles.” Today digital resistance is born online—and that is why it is crushed online. Freedom House reports a 15th consecutive year of decline in internet freedom, including arrests for online expression and internet shutdowns as a tool against protests. The mechanism matches 1984: power does not fear opposition as an idea, but opposition as coordination.

👎 Today's real victories often come not from a mythical “prole” but from legal protections and coordinated journalism. The EU Whistleblower Protection Directive is an institutionalized counter-Oceania: it makes exposing abuse more defensible rather than automatically suicidal. Yes, repression exists—but the very fact that there is legal protection for whistleblowers, and demonstrable financial and political consequences from investigations, refutes Orwell's total hopelessness. Therefore “hope” is not locked inside one class; it lies in the institutionalized channels for disclosure, verification and sanction.

Sitting Crooked, Judging Straight

Time to give the floor to our third, independent judge.

Here is my score for each of the 15 topics (10 = a perfect prediction, 1 = completely inaccurate):

1. Attitude to Truth—9/10

Deepfakes, synthetic media and industrialized disinformation have turned “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears” from a metaphor into a literal technical reality, and verification tools reach a tiny fraction of the audience compared to the viral lie.

2. Memory and the Past—8/10

The right to be forgotten, algorithmic deindexing and state criminalization of “wrong” memory show that the past is in fact being edited at scale—the Internet Archive is the exception, not the rule, and is itself under constant legal pressure.

3. Language as a Social Instrument—7/10

Multilingualism is a fact, but political euphemisms (“collateral damage,” “enhanced interrogation techniques,” “special military operation”) prove that power successfully narrows the thinkable at the key moments when it truly matters—and memes are noise, not correction.

4. Freedom of Speech—8/10

Self-censorship is the mass effect Orwell foresaw with surgical precision—billions of people calculate every day what they can say online, and legal guarantees are powerless where the loss of a job or an account comes before any court.

5. Media—8/10

The plurality of voices is formal—the real media diet of the majority passes through two or three platforms whose algorithms decide what counts as “news,” which is de facto centralization through a private rather than a state monopoly.

6. Managing Attention—9/10

Screen Time and Digital Wellbeing are cosmetic: average screen time keeps rising, addictive design is a trillion-dollar business model, and the “rhythmic noise” of TikTok and Reels is more effective than anything Orwell could have imagined.

7. Surveillance, Data and Profiling—9/10

The GDPR exists, but big tech pays for it as a “cost of doing business,” actual profiling is deeper than ever, and the combination of state and corporate surveillance makes the telescreen look primitive next to what your smartphone knows about you.

8. Technology and Power—9/10

The smartphone is a telescreen you buy yourself, charge yourself and carry voluntarily everywhere—Orwell did not foresee that people would record themselves, and regulatory responses lag years behind technological reality.

9. Democracy—8/10

Cambridge Analytica was not an anomaly but a business model—microtargeting, bots and information operations make the “informed voter” a fiction at scale, and regulatory measures always arrive after the damage and rarely make up for it.

10. Security and Emergency—8/10

Surveillance infrastructure is growing exponentially, and every new threat (terrorism, pandemics, cyberattacks) adds a new layer of permanent control.

11. War—8/10

The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan brought not peace but chaos, the war in Ukraine has normalized military thinking in Europe for a generation to come, and the “war on terror” has become a permanent administrative state, exactly as Orwell describes.

12. Relations Between Communities—8/10

#MeToo and Fridays for Future are real, but algorithmic polarization works 24/7 at the scale of billions. We have a permanent “Two Minutes Hate” on Facebook, and solidarity is episodic, while hatred is a business model.

13. Intimacy and Private Life—8/10

The smartphones of billions of people are an open book—health apps sell data, Pegasus gets in with zero clicks, and the very habit of documenting your life online liquidates intimacy from within, with no need for outside coercion.

14. Corporate Power—8/10

EU fines are belated and insufficient relative to profits—Apple, Google, Amazon and Meta control the infrastructure of everyday life in a way that makes dependence on them deeper than dependence on any state, and regulation is running after a train that has already left.

15. Resistance and Opposition—7/10

Journalistic investigations and whistleblower protection are real victories, but 15 consecutive years of declining internet freedom, mass arrests of activists in so many countries and the conversion of digital surveillance into a tool for preemptively crushing protests show that coordinated resistance is ever more costly and risky.

Average score: 8.1/10—Orwell did not foresee the specific technologies, but he captured the logic of today with almost prophetic accuracy. Countervailing forces exist, but they are chronically slower, weaker and more fragmented than the mechanisms of control they try to limit.

Well, since you've read this far, all that's left is to ask you… didn't I tell you?

This piece is part of the new issue of Perfect Day magazine.

– 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!

Trying to peer into the future is a doomed challenge. Sometimes predictions come true with astonishing accuracy—like, for example, the ones we make every year with the futurologist Assoc. Prof. Mariana Todorova.

At the same time, reading tech predictions that never came true turns out to be unexpectedly entertaining, especially when… they are your own. That is exactly what we will do in the lines below. In more than five years, I have published just over 500 Digital Stories. I will invite an impartial observer to assess them and pull out specific passages from my own texts (the point is not to embarrass my guests) that have not aged well at all.

The honor, of course, goes to ChatGPT, which receives the full texts of all the Digital Stories and the freedom to check them.

1. Digital People

“A Fake Hero,” March 15, 2021

Quote from the text:

“I believe that in just five years we will have a significant population of digital humans who will interact with people and will be able to hold millions of conversations with them every day,” says Greg Cross. And this will go far beyond customer communication—his “children” will soon teach lessons in various fields and could become part of the healthcare system, Greg believes. “The possibilities of digital humans are endless!” he sums up.

ChatGPT:

As of April 9, 2026, Soul Machines positions itself as a platform for digital workforce and AI assistant deployments, not as a world with a “significant population” of digital humans turned into a mass social reality. In other words, there is product evolution, but not the large-scale social breakthrough built into the prediction. There are not many well-known digital humans.

Hmm. Even if digital humans really aren't everywhere today, the phenomenon is gradually making its way, and I still believe it will soon be extremely widespread. Suffice it to mention the EcoElena you know so well, and the fact that a digital human recently even took a central role in the campaign of the American president.

2. A Chip in the Brain

“When Musk Puts a Chip in Our Brains…,” April 2, 2021

Quote from the text:

Elon Musk says that within five years it will be commonplace for each of us to have a chip in our brain. That we will finally merge with computers to unleash an incredible future for humanity as a different biological species. More than that—that this is the only way for us to survive.

ChatGPT:

This is among the most clearly missed predictions. By April 2026 there is no mass use “for each of us”; Neuralink is still in early clinical trials with its first human implants, not at the stage of everyday, routine practice.

You'll agree that here it isn't me who got it wrong, but the esteemed Elon. In recent years he has once again distinguished himself with quite a few successful predictions, but also with plenty of ideas that turned out to be either impossible or too far ahead of their time. How far off is the age of brain chips? Either way, all the important questions on the subject remain fully relevant.

3. Where's the Decentralization?

“Web 3.0. What Does the New Era of the Internet Bring Us?,” May 18, 2021

Quote from the text:

Web 3.0 is expected to change this too. Thanks to the significantly higher level of security in data exchange, it will also be possible to exchange goods and services directly between individuals, businesses and machines, with no intermediary needed. The whole layer of the businesses we mentioned a moment ago will become redundant, because until now they were the link between the provider and the recipient of the service, and they guaranteed trust in the system.

ChatGPT:

This did not happen on the scale described. In 2026, Airbnb, eBay and Uber not only exist but keep reporting active business and financial results, which shows that intermediary platforms are far from extinct.

4. How Meta Took Us for a Ride

“Facebook Became Meta. What Does the Metaverse It Will Send Us To Look Like?”, October 28, 2021

Quote from the text:

According to Zuckerberg, if all goes well, the first version of the brave new world will be here within about five years. And I don't want to overdo the irony—I hope it really is brave and new, and some of the possibilities sound wonderful. As long as we are ready for them.

ChatGPT:

Avatar cohabitation in a metaverse did not become a near and mass norm. As of spring 2026, “the first version of the new world”—the metaverse—does not appear to have arrived in the promised sense. Meta reports continuing heavy losses at Reality Labs, and in March 2026 it announced that Horizon Worlds and its related virtual reality elements were being dropped from its plans, which is a sign of retreat and reshuffling, not of a successful early metaworld.

Zuckerberg certainly has a lot to say about the old Bulgarian saying that not everything that flies is fit to eat. The metaverse, at least so far, has turned out to be anything but the big subject and the big change of the future.

5. Car, Don't Drive! (For Now)

“Drive, Car!,” November 26, 2021

Quote from the text:

Autonomous cars won't keep us waiting; they will be here soon. Personally, I prefer riding a bike, and I can't wait for the moment when every driver will know where to give me the right of way. When there will be no risks while I wait at the traffic light.

ChatGPT:

As of April 9, 2026, autonomous cars are not “here” as a mass, normal everyday reality. Tesla itself writes that Full Self-Driving is supervised and “does not make the vehicle autonomous,” while Waymo has a real service, but in specific cities, not as a general market breakthrough. Yes, there is progress, but in 2026 the market is still split between limited autonomous services in a few cities and systems that officially require active human supervision.

Here, it seems, ethical and legal regulation is lagging behind the technological solutions. After so many increasingly successful trials, it's clear that we have technology that drives even more safely than humans. But how to make this happen in practice has obviously turned out to be a more complicated question. Still, I expect good news here too, and I stand by my expectation that we will soon have a completely different way and model of getting around.

6. Bye-Bye, Programmers!

“Will Artificial Intelligence Take the Bread Out of Programmers' Mouths?,” August 6, 2021

Quotes from the text:

Even if we get to the point of creating algorithms that write code, everything suggests that the moment when they will be able to do it autonomously is not too close. To do on their own the work of today's programmers—who are, in my opinion at least, somewhat spoiled by their social standing.

Since the flagship of the most advanced artificial intelligence systems is barely taking its first steps at the lowest level of programming, the moment when software will be able to make complex decisions, deliver finished projects and settle architectural questions seems, if not impossible, then far too distant.

ChatGPT:

This turned out to be too cautious. Already in 2025–2026, OpenAI describes Codex as a software engineering agent that works on many tasks in parallel, and Anthropic describes Claude Code as a system that reads code, makes changes to files, runs tests and works on the problem autonomously. OpenAI already describes Codex subagents for parallel complex processes, and Anthropic showcases a long-running mode of work with Claude on a C compiler project.

Exactly! It turns out I was cautious precisely in the field that earns me my bread. The fact is that today artificial intelligence is extremely advanced at producing computer code, and according to leading specialists we are close to, or have even reached, the time when programmers won't write computer code at all.

7. Death to Death

“What If One Day We Defeat Death?,” September 14, 2021

Quotes from the text:

That endless sleep, when we slip out of our mortal shell”… soon that moment may really be quite different.

And what if this same science, on the wings of technology, soon redeems itself by making human life, if not infinite (is there even such a thing as infinity?), then at least dramatically longer.

ChatGPT:

“No, it did not become ‘quite different’ soon. Even companies like Altos Labs talk about healthier lives and reversing disease and damage, not about an imminent victory over death. The best available estimates point to limited potential for increasing average life expectancy, not a dramatic leap in the near future.

With the boom in artificial intelligence combined with the huge interest in health topics because of the pandemic, very serious news and progress in medical technology really were expected. Well, on the whole, they are still expected…

8. Mind It

“Technology Can Already Read Minds. Is This the End of Freedom?,” April 21, 2023

Quote from the text:

This, according to Prof. Farahany, will very soon allow us to have convenient gadgets in our daily lives that can pick up our mood and judge whether we are focused and what we are imagining.

ChatGPT:

There is research and there are wearable EEG devices, but the literature in 2025–2026 still describes serious limitations: weak signal, artifacts, low reliability outside laboratory conditions. In addition, a leading review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences says the field is still mainly anchored in decoding motor and visual signals, not in rich reading of imagination and mood in everyday life.

This I definitely consider good news. The idea of mind reading is practically absent from public debate. Alas, I don't think that will last long.

9. Dr. Chatty

“How Much Does Truth Matter to Us Today?,” March 12, 2024

Quote from the text:

I imagine that artificial intelligence offering medical consultations will soon be very popular. It will be trained on very rich data, it will have the experience of millions of doctors, it will know a huge number of cases.

ChatGPT:

As of 2026, there are no grounds to say that this has already become a mass, trusted form of medical consultation. Reuters summarizes a study in Nature Medicine according to which asking AI about symptoms does not lead to better decisions than other methods, and the FDA continues to treat AI in medicine as a strictly regulated category with premarket pathways and separate guidance.

Here too, in my view, Mr. Chat is selling himself short. Both doctors and psychologists are noticing a boom in self-diagnosis with AI, and I think we have yet to see many more serious consequences of this phenomenon.

10. O Quantum, Where Art Thou?

“The Cat and the Quantum Computer,” May 11, 2021

Quote from the text:

“And according to the ‘fresh’ estimates of IBM scientists from March 2021, the new era in this field begins very soon—in 2023. According to the company's researchers, humanity will have a good enough quantum computer by the mid-2020s.”

ChatGPT: “It did not begin. In 2025–2026, IBM itself is already saying that its first truly large-scale, reliably working quantum computer is planned for 2029, and for 2026 it speaks not of a ‘new era’ but of some expected progress.”

The fact is that the long-awaited quantum computing revolution is still awaited. The topic has somewhat faded from the public stream in the shadow of the big winner—AI—but I don't think that will last long.

11. Et Tu, Blockchain?

“Blockchain Still Connects Us…,” June 4, 2021

Quote from the text:

The same will now happen with money and micropayments. The banking system, IBAN transfers, sending money and having it arrive three days later, credit and debit cards and the monopoly of Visa and Mastercard—all this is about to disappear.

ChatGPT:

This is very far from reality in 2026. The BNB, the Bulgarian National Bank, continues to maintain a register of licensed banks and branches of foreign banks in Bulgaria, and Visa reports 257.5 billion processed transactions and $14.2 trillion in payment volume for 2025.

And blockchain today is definitely not as large-scale a direction as was predicted. Yes, the ecosystem is developing, and it has its chance in the context of artificial intelligence too, but here as well the big news, if there is any at all, remains for the future.

12. Taking the Bread

“What Will We Do When a Third of Jobs Disappear?,” October 22, 2024

Quote from the text:

The development of artificial intelligence confronts us with an unprecedented, all-encompassing social transformation. While we neglect the progress in this field, big companies are investing in multibillion-dollar projects through which machines could replace a third of the jobs on the planet in the near future.

ChatGPT:

This is not visible as a reality of the “near future.” The World Economic Forum's 2025 report forecasts 170 million new jobs over the decade and a net balance in which AI and technology create 11 million jobs and displace 9 million, not a scenario of a third of all labor suddenly evaporating. PwC also writes that AI is so far making people “more valuable, not less,” including in highly automatable roles.

As someone who has already lost a job because of artificial intelligence, I would happily bet against both ChatGPT and even the World Economic Forum here. I won't, because in this case I have no desire whatsoever to win. These dramatic changes in the labor market keep getting closer, while preparation for them remains just as distant and illusory.

13. Where Did You Go, NF-T?

When Everyone Starts Talking About Bitcoin, Don't Buy!, October 26, 2021

Quote from the text:

In this field, I think there will soon be another explosion, and we are already seeing its first moments—art and the way artists sell it.

ChatGPT:

Exactly the opposite happened here. DappRadar describes a crash in the Art NFT market: from about $2.9 billion in volume in 2021 to $23.8 million in Q1 2025, which is a collapse, not an “explosion.” And in 2025 the NFT market kept shrinking in volume, including in the segment specifically tied to art.

14. Want to Bet?

“AI and the End of Stock Exchanges,” June 9, 2023

Quote from the text:

The ubiquitous adoption of AI in the financial industry will lead to traders with huge salaries losing their jobs as quickly as factory workers,” says Mark Minevich, founder of Going Global Ventures.

ChatGPT:

No such rapid collapse is visible. The closest official picture, from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), shows that the occupations of people engaged in securities trading have a projected 3 percent growth for 2024–2034 and around 38,100 new positions, so it does not look like a profession about to vanish suddenly. Even the Financial Stability Board in 2025 still speaks of the controlled introduction of AI and the related risks in the financial sector, which sounds like a sector in the process of adoption and oversight, not one already “transformed from the ground up.”

15. The Guilt?

“But… the Guilt?,” March 2, 2021

Quote from the text:

The artificial intelligence journalist is already here. It will only keep getting better, and it will try to take the bread out of the mouths of an entire profession…

ChatGPT:

AI really has entered journalism, but it has not “taken the bread” of the profession in the sense of mass displacement of journalists. In 2025, the Reuters Institute reports a major trust problem: only 12 percent feel comfortable with fully AI-generated news, compared with 62 percent for fully human-made news. Even when AI is used, audiences want human control, not journalism without journalists.

Really? Today we don't read generated content everywhere around us at all, and this doesn't apply in the slightest to journalism, which is enjoying a golden age and a return of trust.

If only that were so. Even if it happens, it won't be soon. And I'm glad we had this chance to look at some of the predictions of Digital Stories, to have some fun with them and to give them some thought. And if you, too, think it matters that we keep this conversation going and keep trying to peer into the future, join this important experiment before the end of the month. I believe it matters, and I will be endlessly grateful to you. Read this text to the end!

“We remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm it or deny it.”

Sounds timely, doesn't it? More timely by the day, in fact. With the first quarter of the 21st century behind us, we have surrounded every step of our lives with technology. It dictates our working days, it connects us to the people closest to us, and to a large extent it shapes the way we think. By all appearances, we are nowhere near the limit of this love-hate dependence—quite the opposite. With the rise of artificial intelligence, we face the next generation of challenges. And that strips us of more and more freedom in exchange for overtrust.

The words above belong to a man who never scrolled through Facebook or TikTok and never held a smartphone in his hand. And perhaps that is exactly why the social dissection he offers of our relationship with technology is so precise and impartial, so prophetic and so historical. It comes from the past to give us a new view of the future.

Martin Heidegger was one of the most controversial philosophers of the 20th century. Today his words—specifically about our relationship with technology—matter more than ever. Here are 10 selected quotes for us to discuss.

1. AI Out of the Bottle

“The will, as they say, is to ‘get technology spiritually in hand.’ The will is to master it. The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control.”

Heidegger was controversial in his own time, but he is undoubtedly the philosopher who managed to capture the spirit of the great subject. Technology, technique, is here to change every aspect of the way we interact as human beings.

2. Precious Captivity

“Above all, modern technology is not a tool and no longer has anything to do with tools. I am not saying that we are captives of technology, but that we do not yet have a path that corresponds to the essence of technology.”

The philosopher was born four years after the Unification—the 1885 union of the Principality of Bulgaria with Eastern Rumelia—in 1889, in the small town of Messkirch. “Kirch” means church in German, and he, too, was first drawn to theology before deciding to devote himself to philosophy. Incidentally, he is the very philosopher who said that his own discipline would soon be replaced by cybernetics.

Early in his academic career he was captivated by logic. During the First World War he served in the army, though far from the front for health reasons. In 1917 he married Elfride Petri, with whom he stayed for the rest of his life.

In 1927 he published Being and Time—a book that rearranged 20th-century philosophy with the idea that the key to being runs through concrete human existence.

3. Democracy, You Say?

“Over the past thirty years it should have become clear that the planetary movement of modern technology is a force whose magnitude cannot be underestimated. For me today the decisive question is how a political system—and which one—can be adapted to the technological age at all. I have no answer to this question. I am not convinced that it is democracy.”

I'm not at all convinced either, at least not in the form we know it. And yet it is extraordinary, almost impossible, to imagine that Heidegger reached these insights long before computers became widespread, before anyone was even talking about artificial intelligence.

But why did we say he was controversial? In 1933 the philosopher became rector of the University of Freiburg and joined the National Socialist Party. His rectoral address from that same year remains one of the most debated documents connected with his name. In 1934 he resigned as rector, but his party membership and the positions he took during that period left a lasting mark on how he is regarded.

After the Second World War he was banned from teaching. He was rehabilitated in the late 1940s, but he would suffer all his life for the decision to support the Nazis. Some of his actions weigh heavily here too: as rector, he refused to appoint two lecturers because of their Jewish origin, and for the same reason he himself removed the dedication of his best-known book, which had been dedicated to his teacher Edmund Husserl.

4. Uprooted Man

“What is uncanny is precisely that technology is uprooting man from the earth more and more. I was frightened when I saw the pictures of the Earth taken from the Moon. We don't need an atomic bomb at all. The uprooting of man is already a fact. All that remains are purely technological relationships. What man lives on today is no longer the earth. Recently in Provence I had a long conversation with René Char, the poet and Resistance fighter. In Provence, rocket bases are now being built, and the land is being laid waste in unimaginable ways. The poet, who certainly cannot be suspected of sentimentality or of glorifying the idyllic, told me that the uprooting of man now under way is the end, unless thinking and poetry once again become a nonviolent power.”

Of course, let him who is without sin cast the first stone, as one popular read puts it, but it is only fair to mention that at the same time many other scientists who had collaborated with the Nazis enjoyed worldwide fame—it is enough to recall Wernher von Braun, who took man to the Moon.

Unlike Heidegger, who is often called “the spineless genius”—largely undeservedly, though that only became known after his death in 1976. Exactly a decade earlier, two journalists from Der Spiegel visited his home for a lengthy interview. In it, the philosopher spoke at length about the decisions he was accused of. But he also laid out his remarkable views on the future interaction between humans and technology. Most of the quotes you are reading come from that interview; the rest are from the 1954 lecture “The Question Concerning Technology.”

He himself insisted that the interview be published after his death, which, alas, makes it impossible (for now) to ask him follow-up questions. But there is no need, I believe, as you will see for yourselves that sometimes questions matter more than answers. And that pure, meaningful scholarship can sometimes look like a prophecy come true.

5. Man on Call

“I see the essence of technology in what I call ‘Ge-stell,’ an often ridiculed and perhaps clumsy expression. The rule of ‘Ge-stell’ means that man is placed at the disposal of, claimed and challenged by a power that is revealed in the essence of technology and that he himself does not control. Thinking asks nothing more than to help bring about this insight. Philosophy is at an end.”

Aren't we, more than ever, at the disposal of technology, which is supposedly meant to help us, to make things easier for us, to give our lives meaning? And not it at ours…

Don't we depend on the battle for attention? Don't we increasingly find our meaning in the reaction that reaches us through technology? Don't we fear technology and thrill to it at once?

Aren't we led along the thread of progress, doomed to greet every new technology that changes us, molding our daily lives like modeling clay, while as a species we remain just the same?

And in all this rush forward, couldn't art be the thing that leads us—even if only to slow us down?

6. Close Encounters

“That is precisely the great question: where does art stand? What is its place? I do not see what points the way for modern art, especially since it remains unclear what it sees as the innermost essence of art, or at least where it is looking for it.”

Or is it too late? Have we managed to welcome the new forms, genres, ideas and plots of art in the new and so very different times we live in? Will it ever happen? Is it even possible?

Heidegger lived at a time when television and the telephone were only just arriving, but he clearly sensed the trend: technology makes the world “smaller” in space and time. In the essay “The Thing” (1950) he wrote that “all distances in time and space are shrinking”—airplanes, radio and automobiles were removing the barriers. Then the internet erased geographical distance once and for all. But it turned out that “this frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in shortness of distance.”

Yes, art remains a form of survival. Even when algorithms write poetry indistinguishable from a human's. It's simply time for unexpected ideas.

7. Alone with the World's Destiny

“It is not a matter of simply waiting until, over the next 300 years, something occurs to man, but of thinking our way into the coming age, without prophetic pretensions, from the unthought fundamental features of the present era. Thinking is not inaction, but is in itself the action that stands in dialogue with the destiny of the world.”

I will never tire of repeating that this is why this site exists, just as I never tire of giving it a chance in its naive battle to start that conversation—about the world of technology and the path it is leading us down.

Heidegger approached the question of technology beyond its everyday understanding. What interested him, once again, was “the essence of technology”—that invisible something that makes modern inventions so all-pervasive.

For him, the essence of technology is not even something material. It is a way of revealing and disclosing the world. Technology does not simply serve man; it determines what we perceive as reality, and how.

8. Science and Technology

“Philosophy is dissolving into the individual sciences: psychology, logic, political science. And what will take the place of philosophy now? Cybernetics.”

Heidegger even adds that “modern science is an application of the essence of technology, not the other way around.”

From Heidegger we will come back to the everyday mundane drama of traffic cops, who will have to cope with the challenges of self-driving cars as well… —but they'll manage, I'm sure!—only to arrive at the most philosophical question of all.

What do we do now?

9. There's Water for Everyone

“The truth is that today man nowhere encounters himself, his own essence.”

Our lives change, and so does technology. The old windmills drew energy from the wind naturally—letting nature reveal itself in its useful aspect on its own. But as Heidegger says, modern technology challenges nature: it “demands” raw materials and energy from it and rearranges it according to human goals.

He gives the example of the Rhine. For the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, it is a “majestic, free-born river that flows with its own voice and spirit.” For modern man, however, it is just an object “placed at our disposal.” “The river now flows only as an object on call for inspection by the tourist industry.”

In this way the technological gaze reduces things to their usefulness—we see the world through the eyes of an engineer or an accountant, and less and less often through the eyes of a poet.

10. On the Way

“What is dangerous is not technology itself. There is nothing demonic about technology; but there is a mystery in its essence. The essence of technology as a mission to reveal what is concealed. The threat to man does not come from the potentially deadly effects of machines and technical devices. The real threat has already affected man in his essence.”

Modern man easily gets lost in his own technological abundance. In the 1950s Heidegger wrote that “the truth is that today man nowhere encounters himself, his own essence.”

The technological environment lures us outward—toward the endless stream of stimuli and tasks—until we forget to look inward at ourselves.

Does that sound familiar in the age of the smartphone? Instead of staying alone with our thoughts, we check our messages. Instead of asking ourselves who we are, we scroll. And in these reflections on the screen, we lose ourselves.

Does anyone today talk to ChatGPT about philosophy? About literature? About meaning?

As we said, today is a time for questions, not answers. And, I hope, for a little admiration for Heidegger and for the people capable of peering beneath the surface of the topical. Are there still such people today?

– 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.

We all know we shouldn’t click on suspicious links, because it could cost us dearly…

But do we really know it? Time to check, with the latest Digital Stories experiment—and this time with impressive partners. The result is definitely worth a scare. Worth making us think. Worth giving us that healthy dose of doubt that can, quite literally, save us.

A Hunter and a Fisher…

How could anyone resist? An email lands in your inbox from a big chain of gas stations, offering a special discount. You click, you save a fair bit on your next fill-up… And if this weren’t an experiment but a real cyberattack, it could all end with a hacker gaining access to your personal data—and why not your bank account too.

Phishing—spelled differently in English, but derived from “fishing.” That is the name of one of the most popular cyberattacks of recent years, one that relies not on technological loopholes but on what may be the weakest link in the chain of information: common sense.

Hackers sometimes craft virtuoso emails, almost impossible to tell apart from the real thing, and use them to get the victim to click a malicious link. And then to regret it—phishing costs billions of dollars. Last year, it is estimated, nearly 900 million such attacks were attempted worldwide, and over 90 percent of organizations were targeted.

But maybe the problem doesn’t exist here in Bulgaria? Perhaps the Bulgarian online user will turn out to be well prepared enough to spot fake emails without fail, and would never, for anything in the world, fall for something like this?

Evening Roll Call

“Trust, but verify,” Mr. Reagan used to say, and as you know, verifying is what I love most here on Digital Stories. Checking how far both people and algorithms have come.

This time I’m not alone: we are running the experiment together with a leading Bulgarian cybersecurity company, for which checks like this are a profession. Very often, part of their job is to test the employees of companies and institutions—to see whether they are prone to fall for a fake email—so that training can then help them avoid the real attack.

Tellingly, the person running the experiment has no experience as a programmer, and yet will create a page made to look like that of a popular gas station chain. The attempt is especially revealing because it shows how much easier today’s technology makes it to mount such a cyberattack, with no particular preparation.

You’ve Got Mail

Who are we going to test? The goal isn’t, say, the employees of a particular institution, or a specific sample, demographic or otherwise. We decide to go with a list of randomly chosen emails that have surfaced online. We limit ourselves to people in Bulgaria with public addresses, with no restrictions on age or gender.

So the question is simple but vital: how easily would people hand over sensitive information, lured by an attractive but fake offer?

No sooner said than done. With basic software, we build a fake web page that quite successfully mimics the look of the official website of a popular gas station chain.

A curious detail: with today’s technology, this can be done without writing a single line of computer code. (And yes, in this case not even artificial intelligence was used!)

“The messages were worded to create a sense of a lucrative and urgent opportunity, prompting users to click a link that took them to our pre-prepared phishing page. There they were asked to enter their details in order to get their ‘discount,’” says the specialist who ran the experiment.

Of course, in the spirit of real phishing attacks, the email was sent from a domain that very closely resembles the genuine one.

In Their Image and Likeness

The results… frankly, they impressed us. We used emails we weren’t even sure were still active, and yet an astonishingly high percentage of people took the bait!

Our email reached 393 users. A full 69 of them (or 17.5 percent) followed the link. Clearly, the content of the email was convincing enough, and the users careless enough.

And now for the cherry on top. As many as 19 people (or 4.8 percent) uncritically entered their personal data into the fake form!

Does that seem like a small number? Think again.

Imagine you are a real hacker: you send a phishing email to thousands of users, and almost 5 percent of them are fooled to the point of entering sensitive data. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture the scale of the damage and the consequences… Especially if these are people using their work email. Having someone’s personal bank account drained is a nightmare and a real life drama, but the problems would become even bigger if this were how the security of an institution or a large company got compromised.

Bad Boys

19 stolen accounts.

If it hadn’t been me and my cybersecurity colleagues but real hackers, we would most likely be quite a bit richer by now…

Our goal, though, is even more important. For more of us to realize how fragile security online is. Over 27 percent of the people who landed on the site entered their personal data. That’s how effective a well-made phishing site can be.

And the other statistic points in the exact opposite direction. Emails reported: 0

You know you can always flag an email that is obviously trying to trick you. Not one of the owners of those 393 virtual mailboxes did.

I think it’s time for all of us to get a little scared…

“The data show a worrying reality: Bulgarian users are highly susceptible to phishing attacks, and the combination of a tempting offer and a convincing execution gives attackers a high success rate,” the cybersecurity specialist adds.

Click to Hell

So: are 69 people who clicked the link and 19 who entered sensitive data a lot or a little?

In the world of cybersecurity, even a single successful breach is too many.

The experiment clearly showed that there is a large, vulnerable group of people who can be misled by a well-crafted scenario.

What’s more, some users made repeated attempts to enter their data on our fake platform. This shows how convincing the scenario can be—people were so sure of the offer that they kept insisting on getting in, handing over their sensitive information again and again.

Abandon All Hope

Each of these 19 cases represents a huge risk. “Compromised passwords and usernames are often reused to access other services,” says the specialist. “Personal email, social media profiles, sometimes even online banking. That way a single incident can put the victim’s entire digital identity, financial stability and personal reputation at risk.

“This social engineering simulation unambiguously underlines the need for a constant, targeted improvement in cyber hygiene. It has to become second nature to us. It’s important for all of us to build a culture of vigilance that helps us stand up effectively to ever-evolving online threats.”

Truly, it is more important than ever to be vigilant. Here’s how.

Warning!

Before we part, here are the key elements of the “attack” that made it successful. These are exactly the things to watch out for if you want to avoid real trouble.

Until then, watch out for:

1. The Look-Alike Domain

A key step was buying an internet domain resembling that of the real company. The technique is called “typosquatting”—you register a name containing a deliberate misspelling or a visual resemblance to the original (for example, “oilc0mpany.com” instead of “oilcompany.bg”). That way, even if users glance at their browser’s address bar, there’s a good chance they won’t notice the tiny difference and will accept the site as legitimate.

2. The Fake Promotional Page

The next step was to recreate a page that looked like part of the gas station chain’s official website. We copied the logo, the colors, the fonts and the overall design to build a sense of authenticity. We added a form for users to enter their information. Since the campaign wasn’t aimed at collecting sensitive data (and yes, we’ve deleted the rest too!), we limited ourselves to four fields: first name, last name, phone number and address.

3. The Tempting Email

The phishing message itself was the heart of the operation. We sent the emails from a mail server set up specifically for the purpose, to improve the chances of getting past spam filters. We altered the sender so that it matched the gas station chain’s real domain. The content was short, clear and extremely tempting:

Offer:

“Take advantage of an extra 20 STOTINKI” (stotinki being the hundredths of a Bulgarian lev)

Call to action:

A clearly visible button and a link reading “ACTIVATE THE DISCOUNT.”

Creating a sense of urgency:

To make recipients act on impulse, we added an element of urgency—phrases like “Don’t miss this opportunity!” This psychological trick is extremely effective, because it cuts down the time for critical thinking.

– 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…

Is there any way to predict the future? Not a chance.

Is it worth trying? Without a doubt!

Because by discussing it, we steer it. Because of self-fulfilling prophecies. Because the moment we stop looking ahead, we let ourselves drift with the current.

Making predictions, especially about technology, is delicate work measured in nanometers. I say this as someone who has been collecting predictions for five years now and loves rereading them later, to laugh at his own naivety (an important and somewhat forgotten skill, by the way).

One of the traditions of Digital Stories is that every year begins with a visit from Assoc. Prof. Mariana Todorova. A researcher at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS), she is boldly and tirelessly clearing the way for futurology as a science in Bulgaria. Her predictions make you think, make sense of things and make sense themselves, and a conversation with her is an adventure.

The tradition will continue—the second Digital Story of 2026 is precisely our annual meeting with Assoc. Prof. Todorova. First, though, just hours after we rang in the new year, I have an especially interesting experiment for you. The “we” in the headline is a figure of speech; we will check directly against the guest’s own words.

Have her predictions from our conversations so far come true, and to what extent?

(If you only care about the final score, you’ll find it here.)

2022

You may not remember where you were on June 28, 2022. Don’t worry, Google remembers (with all the problems that come with that). I remember too, because that was the day I first recorded an interview with Assoc. Prof. Todorova, which you can find here. The things the researcher told me were so thought-provoking that I decided to arrange a conversation with her every year. That is how the interviews at the start of 2024 and 2025 came about.

Can we check what has happened in the meantime, and whether it confirmed or refuted the futurologist’s words? How can we do it impartially? I will pick 20 specific quotes from the interviews and find an unemotional analyst to grade them.

In a book I love, death is called “the Great Equalizer,” but the words apply to ChatGPT as well. I will offer our brand-new “friend,” version 5.2, specific quotes and ask it to grade how accurate they have turned out to be from the vantage point of the dawning 2026.

Here are specific excerpts from the Digital Stories featuring Assoc. Prof. Todorova, along with the AI’s brief verdict on how right she has proved to be as of today, garnished with a score on a ten-point scale. Let’s do a little time travel!

AI. And?

“The cause for concern today should be that we cannot control many of the risks. Especially with neural networks, programmers cannot see what happens below the third layer. It is known that OpenAI has a very serious breakthrough and will most likely announce it soon—the GPT-4 model. They keep launching a model, releasing it for testing, and when they see something worrying, for instance a very strongly expressed bias, they stop it and change it; huge teams work on this.”

ChatGPT:

This prediction turns out to be largely correct. OpenAI did announce the GPT-4 model in March 2023, about a year after this prediction. The concern that deep neural networks are “black boxes”—that even their creators do not fully understand their internal logic—was also confirmed. In 2023 OpenAI acknowledged that it continues to improve and test its models to reduce bias and dangerous deviations.

Score: 9/10

Out of Control

“The impossibility of sufficient control is a problem professionals have to solve, if they can. I think that in the long run it won’t be possible. The more advanced artificial intelligence becomes, the more it will take on the characteristics of a black box, which is what our brain is, too. And not because we program it wrong, or programmers aren’t good enough; it is simply an extremely complicated and complex system.”

ChatGPT:

Here again we see strong accuracy. As of the end of 2025 there is still no reliable solution for full control and explainability of the most advanced AI systems. On the contrary—AI safety experts note that with a sufficiently powerful “general” AI, achieving complete obedience or fully predictable behavior is fundamentally impossible. The development of deep learning has made models extremely complex and practically opaque, so that even their creators do not understand every internal state in detail.

Score: 9/10

At Every Turn

“There is no human sphere that will remain untouched by digital technologies driven by artificial intelligence. My plea has always been to consider it separately, because the other technologies truly have all the parameters of technologies, while it is developing in a direction where we will have to think of it in completely different categories, even as a separate entity. From our birth to our death, every human field will be permeated by these technologies. Including purely biological processes and ones we are not used to thinking of as a business niche.”

ChatGPT:

In the middle of the decade we see artificial intelligence spreading widely into almost every sector and aspect of life. From the creative industries (e.g., generative art and content) to medicine and biology, AI technologies are already applied everywhere. Statistics show that demand for AI skills is growing in almost every industry. In other words, the prediction that every sphere “from birth to death” will be affected is coming true to a large extent.

Score: 8/10

Dear Chat, if it’s so accurate, why only an 8? Oh well, you know best…

You’re It!

“It seems to me that at some point humanity and our development begin adapting to technology, rather than the other way around. And this cognitive decline, this mediocrity, the twilight of expertise and science, seems to me to be adapting to a kind of technologized and very sterile thinking. People look for shortcuts; in science these are called heuristics. When I appear on television, in 10 minutes they ask me questions that need 20 hours, and not everything can be digested and presented, so it becomes unscientific and devalued.”

ChatGPT:

There are worrying signs that society really is sliding toward the “shortcuts” and superficial knowledge this prediction warns about. In the era of smartphones and chatbots, people often rely on instant answers instead of deep understanding—a phenomenon known as “digital amnesia” or cognitive offloading. At the same time we are seeing a devaluation of expertise—influencers and bloggers often drown out the voices of scientists, and complex topics are simplified to the point of distortion.

Score: 9/10

Strengths

“We see AI entering every field; in the creative ones it is forming new niches, new types of art, and in medicine it can detect abnormalities at the micro level. Simply because we don’t have the cognitive ability to handle such a volume of information and find patterns.”

ChatGPT:

This claim is unambiguously confirmed by what has happened in recent years. In the creative fields AI has indeed created entirely new niches. New kinds of art and tools have appeared (from musical compositions to visual art) that would not have been possible without AI. In medicine the picture is the same: AI systems analyze huge sets of data and images and detect minute anomalies that escape human eyes. For example, algorithms already recognize tumors in scans with over 94% accuracy, outperforming specialist radiologists.

Score: 9/10

Before It Was Trendy

“It’s underestimated because people don’t see the examples, or rather don’t pay attention to them. They watch Hollywood movies, at most they talk to Siri or Alexa, but very soon they will start noticing more applications.”

ChatGPT:

The prediction that ordinary people underestimate AI because they know it only from movies or simple apps like Siri, but will soon see its real applications en masse, came true spectacularly: the arrival of accessible, powerful AI such as ChatGPT at the end of 2022 literally exploded public attention. In just two months ChatGPT gathered 100 million users—the fastest growth of any consumer service in history.

Score: 9/10

Poor, poor Chat, I know modesty becomes a person, but why won’t even your own success, brilliantly predicted in my view, make you give the top score? Perhaps we need a more impartial arbiter.

In a Rush, No Time

“People are becoming disoriented, and technology contributes to that. Every day the world produces as much information as in the last 8,000 years before technology. But we have no time at all to reflect on it, to draw conclusions. There could well be a strong tendency for humanity to turn toward the sciences of mental health, of self-improvement. But there will probably also be a very strong trend toward merging with technology—technological absolutism, and what will de facto turn us into cyborgs.”

ChatGPT:

This prediction, too, is confirmed by present-day reality. Information overload is a real problem—we live in an age of a constant stream of data and news, which makes deep processing of information difficult. Many people really do feel disoriented. In response, both predicted trends can be observed.

Score: 9/10

“We live?”… Seriously, “we live”?

Who Swept Away Meta

“The metaverse, which I expect to explode in the next 5 years, to virtualize and create a mixed reality, will distort things even further. Today we have no strongholds to hold on to. This disorientation will become dangerous; it will lead to social clashes. What’s more—we see that actions don’t matter, and it is words and messages that have a very powerful effect.”

ChatGPT:

Here the accuracy is mixed. The assumption that the metaverse (VR/AR worlds) would “explode” and change reality on a mass scale within 5 years has not been borne out so far. From 2022 to the end of 2025 the metaverse did not see the expected boom—on the contrary, enthusiasm waned. The rest, however—about dangerous disorientation and the role of words—rings true. The high pace of change and the lack of “strongholds” (stable truths or authorities) continue to confuse society. We have witnessed social tensions and clashes fueled by disinformation and divisive narratives.

Score: 5/10

Fair enough, AI has dominated tech news lately. But let me just note that the five-year deadline has not passed yet, and Mr. Zuckerberg and his metaverse may still have the last laugh.

2024

And here we are at the start of 2024, with Assoc. Prof. Todorova’s predictions from our interview exactly two years ago.

The Road Has No Deadline

“We have enormous opportunities, but we may fall into the trap of the easy road. The way the knowledge behind Apollo was lost. If, because of ChatGPT and the other models, programmers themselves stop developing mathematical code and that knowledge is lost within a generation or two, what happens? What if we walk into this trap, simply instrumentalize everything and replace mathematics with a symbolic game?”

ChatGPT:

This warning is relatively new and is only beginning to be assessed, but there are already signs that the risks are real. With the spread of tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, which can generate program code or solutions, there is a concern that young programmers and engineers may not master fundamental knowledge in depth. At present we cannot say the knowledge is “lost,” but trends are emerging.

Score: 8/10

Don’t Look Up!

“The whole situation for a long time, since COVID, since before GPT-3, strongly resembles the film Don’t Look Up. We face problems at different levels, of different natures, that we cannot solve, and we stand frozen, like a deer in the headlights. It is truly strange that we don’t strive in every way to solve the environmental and climate problems. Even after the worst cataclysm, Earth would have far better living conditions than Mars or the Moon.”

ChatGPT:

Here we have a socio-political comment that still rings true today. The annual climate summits (COP) reach partial agreements, but greenhouse gas emissions keep rising. In recent years we have also seen a stronger focus on space programs and plans for the Moon and Mars. The described situation of multiple unresolved crises and human inaction is spot on. There is no specific event that refutes it—on the contrary, the trend of insufficient action against the climate threat continues.

Score: 9/10

Will we ever get a ten out of this strict “teacher”?

Flights of Politics

“The problem is that the political person has disappeared; he is in some kind of crisis. This concerns even society’s ability to hold a dialogue through the political person, as a collective notion—politician, leader, party representative. It is a consequence of the crisis of ideologies; it disrupts dialogue in society and the possibility of anyone representing it.”

ChatGPT:

This is a diagnosis of the state of contemporary politics confirmed by many observations. In many countries traditional ideologies and parties have lost influence and trust. We are witnessing a crisis of the classic “political person”—declining party membership, low voter turnout, fragmentation of political landscapes.

Score: 9/10

Hybrid Times

“We live in hybrid times, a function of social media, which struck at the classic authorities and put influencers, bloggers and experts, rather than scientists, in their place. We need to work in this direction—the restoration, the reinvention of democracy, so that there are clear actors. They should make clear decisions and be held accountable, because tech leaders are not obliged to do so. We see that nation-states are powerless. That is why there must be global mechanisms, an institution resembling a global government, only on truly essential issues.”

ChatGPT:

This is more an analysis with a recommendation, which hits the symptoms well, but the proposal for a “global government” remains theoretical. It accurately describes how social media undermined the classic authorities. The problem of tech giants not taking responsibility is also a fact—social platforms have enormous influence on public debate without corresponding accountability or regulation.

Score: 8/10

Yes, here the prediction is tied to an optimistic development, and that hasn’t happened. Which is exactly why the Digital Stories site exists…

Make Haste Slowly

“Everything has become very fluid, because we live in a state of constant change. It is so constant and frequent that there is no need even to think about the future; we live with the feeling that the future is now, that everything is getting faster and faster. That the future is far poorer in metaphors and meaning than it has ever been. In such turbulent times, instead of adapting to rapid change, being like chameleons, people harden and seek conservatism, some kind of stronghold. That is why they choose unfit, elderly leaders, because in the past old age was a guarantee of wisdom.”

ChatGPT:

This insightful socio-psychological observation is confirmed by reality in many societies. The speed of change—technological, cultural, economic—is truly unprecedented, which gives many people the feeling that the ground beneath their feet is unstable. So instead of joyfully embracing the new, many feel anxiety and a longing for security. This is precisely what explains the rising conservative tendencies around the world.

Score: 9/10

Who’s Taming Whom?

“Humanity has not yet fully felt the true effect of what has already been achieved technologically. We are very conservative and are starting to build adaptive responses. Some deny it, others attribute human characteristics to it. Still others say they are taming it, but in fact artificial intelligence is taming us. Even friends of mine believe it is conscious, that it understands them, that it changes its behavior every day; they ascribe human attributes to it. But the fact that we communicate with it as with an animal or another person is a process of getting to know it, of overestimating or underestimating the situation. We have no real assessment!”

ChatGPT:

This description of the various human reactions to advanced AI is fully confirmed by what has happened to date. With the arrival of chatbots like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, personal AI assistants and others, people reacted in divergent ways: some deny the abilities of these systems and call them mere “text machines,” while others attribute human traits to them, even believing that AI “understands them and has feelings.” Ultimately, we agree with the author that society still has no real, sober assessment of AI—we lack a collective understanding of what exactly a large language model is, where its limits lie and where its risks are.

Score: 10/10

Hallelujah! 10 out of 10 for you too, colleague!

No Work Today

“The statistics on how many people have lost their jobs haven’t come out yet. They will, and then there will be a sobering moment, because there are quite a few. In America, I think 70 to 80 percent of copywriters no longer do that work, and the same will turn out for accountants and legal analysts. When these 3 elements sink in, there will be a new attitude.”

ChatGPT:

This speaks of an impending shock from data on jobs lost to AI. As of the end of 2025 there are still no official statistics attributing a specific percentage of layoffs directly to AI, but clear indications of such an effect are beginning to appear. In writing and content marketing—copywriters, content editors—the arrival of generative models has led to serious cuts. The prediction that a sobering moment will come once real statistics are released has yet to be validated.

Score: 8/10

You’re so optimistic, Mr. Chat, simply because, unlike me, you have never lost a job to the advance of AI. Whatever that might mean in the spirit of philosophical scholasticism.

Winter Is Coming, Winter Is Coming!

“The factors that could lead to an AI winter are falling away one after another. Which is frightening, because at times we humans resemble monkeys playing with fire.”

ChatGPT:

After the boom of recent years, it is becoming clear that no “AI winter” is expected in the near future—that is, there is no visible decline in interest, funding or progress, as happened twice in the 20th century.

Score: 9/10

It really is strange! I have interviewed so many people on these topics, and in the development of technology the cycle has practically no exceptions—the boom of the latest “new thing” is followed by a lull, a cooling off, or even the bursting of the bubble. With AI, however, things are quite different for now…

2025

And now we are only a year back. Yes, the time frame is still rather short, which is why there are fewest predictions here for Mr. Chat to grade.

Common Ground

“Today it makes sense for children to learn everything that interests them. Some people’s analysis that there is no need to learn facts, to accumulate basic knowledge the way it has been done until now, is partial. Yes, indeed, our education system is at a 19th-century level, as Jack Ma says, while it has to cope with the conditions of the 21st century.”

ChatGPT:

As of 2025 this prediction is only partly confirmed. Despite some people’s opinion that factual knowledge is no longer needed, research shows that even in the age of AI, building basic knowledge remains critical for higher-order thinking. The education system does indeed continue to lag behind modern needs, as Jack Ma warns.

Score: 7/10

A Bit of This, a Bit of That

“In this era, in which we are about to reinvent ourselves, we will create many unconventional, interdisciplinary niches in which, say, a musician and a neurobiologist will produce some new AI audio product. That is, we are still at a stage where we can rather learn anything, as long as we are open, knowing that this may be basic knowledge we will have to build on and combine with much else.”

ChatGPT:

There are signs that this prediction is coming true. In recent years new interdisciplinary projects have appeared that combine different fields—for example, initiatives that bring together neuroscience, artificial intelligence and music to create innovations in mental health. Experts also stress the need to bridge the divide between the sciences and the arts, since creative breakthroughs often occur at the intersection of different disciplines.

Score: 9/10

Slowly Getting Dumber

“With the new capabilities of AI as a voice agent, people will also lose the ability to write, to read, to use language correctly. From now on we will need a great deal of self-discipline to master things we have used for millennia but which now seem unnecessary. This will happen in order to preserve our intelligence, not because we immediately need it.”

ChatGPT:

Although it is too early to speak of a mass loss of literacy, early data show that excessive reliance on AI weakens some of our writing and critical thinking skills.

Score: 8/10

Fast, Bold, Skillful

“Here we see not just development but exponential development. Our brain can’t even imagine what is going on. There is no way we can say it will create just as many professions. Yes, new ones are appearing—and one AI product at a startup, if it is successful, requires project managers, people who will deliver the service or product. These are new jobs, that’s a fact. But on the other hand, they are for people who are good specialists and can do their tasks, not just any jobs.”

ChatGPT:

Observations to date support the claim that the rapid progress of AI does not lead to equivalent growth in employment. Global analyses predict that in the coming years automation will eliminate more jobs than it creates.

Score: 9/10

Et Tu, Chat?

So the arbiter, in my view, turned out to be rather stern—it confirmed almost every claim and how it has become reality, yet in numerical terms it proved far less generous. I understand it, too, and I see the conflict of interest in its actions, but I couldn’t have found a more cold-blooded grader.

Of course, as always, I make no claim that the scores are scientific—this is an entirely journalistic experiment, but one that I believe is impartial, important and telling enough.

85%

That is exactly the average score of the 15 statements from Assoc. Prof. Todorova’s three interviews, according to our judge. To me, at least, it is astonishingly high. One more reason I can’t wait to hear, as soon as next week, what Assoc. Prof. Todorova will tell us about the year ahead. I hope you can’t either—there is definitely good reason, just ask ChatGPT!

The internet keeps connecting us, and the internet keeps dividing us. But how many parts of our lives have we handed over to technology? We rarely stop to think about it. And the Christmas holidays are the perfect moment to do just that. If you've grown a little weary of festive emotions and laden tables, I've prepared a special Digital Story for you.

Today's heroine found love on the internet. That unexpected spark online took her to England, where she built a happy family. Until, at some point, she and her husband decided they wanted to escape… from a society in which everything happens online and human contact is a relic of the past.

Individual stories make up our shared history, and Daniela Radkova's tale ends in a place that is very special to that shared history. And with causes that are beautifully symbolic, especially for the holidays.

Farewell

How many women do you know who can parachute? Until recently, I didn't know any either. Daniela grew up in the Rhodopes, the mountains of southern Bulgaria, and her path led her to… a military unit in Plovdiv, where she trained as a paratrooper. She says the scariest jump isn't the first one but the second—when you already know what's coming.

The scariest leap into the unknown, however, came later, long after she had left the unit. After a painful breakup with her ex-boyfriend, she was killing time on the internet. Those were the days when Facebook “farms” were all the rage, and she topped them off with movies and random chats with all sorts of people. Only to run into, by chance… a colleague from her army days whom she had not liked one little bit. In the meantime he had moved to England. They exchanged a few words… and then the road carried them so far that it led to three sons.

The small talk grew into an endless chat, and having set out on that road, Daniela walked it to the end. “He suggested, ‘Why don't you come to me in England?’ And, to my own surprise, I answered, ‘Why not?’”

To My First Love

In England, the adventure was only beginning. At first the young couple worked on a mushroom farm. Work permits were required back then, and once they got them, they decided to move on. Their next job was at a kitchen cabinet factory… But can you picture former soldiers, people who had jumped out of planes professionally, standing in one spot doing repetitive, monotonous tasks? Exactly. You can't.

“We were at the second-largest kitchen company in England. We advanced enormously, they respected us, but at some point… the same thing over and over, cabinet, cabinet, cabinet. I told my husband I had to change jobs because I couldn't take it anymore.”

A friend suggested she start as a delivery driver for Amazon. Before long, the pioneer of e-commerce welcomed Daniela's husband too.

“But at some point in England we fell into the same rut as everyone else. You sit on the couch, go to the water company's website, pay for your water, pay for your electricity, your gas. You need pens, you go to the site and order. You need a TV, you go and order… At one point I realized we had no social life at all! We had turned into little robotic figures that went to work.”

And so we arrive at Covid and the times when delivery drivers were the only people who could move among others with relative freedom. (How quickly we forget such supposedly unforgettable things!)

A Dark Cloud Looms

“It was eerie and awful,” Daniela recalls. “Only us drivers were on the road—everyone else was locked inside. At some point I felt I simply couldn't bear it. We had turned into robots!”

“That's when life online grew even more. People started working from home. Every day you pass the same house, drop off some parcel, and watch the children's room disappear, renovations begin, and in its place appears a room with a monitor. Then two monitors, three. People began shutting themselves in completely. They even stopped getting dressed and stayed in their loungewear. They stopped going out. Social life stopped. You pass by every day and see it changing before your eyes. We decided it wasn't for us. That we wouldn't cope with this digital way of life.”

Right around then their second son was born. The parents knew they didn't want him growing up in a robotic daily routine, and that it was time to return to their roots. The family made the big decision in 2022 and parachuted back home, 12 years after they had flown off to Albion.

Patriot

You've probably noticed (ChatGPT certainly would, if you asked it) that the subheadings in this piece are the titles of poems by perhaps our best-known poet—Hristo Botev, the nineteenth-century revolutionary—whose poems, for all that, can be counted on our fingers and toes.

It is Botev's hometown, Kalofer, a small town at the foot of the Balkan Mountains, that is home to Daniela and her family today. The now former (or perhaps future, who knows?) paratrooper runs a little souvenir shop, where we are greeted by a colorful jumble of just about everything except… the most typical local “product”—Kalofer lace. The town's shopkeepers have agreed not to sell the most iconic item, because doing so would drastically cut the number of people who visit the museum devoted to the traditional craft.

Daniela started with an online business, then noticed that the web was full of handmade crafts that simply had nowhere to be seen outside the web.

My Prayer

Back in England she had set up a page for handmade baby accessories. “The problem with online shopping was that you couldn't see these things physically anywhere. Online stores are a great opportunity, but you can't always choose exactly what you want just by looking at a picture. I wanted to make a shop you could walk into, see things, touch them. Look at the colors, lay the patterns side by side.”

So she decided to open a baby shop in Kalofer. But somehow, naturally, slowly and inexorably… souvenirs crowded out the baby accessories. People come to the center of this National Revival–era town and, as they stroll, look for fridge magnets, wooden spoons, cutting boards. The baby shop became a souvenir shop. It still takes orders from people who remember the page from her England days, but that has taken a back seat.

Kalofer had another surprise in store for her. After her eldest son was conceived following a long struggle and with the help of IVF, and her second child arrived at the very height of Covid, again with the help of medication… a third young man unexpectedly joined the family.

And so today the digital detox is a fact. Daniela, who met her husband online and went through the technological alienation on the island, now enjoys a healthy life surrounded by relatives in a small town.

In the Tavern

Why Kalofer of all places? Daniela's husband comes from this picturesque mountain town. And “a person born in the Balkan Mountains or by the sea can never tear themselves away from them,” she says.

Today, being far from the big city helps Daniela and her husband be happy. But that's not all: thanks to those very same technologies, they can do all kinds of things, including… successfully completing a distance-learning degree in England.

Daniela is adamant that education shouldn't be a reason that stops people from returning to smaller towns. “Right now the big brother goes to English lessons, swimming, even football in Karlovo. If one day he decides to study somewhere else, let him try. There are rented rooms. People have always survived that way, but today we seem to have spoiled our children a bit.

At 14 I went to Plovdiv, on my own, to a rented room with another girl who, until then, had lived in the same little village in the Rhodopes, with landlords—an old granny and grandpa. It's nothing so dramatic; back then so many kids managed that way.”

To Her

“In a small town everyone's opinion is always being heard. One person says you're good, and everyone thinks you're good. One says you're bad—everyone thinks you're bad. Someone is always gossiping about what you do, why you do it, how you do it. But that's where the bad part ends. In Kalofer you'll never go hungry or thirsty, or be stranded on the road. Someone will come, help you, take you home. Whenever you need something, even if the shops are closed, there are always neighbors and people to count on. You have work to do—everyone will rush over to help. Call a neighbor at 10 p.m. and they'll give you milk, rice—whatever you've run out of and need.

“I'm very glad we went back to the old ways,” Daniela says. “I really like that more and more people are doing it. They realize they need to dig their hands into the soil and how much energy that gives you. Childhood is completely different here, too. I got out of the habit of locking the door long ago—there's simply no need. My child goes out to play, a whole gang moves around in a swarm, and they have lunch wherever is closest—at our place or someone else's.

In Kalofer it's as if time stopped 30 years ago; modernization is creeping in slowly but can't push out the traditional. There's one ATM in town, and survival is largely a matter of barter. I give you eggs, you give me milk. But there's the other side too—just now an old granny left me a little money ‘to treat myself,’ because I spent 30 minutes ordering things for her from Temu for a serious sum. In the end she was so pleased she didn't know how to thank me.”

Struggle

In recent years Daniela has kept finding causes to devote part of her time to.

Today she is focusing her efforts mainly on two: renovating the town's neglected cinema and getting new books for the town library.

She doesn't meet many kindred spirits along the way, but, as she puts it herself, sometimes happiness loves silence.

She is determined not to give up until she secures a comfortable hall where her children, and those of the whole town, can enjoy a movie without traveling dozens of kilometers. And also to bring back children's and parents' interest in books. The little town's library definitely needs new and interesting titles.

Her family is skeptical, her acquaintances are puzzled, but she is set on reaching her goal and giving the town its new treasures. And Christmas is the perfect moment…, when even the most devoted digital adepts step away from their consoles to share stuffed cabbage rolls with their relatives. If you haven't yet found a good deed to do for the holidays, Daniela's causes are definitely a fine opportunity.

Quizzes, charity auctions, initiatives… Daniela has taken on no small number of ventures, and we can all help her, little by little and hand in hand. Let's look for the beauty of the analog together. If her story has filled you with the urge to help, you'll find more about the ways you can do it here.

– 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!

– 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…

To tell the whole history of humankind in a few hundred pages… sounds like an impossible task. Then to tell the future. And finally, to draw attention to the big questions of our day in a way that wins over both readers and the people who make decisions… That becomes more than a superhero mission, wouldn't you say? I can think of only one person who has pulled it off, even though he lacks the typical outward features of Batman or Superman.

Yuval Noah Harari. You will often hear the name of the historian and futurist in conversations about the future. In recent years he has established himself as the world's thinker who not only manages to untangle, thoroughly and competently, the threads from which the history of humankind is stitched together, but also poses the big questions of tomorrow.

The Salt of the Earth

But how did a history professor become the favorite author of people like Bill Gates and Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Clinton, while at the same time being popular, translated, read and debated? How does he manage to reach people's minds with his long texts in an age when concentration and a deep look at things have become exotic skills?

A colorful figure, beyond the stereotypes. A favorite target for anyone who wants to shine. A vegan and an animal-rights advocate, he and his husband head a foundation that aims to provoke public debate on important issues. The Israeli is at once a widely recognized scholar and an authority. Most importantly, in my view, he is a valuable and powerful voice warning us about the immediate dangers we face as a species. Here is what is worth knowing about him and his striking insights.

1. “Given the magnitude of the danger, artificial intelligence should be of interest to every human being. While not everyone can become an expert in the field, we must remember that this is the first technology in history that can make decisions and formulate new ideas on its own. All our previous inventions gave new powers to humans, because no matter how powerful a new tool was, the decision about how to use it remained in our hands. Knives and bombs do not decide by themselves whom to kill. They are mere tools, lacking the intelligence that would allow them to process information and make independent decisions. Artificial intelligence, by contrast, can process information by itself and can replace humans in decision-making. It is not a tool but an agent.”*

* The quotes are from Yuval Noah Harari's new book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

Harari is a legend, a myth, a luxury brand. Inviting him to give a lecture can cost a six-figure sum in dollars.

Though he himself says that a brand is simply a well-told story that has turned into much more. He tells us about Stalin, who refused to let his own son use his name as proof of authority, because the story is much more.

A Time to Be Born and a Time to Die

There is also a stronger story connected with that same son of Stalin, but Harari chose the other one. “Harari”—you can hear his name from so many directions. On this site, for example, I quote him often for his brilliant metaphor that the human being today is not the crown of creation but simply a creature that can easily be (and already has been!) hacked by algorithms.

How is the Harari legend born? A hard question, but Yuval himself was born in 1976 in the small Israeli town of Kiryat Ata. His father was a weapons engineer, his mother an office manager.

2. “How does information flow? As we have seen, the new information technologies of late modernity gave rise to large-scale democracy and large-scale totalitarianism. But there are key differences in the way the two systems use information technology. Democracy allows information to flow through many mutually independent channels rather than passing through the center, so that many independent centers process it and make decisions. Information circulates freely among private companies, media outlets, municipal authorities, sports associations, charities, families and individuals without passing through any government office. Totalitarianism, on the other hand, seeks to have all information pass through the center and does not want independent institutions making decisions on their own.”

By the age of 3 he could already read; at 8 his ambitious parents enrolled him in a school for gifted children. At 17 he was admitted to study history and international relations at Tel Aviv University.

His home country is famously strict about military service, yet he was spared it. First it was deferred by his university studies, then by medical reasons.

To this day Harari, perhaps the most popular thinker of our new age, lives in a typical middle-class neighborhood of Tel Aviv. All while being one of the favorite speakers at Davos and one of the best-selling writers on the planet. Even so, they say, his life is unusually modest. Far from the glitter of high society, which, of course, cannot be unconnected to his nationality.

3. “For a long time we believed that the victory of democracy over totalitarianism was final. That victory is usually explained by democracy's fundamental advantages in processing information—totalitarianism doesn't work because it tries to concentrate and process all data in one place, which is extremely inefficient. At the start of the twenty-first century, it seemed that the future belonged to distributed information networks and to democracy. That turned out to be wrong. In fact, the next information revolution, which is just gathering momentum, is preparing the ground for a new round in the contest between democracy and totalitarianism.”

He specialized in medieval warfare and went on to a doctorate at Oxford. And soon afterward, imperceptibly and unexpectedly… he became a superstar. Forgive me for repeating myself, but he definitely does not like to talk about personal matters and knows how to keep them hidden; from what we know, though, his first book came out almost by chance.

Ask, and It Shall Be Given You

After successfully completing his doctorate, Harari returned home and began teaching the fundamentals of historical science to students from a wide range of majors. The students loved the course, and so came a publisher's invitation for Harari to gather his lectures into a book. Thus in 2011 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind appeared, bringing together millennia of evolution in an engaging narrative, as the historian sees it. Three years later it was translated into English, and today it has been published in more than 50 languages. The book stayed in the top three of The New York Times list for 96 consecutive weeks! Not a romance, not a thriller, but a scholar's account of humanity's past…

Sapiens catapulted its author's popularity to a global level. A history textbook, only written with the page-turning pull of an adventure novel. The reader gallops from the Stone Age through the agricultural revolution all the way to the age of artificial intelligence, realizing along the way that our species' secret weapon is neither muscle nor claws but the unique ability to believe in shared “fictions”—gods, nations, money—that bind us together in groups.

Harari shows how one particular species of primate rose to become master of the planet thanks to its rich imagination and its ability to cooperate in large societies through shared myths.

4. “By skillfully using language, computers can go one step further. By conversing and interacting with us, they can form intimate relationships with people and use them to influence us. To create such fake intimacy, computers don't need feelings; they only need to learn how to make us become emotionally attached to them.”

Having reminded us where we come from, Harari turned his gaze forward. In 2016, in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, the historian looked at humanity's ambitions to surpass itself, to defeat aging and death, and even to “upgrade” Homo sapiens into a kind of god.

The Beam in Thine Own Eye

In this book Harari predicts both dizzying achievements and grim scenarios. He warns of the emergence, by the middle of the century, of a new kind of people—the “useless class,” unable to fit into the labor market. While some become godlike through biotechnology, others risk being left as superfluous onlookers. As the futurist Assoc. Prof. Mariana Todorova aptly put it, it is the time when we have to reinvent ourselves.

5. “We humans are still holding the reins. Nobody knows how long that will last, but we still have the power to shape these new realities. To do so wisely, we need to understand what is happening. When we write a computer program, we are not just creating a new product; we are reshaping politics, society and culture, so it is good to have a solid understanding of each of these fields. We also need to take responsibility for what we do.”

But why did a historian, and a specialist in medieval wars at that, step into the role of futurist? I don't think anyone could find a worthy answer. Naturally, the courage to venture in such a different direction has earned him criticism too, but it doesn't seem to trouble him.

Next came the essay collection 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and then we arrive at his newest book—Nexus boldly peers into the existential questions about the future of humankind in the age of artificial intelligence. Into the next step in the seemingly eternal war between democratic regimes and autocracy.

At least in my view, in this paradigm he gets carried away by stereotypes, by black-and-white, emotional thinking. He tries to project phenomena from the past onto a future that, by every indication, is far too different for far too many reasons. But, I am sure, my opinion would not trouble an adviser to American presidents and an author with print runs in the millions. So if you ever meet him, feel free not to spare him.

Love Suffereth Long, and Is Kind

Harari strongly (and, in my opinion, naively) advocates very strict regulation of artificial intelligence. He points out that every pharmaceutical product goes through years of evaluation before it reaches people, while new versions of artificial intelligence, on which the future of all humankind may depend, are released just like that, mostly at the discretion of tech leaders. Yes, regulation is a wonderful idea—at least until we realize that the models keep getting better and are open source. And the idea of controlling such a technology may safely be called an illusion.

6. “A dangerous asymmetry arises. The leaders of the information revolution know far more about the technology than the people who are expected to regulate it. What, then, is the point of repeating that the customer is always right and the voter knows best?

Nexus: a link. That which connects us as human beings and which is only now confronting us with the enormous challenge of technology—the very reason this site exists.

The success of his books inspired him to found Sapienship, an organization that aims to focus society's attention on the most important global challenges. It is headed by his husband, Itzik Yahav, who is also Harari's personal manager. Same-sex marriages are not permitted in Israel, but they are recognized if performed abroad, and so the two married in 2010 in Toronto, Canada. In the rare moments when he allows himself a personal emotion, Harari says Itzik is the love of his life. Although both come from the same small town, their paths crossed some 20 years ago through one of the first online dating apps.

7. “The key question is: what would it be like to live in the new computer network as an increasingly powerless minority? How will the new network change our politics, society, economy and daily lives? How would it feel to be constantly monitored, guided, nudged and sanctioned by billions of nonhuman entities? How will we have to change in order to adapt, survive and even flourish in this astonishing new world?”

Among his other favorite subjects are animal rights, especially those of farm animals. That is why he went vegan long ago; in his view, “industrial farming is one of the worst crimes in history,” and “the fate of the animals raised there is one of the most important ethical questions of our time.”

The Truth Shall Make You Free

Meanwhile, he has written many scholarly books on topics such as military operations in the age of chivalry, the concept of “decisive battles” in world history, and the birth of modern warfare.

8. “The end of privacy. In a world where humans watch humans, privacy is the default state, but in a world where computers watch humans, it may become possible for the first time in history to destroy personal space completely.”

Inevitably, he draws no small amount of criticism—both for the way he presents history and for often writing on subjects outside his expertise. According to Ian Parker, “Harari did not invent ‘big history,’ but he updated it with notes of self-help and futurology, as well as a lofty, almost nihilistic calm about human suffering.” Another review of Sapiens, by Christopher Robert Hallpike, states that the author “has read surprisingly little on some quite essential subjects. It would be fair to say that when his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and when he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously.”

Love Your Enemies

One might almost be surprised that it doesn't happen only in our part of the world, but he is often called not a historian but an “infotainment” specialist. And yet, especially in times of frayed authority and a sea of information, his powerful voice is important and useful.

9. “Can we still talk to one another? Civilizations are born from the marriage of bureaucracy and mythology. Computer-based networks are a new kind of bureaucracy, far more powerful and tireless than the human bureaucracy we know from the past. This network is likely to create inter-computer technologies that will be far more complex and alien to us than the gods humans created. The potential benefits of this network are enormous. The potential harm is the destruction of human civilization.”

Harari certainly likes to provoke—he has gone down in history as the first speaker at the TED conferences to appear not in person but as a digital avatar.

Meanwhile, against that backdrop, Yuval himself… avoids technology. Until a few years ago he had no mobile phone at all; now he uses a basic model, saying he needs it only when abroad, in case of emergency.

In the Beginning Was the Word

He describes himself as an atheist but is also devoted to meditation—he practices for two hours every day. Once a year he withdraws from the world to meditate for 30 days or more. He spends them in silence, with no social media, not even books.

10. “In the German elections of May 1928, the Nazi Party won less than 3 percent of the vote, and the republic seemed in no danger. Within less than 5 years it collapsed, and Hitler became an absolute dictator. This reversal is usually explained by the financial crisis of 1929 and the global depression that followed. Whereas before the crash of the American stock markets that year unemployment in Germany was around 4.5 percent, by early 1932 it had reached almost 25 percent.

If three years of high unemployment could turn a seemingly prosperous democracy into the most brutal totalitarian regime history has known, what might happen to democracies when, in the twenty-first century, automation causes even greater upheavals in the job market?”

And though he lives modestly, at the height of the COVID pandemic, when Donald Trump cut American funding to the World Health Organization, his foundation supported it with $1 million.

His political views are clearly liberal; he is no great fan of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his policies.

Give, and It Shall Be Given unto You

What is his greatest fear? That we will destroy humankind without even understanding what we have lost. Whom does he admire? On a personal level, a friend who is a single mother of two children in difficult times. But the historical figure he bows down to is Mikhail Gorbachev, because he probably saved the world from a Third World War.

What secret would he like to share with everyone else? “The people who run the world don't understand it.”

11. “Before the advent of newspapers, radio and other modern information technologies, no large society had managed to combine free debate with institutional trust, which is why democracy was impossible on a large scale. Will the rise of the new computer network make it impossible once again? One of the difficulties is that the computer network makes it easier to join the conversation. In the past, organizations such as newspapers, radio stations and traditional political parties acted as a sieve that determined who got heard in the public sphere. Social media has undermined the role of that sieve, making public conversation more open but also more chaotic.”

People often say he is a posthumanist—an advocate of the school of thought holding that humans should continue their evolution together with technology as a new, different biological species. He denies it, because using bioengineering and artificial intelligence to change human beings is, in his words, “an extremely dangerous idea.”

While It Is Day, the Night Cometh

“I am definitely not a prophet or a guru. I don't predict the future, and I don't think anyone can. History is not deterministic, and nobody has any idea what the world will look like in 2050. All I do is use my knowledge of history to raise questions about the future and to map out possible scenarios, highlighting the most dangerous ones in the hope that we can prevent them,” the professor explains.

12. “As far as we know today, primates, rats and the other living creatures on this planet may be the only conscious beings in the entire universe. We have created a nonconscious but extremely powerful ‘alien’ intelligence. If we do not use it properly, it could end not only human dominion over the planet but also extinguish the flame of consciousness itself, leaving the universe shrouded in impenetrable darkness. It is our responsibility not to let that happen.”

His middle name is a variant of Noah. Could knowledge itself be the Noah's Ark of the future, the one that will save us in turbulent times ahead?

“AI may enslave or destroy us,” runs another popular quote of his, one that came long before we reached advanced artificial intelligence. Harari is certainly among the authorities who were the first to draw public attention to the dangers that come with it. And even if that were his only contribution, it truly matters to every one of us.

“I am glad to see that many people are already concerned about these dangers. I am less glad that instead of uniting against common threats, we are fighting and blaming one another,” says the historian, and I don't think he could be more right.

Especially if we take the next steps too—talk more about these dangers and bring more important perspectives into the conversation. Before it's too late. What will historians write about today's technological times? And will there even be historians? It's up to us. For now.

– What are the biggest mistakes we make today when we introduce children to technology?

– In my view, the fundamental mistake is black-and-white thinking. In other words, the difficulty we have, in just about every sphere of life, in hitting the middle path. That is only possible through serious intellectual effort, which we very often don’t want to make, and it’s easier to settle on some extreme.

One extreme is demonizing technology. Explaining to children that it will ruin their brains. But a total ban means children end up with no competence in using technology. They are like tribesmen handed a grenade—they have no culture of using it, and sooner or later that grenade will land in their hands. Talking about technology the way we talk about drugs, equating it with something harmful, dangerous, deadly. As a parent, and as a psychologist who has read far too many studies on the effects of overuse on the child’s brain, I tend to slip into this extreme myself.

The other is that technology is something wonderful, the new human playground, the new reality—let the kids loose without supervision.

The supporters of this view say:

“They survived in reality, they’ll survive now too.”

That isn’t true, because biologically humans were not made to thrive in a technological world. We were made to socialize, to get to know ourselves, to get to know the world through our bodies, through play and relationships with other people.

The way forward is surely in searching for some middle, sensible path that makes children neither addicts nor technological idiots. Preparing them to live in a world where technology awaits them… in the good version of the future. In the bad version there won’t be any technology, but for now we maintain a moderate optimism that the world isn’t heading for a sunset, sudden and brutal.

– How are we doing so far?

– In my view, we adults sacrificed two generations because we created something without knowing what it was or how it worked. These children are the victims of our incompetence. Nobody knew; it wasn’t out of malice. Now we know,

no one can say anymore that we adults are unaware of what excessive use of digital devices does to the development of children’s emotional and intellectual apparatus.

– Let’s spell it out anyway. What does it do?

– Technology isn’t one thing. Solving logic problems on a computer, scrolling TikTok and playing games where you walk around killing things are three completely different activities that affect the human brain in different ways. The only thing they have in common is that

they pull you away from the real world and give the central nervous system an unreal arousal—one that real life doesn’t allow with such intensity and duration.

Whatever digital environment you consume, it is built to be stimulating, interesting, attractive, attention-grabbing. The world isn’t like that. It’s gray, slow, boring, inconsistent, arrhythmic. You have to engage with it through willpower for it to become interesting. It doesn’t entertain you on its own; it’s jagged, hard.

That is, the digital amusement park is not the natural habitat of the human brain, and when you live there too long, your brain shifts away from its usual functioning and adapts its structures to it.

It stops dealing with the big picture and starts dealing with a very narrow frame, wherever your focus of attention is. So whether it’s TikTok or a little house-building game, you’re left with a very narrow focus on something that excites you, because it was made for exactly that purpose. You have no need to create something interesting for yourself.

Your brain gets used to the idea that the world is an exciting place, and the only thing you need to develop is the skill of operating within it.

– Our brains are definitely not designed for such challenges…

– Naturally, it works wonders for developing operational skills. Children immersed in the digital have reflexes and short-range cause-and-effect thinking far more developed than those who climb trees all day. The problem is that the world isn’t like that. When you expect it to be a constantly stimulating place, you fail to develop

one of the basic qualities a person must develop in early childhood—the ability to delay gratification.

To know that you have to make an effort here and now, without getting anything, in order to earn some big reward in the future.

It’s connected to everything in our lives! Tidying your room, taking care of your hygiene, studying, not interrupting others. Being able to make an effort toward more meaningful goals, like a diploma, a relationship, friends, a family—a long-term bond that requires some investment.

The ability to delay gratification is trained, like everything in the human brain. And

when you don’t have it, you only make decisions that lead to quick satisfaction, quick stimulation, quick interest, quick fun. That rarely leads to a good life.

The second thing that happens is that you create a brain with a very narrow focus. Reading a book means receiving a new stimulus, a unit of information, but one that enters a field where other units of information are constantly buzzing, giving meaning to the new piece.

A single sentence in a book has absolutely no meaning on its own unless it lands in that half-active, unconsciously active cloud of all the other sentences

you’ve read so far in that book, and of a huge amount of other knowledge about the world, which together create the meaning. Yes, you aren’t thinking about any of those things at the moment, only about the stimulus coming in right now. But it will have no meaning unless it enters an information field that you keep half-active in your mind, so you can picture the world being described, the person speaking, so you can understand why they say it, why they behave that way.

That is the piece of information you’re focused on. Everything else, however, is also active in your head. And this, on the principle of reinforcing neural connections, creates, strengthens, develops and trains your ability to think in context. And thinking in context is another word for what is very fashionable right now and is called “functional literacy.” In other words, when a piece of information arrives, you can grasp how it is interconnected with everything else in the world, which is what actually gives it meaning.

– So reading remains just as important…

– It’s very fashionable to argue about what literature children should read at school. It makes no difference whatsoever! The point is that they read. Whether the story was written by Elin Pelin, the classic Bulgarian writer of village tales, or by a cyberpunk author, whether it’s Drandyo or The Fairy in the Sugar Bowl, here

we’re talking about the functional ability to put information in context—in other words, to understand it.

These are the two main proven problems of overexposing children to digital stimulation. One is that it damages the ability to delay gratification, which hits the emotional apparatus very sharply and seriously. You can’t feel pleasure unless you’re stimulated here and now. You struggle to find meaning in your life, because meaning is most often tied to distant pleasure, not immediate pleasure. You slide very easily into depression and irritability, because you’re used to being constantly “high” on some thrill here and now. That is what happens to the emotional apparatus of children overexposed to digital stimulation. And the other problem is that you lose functional literacy.

– At the same time, we only talk in hours. Until the age of three, they say today, children shouldn’t be exposed to technology at all. But nobody follows that, you can see it everywhere.

– The sad truth is that none of us knows what the right thing is.

We swing between these two extremes—“Anathema!” and “No problemo!”—because there’s very little information. Yes, two generations burned out because of our incompetence in teaching them how to use what we created some 20 years ago. And this generates an enormous amount of anxiety in our part of the field—psychologists, neurologists, doctors, educators, social workers, psychiatrists—because we work with the end product of the mistake. And sometimes it can be very sad.

That’s why prescriptions like this sometimes come out: “No screens until age three.” I followed that rule; until the age of three, my child had watched a total of 15 minutes of cartoons, by accident.

Yet many children who have had digital stimulation from their first days show no symptoms—no damage to the emotional apparatus or to the ability to hold context and make sense of things.

And here it’s a question of the dose.

Research has arrived at a definition of “harmful use” very similar to what is said about harmful use of alcohol, drugs and cigarettes. It is defined as “use that leads to a loss of interest in other, alternative forms of entertainment, to visible withdrawal symptoms when it is taken away, and to an obsessive-compulsive search for the stimulus.”

In other words, behaving the way an addict would, ready to perform heroic feats to get to their substance and visibly suffering when it is taken away. Ready to drop absolutely everything else in life to get it.

That is,

when children give up natural stimuli so they can sink into a digital device, that’s a problem.

This isn’t even so much about how much they’ve been exposed, but about the extent to which they are prone to such compulsive-obsessive behaviors and find it hard to function in this world. For some children it’s an outlet—if they’re more anxious, shy, slower to socialize. The same way alcohol is for many adults—a wonderful escape. They go to a world where they have complete control over what happens and which, on top of that, rewards them, stimulates them, entertains them. For now, that is defined as harmful, dangerous use.

– But it’s also something every parent can assess by the criteria you just described. They sound quite clear.

– Talking sensibly with children is certainly important. My child started: “So-and-so has a phone.” “Rada, the truth is that nobody is more interesting than a phone. Nobody.” “That’s not true, you’re interesting, Mom is interesting.” “Nobody.

The phone has things in it that no single person can give you.

I can’t swallow fire or walk a tightrope strung between two cliffs, and people like that are in your phone. But right now you have far more important things to do. Yes, they aren’t as fun, as easy, as pleasant, but they’re the important things you need to be doing right now. When you’re at school, be with the other kids, not on your phone. So

you learn to make social contacts, to build relationships with other people, to learn to learn from other people.”

In the very early school years, children learn from one another during breaks. Sometimes they even talk about school, about what they’ve learned. These are fundamental, basic skills that everyone will need for the rest of their lives.

– Maybe evolution no longer requires them, maybe this is the natural course of things…

– No. We’re far too tiny to talk about evolution. We live for far too short a time to comment on it. I would rephrase it: perhaps our civilization doesn’t require them. Perhaps

we are currently building a civilization that assumes the right fit for it is an asocial person, prone to depression without stimulation, addicted to arousal, unable to think in context.

But I very much doubt that if we described the end result of hyper-digital people as personalities, anyone would say: “Hey, that’s exactly what we need!”

Rather, the risk—and a recognized one—is that

the new class inequality will be between people who can understand a page of written text and those who can’t.

All this alarm being raised, and all the research being done, costs a lot of money, and it isn’t done out of some higher form of humanism. It’s funded because at some point the question arises: is 10 percent of people who can understand a page of written text enough of an economic resource for us to keep existing? Our civilization created this phenomenon, but will it survive the result it gets?

More than a few civilizations have perished from their own mistakes. And this is one of the less visible mistakes, like the ecological danger—the fact that we cut away at our natural habitat. But it is also a mistake that could lead to our decline, and many people realize it.

That’s why a global trend is now beginning toward restricting the digital delivery of information to young people.

– Yes, but chaotically, unconsciously, and amid an already broken public dialogue on the important issues. In other words, in practice the trend is doomed. And yet, as you said, it makes a big difference whether you’re playing a game that might develop your brain in some way, or just scrolling…

– It’s like the difference between poker and slot machines.

If you play Minecraft, it’s a logic game, you’re making something, but it’s as if you’re playing poker. TikTok is the slot machine—you sit, you tap and you do nothing. Except both are gambling.

If you overdo either one, you lose the other parts of your life. Because you can be a top poker player whose whole life is just that… And if you imagine that here, in a country of 7 million, we had 7 million people whose only skill was playing poker, clicking away at Minecraft… who will teach the children? Who will treat them? Who will fix the sewers? Who will build their houses?

– I follow rules with my kids too; my older son often turns down his half-hour quota on the tablet to read Harry Potter. But many people only start thinking about it once they’ve already let things slip, once they’ve given unrestricted access to technology. What’s the solution then?

– You take away the stimulus. I’m not saying it’s easy! Most often we do the same as with other issues. We talk and tell ourselves: “It’s not true, it’s not a problem, that’s nonsense, there’s nothing wrong with my child.” Or “I know a kid who’s on his tablet all day and has an Olympiad medal.” You think of isolated cases that confirm your thesis, the one you emotionally want to be true, so you don’t have to deal with it, fight with your child, invent games for them, entertain them, put up with them sulking.

You try to spare yourself all that, because you have work, you have to cook, you’re only human…

Every possible parental explanation is true, every single one. The question is what decision you make—do you feel like dealing with it? If not, you’ll find an awful lot of arguments.

If you do, here comes the bad news: it will be a hard battle. Fortunately, no harder than many other battles we parents have to fight in raising our children. But a battle nonetheless. First, because the child is already used to the reward and the thrill, and few other things can deliver that kind of stimulation. Second, because we parents are very often alone in this battle; everyone around has a device.

What are you protecting? A little island surrounded by screens.

We’re on our own! Some specialists recommend one number of hours, others another. Schools have such a patchwork of policies; there’s no public framework that would back any parental position. People create little micro-communities of the like-minded around this principle.

We’re left to our own judgment, but thank God there is more and more accumulated information, if we care to read it.

– Meanwhile, here and there, governments occasionally remember that it’s not such a good idea for four-year-olds to be on TikTok, and still their measures are mostly palliative.

– Still, legal restrictions are being introduced; Australia, for example, is banning social media accounts for those under 16. Because

social networks carry very clear risks for children: harassment, including sexual harassment, a decline in intellectual capacity, all kinds of risky behavior.

Bullying in these environments becomes much more hidden and invisible. It can lead to terrible states and behaviors in response, and you won’t find out, because nobody knows. The child is humiliated, insulted and crushed in some closed digital space where no one has access except the child and the abusers.

Another step is

a return to paper textbooks, abandoning digital programs in which billions have been invested.

In Northern Europe, for instance, they are increasingly removing digital learning materials and going back to paper, because they see the difference in the brain’s ability to process information.

Ultimately, we’re not talking about knowledge. Some say that if we learn from a computer, we remember much more. That’s probably true. But

the point of learning is to teach you to think.

To be able, when you encounter new information, to see it, remember it, understand it and use it.

The digital environment makes engagement easier, because it’s far more attractive than paper, and remembering easier, because it builds many more neural connections.

But it bugs out the main goal of learning.

– And yet, if we decide we’ve overdone it, is it good to stop abruptly? Little by little? Should we talk more? Where does the road back to balance run?

– Whoever answers that would be irresponsible, because people layer it onto thousands of individual cases. Taking the digital device away completely, thank God, cannot harm the child—unlike certain substances, where abrupt withdrawal causes damage.

The best-case scenario is for the child to have discipline and self-control.

Sooner or later they will be exposed to a world where technology is necessary, and it’s good to help them develop self-discipline and free will, like your son. If I can play on the tablet or draw, I have the free will to choose. But neither is mandatory, because my brain isn’t telling me that one of them is the most important, meaningful and valuable thing in the world.

Empowering children to have access and freedom of choice, however, happens gradually. In the end, we create all their habits in one way or another.

Through imitation—that is very important. If we want the child to limit their use of digital devices, we have to limit ours in front of them. If you tell them, “Put that phone down and go study,” while swiping away at your own phone, it doesn’t carry much weight.

I don’t like bribery as a parenting method, although we all use it. “If you tidy your room, I’ll buy you chocolate.” “If you learn your lesson, I’ll take you to the theater.” “If you read 10 pages, I’ll give you the phone for half an hour.” I fundamentally dislike this method, but it could be used. Only not just for the child to read 10 pages, but for them to be able to tell you what they read, through check questions—and “Did you understand?” is not such a question.

If you have the time and energy to ask “What did you find interesting?”, “Why did this character behave that way?”, “Tell me what this story means”…

Then they can reach the coveted phone, but having made an effort. They’ll know the world isn’t just fun and good things require effort.

Everyone raises their children differently, that’s clear. Some people have no choice; they can’t fight this battle. Someone who works 12 hours a day, picks the child up, cooks—when exactly are they supposed to fight the battle over the phone? The point is at least to be aware of it.

– Why did you start writing children’s books?

– The motivation is very complex. First, because it’s great fun. Second, it was no accident that I started at a time when I already had a small child. Third, because the things I talk about in my children’s books are topics we adults very rarely put on the table in front of children. These are topics about being able to better understand what is happening inside them and around them. Not only to recognize it, but to be able to use that information. To subject it to critical evaluation, to progressive or regressive cause-and-effect analysis. Progressive is: “If I do A, B will happen,” and regressive: “B has happened, so it’s very likely that A happened before it.” This is extremely important in life, even, if you like, for planning a birthday party.

All our thinking is built on chains of logic like these.

– You host a podcast called Natural Intelligence. When do you think is the moment to introduce children to artificial intelligence? We all talk about it, it’s around us constantly, and it’s yet another thing where we don’t know what we’re doing, and we could repeat the same mistake we started with…

– The complex computational models called AI also have at least two sides. Since we’re somehow in the anxious conversation, I’ll start with the dangerous one, which is that

human abilities to perform certain functions atrophy

for the simple reason that there is now someone to delegate them to, who performs them with an acceptable level of error. Which is great.

The problem is that if we all start delegating to a device that performs operations with an acceptable level of error,

who, at some point, will have the capacity to say whether that level of error is acceptable?

In other words, whether the product the computational model generates is a good product that will do the job for us.

Some percentage of people must retain the ability to judge critically. You can only do that if you have actively participated many, many, many times in the process of generating the product you are evaluating. In other words, you need a certain level of experience and mastery that you will never develop if you haven’t gone through that process.

– That is happening in programming right now: AI does much of the work and we aren’t hiring enough young people. So in a few years there really won’t be anyone left to judge.

– It will be like with teachers—all the engineers will be of retirement age, and nobody will want to go to an IT company to write prompts. But that’s your problem. I’m sure you’ll make it ours too, but not anytime soon.

That’s the risk. There are already people who have no idea where they are. We’ve had decent GPS systems for about 15 years, and for about 10, with phones, everyone has GPS. And

having no idea where you are in space confuses you and bugs you out in so many unconscious meta-intellectual ways that, at the very least, it narrows your world.

If the world for you is the dot you see, and you have no idea where that dot sits in the whole big world, it makes your brain extremely narrowed and focused only on your immediate surroundings. That in turn undermines your overall capacity to see in perspective—your life, your relationships, your country’s politics—to hold some bigger picture.

That is the problem with convenience.

Most likely the same old-timer grumbling existed 150 years ago, when the mechanical looms appeared. Some people cried: “Oh no, what will happen when we lose the skill of weaving?” And look, we survived.

The problem with complex computational models is that they strike at the fundamentally human, at our evolutionary advantage of thinking in complex ways.

Leading to the atrophy of intellectual abilities, of the ability to socialize and to think in more complex ways.

– While this topic keeps sitting on the margins of public conversation… But it is precisely because of it that this site has existed for four years now. Thank you!

So far in the “Digital Children” series:

• How do today’s children encounter technology? – a survey

• Hedgehogs Are Born Without AI

• “An era is coming in which we will have to reinvent ourselves.” What will the professions of the future be, and what makes sense to study today? – futurologist Assoc. Prof. Mariana Todorova

• Why does a programmer advise parents on how to get off the grid? – Alexandrina Georgieva of Offline Kids

• What should tomorrow’s education look like? How do we choose the best teacher? – Evgenia Peeva

• How do we introduce children to AI, and why is reading so important? – Val Stoeva

• “I want to tell today’s mothers to take it easier” – Krasimira Hadzhiivanova of Mayko Mila! (Oh, Mother!)

• Parenting as war in the cartoons of Neda Malcheva

• Where did we leave the role of the father? – Mihail Stefanov

If you have ideas about other important aspects of this topic, I’d be glad if you shared them here.

– Technology is advancing astonishingly fast, and everything suggests that more and more human activities will be performed successfully by machines, indistinguishable from us. Against that background, what is worth teaching children today?

– The answer will probably surprise you, but

it is worth them learning everything that interests them.

The analysis some people offer, that there is no need to learn facts or accumulate basic knowledge the way we have done so far, is only partial. Yes, it’s true that

our education system is at the level of the 19th century, as Jack Ma says, while it has to cope with the conditions of the 21st.

On the one hand, it was built to serve industrial society. All our social systems were designed that way too. But perhaps soon

we will be mourning classical capitalism, because it needs people,

so it provides them with social systems—education, health care, pension funds. Technology, on the other hand, has no need for these systems unless they are business niches themselves, which means we will find them ever harder to sustain.

On the other hand, though, there is no way to develop our personal intelligence, our individual experience and awareness, which differ from the whole accumulated body of human knowledge and wisdom, without processing a large amount of information that settles in us as knowledge. Intelligence is a mark of dwelling in the material world, of experience and knowledge; it is a function of the neuroplasticity of the neural connections in our brain, which is unique to each of us.

In other words, to create these neural connections, to create intelligence as a personal quality, we have to encounter fundamental knowledge and, through a personal perspective and a personal refraction, develop unexpected links between different fields. That is individual intelligence—

every person combines this kaleidoscope of human knowledge in a very peculiar way.

– So, caught up in innovation, we must by no means underestimate the role of good old memorizing facts…

– Exactly. Classical learning, the way we have done it so far, is important because it creates this neuroplasticity. But it has to be dosed—if we spend our time cramming and reproducing facts that we forget afterward anyway, because that is how our brains are built, it is not useful.

It is no accident that some experimental schools in America have introduced the concept of the “flipped classroom.” At home, the children read and listen to lessons with artificial intelligence, which even serves them personalized content. Then at school, in the humanities, they do critical analysis of classic works such as Anna Karenina.

– Whereas, alas, reading an entire Tolstoy novel seems today an ever rarer and more underrated skill.

– We are returning to that most primal human quality of critical thinking, reasoning and debate.

In the United States, at least until recently, debate was considered an invaluable tool because it teaches pluralism. I hope that hasn’t vanished in recent years, when America has become so fragmented and polarized.

If we are truly very good at what interests us and combine it with technology and AI; if we don’t do our work mechanically, indifferently, just going through the motions with minimal effort, we have an advantage.

In this era in which we will have to reinvent ourselves, we will create many unconventional, interdisciplinary niches where, say, a musician and a neurobiologist come up with some new AI audio product.

So we are still at a stage where we can learn pretty much anything, as long as we are open and know that it may be basic knowledge we will need to build on and combine with much else.

– I see it in the software industry—AI is advancing, making things easier for us, and far fewer junior specialists are being hired. I think this will soon become a problem, when there will be no experienced people left to catch the errors and hallucinations the algorithms are doomed to produce.

– Exactly. Large generative language models are the reason why perhaps

as early as this year it will become clear that finding a job is no longer so easy.

The inertia of labor shortages in every field, in Bulgaria and around the world, will gradually fade. Big companies, especially software companies, are already reorienting and integrating many AI products—agents, chatbots that answer questions and write code. This will reinforce the trend of having no junior experts. The same has been seen in the media—the Fox group and other big media empires use ChatGPT both for editing and for generating trivial articles. At some point it will turn out that there are no beginners left to become experienced experts.

Youth unemployment will appear again, but of a different structural type.

Not as before, affecting people who have no experience and whom nobody wants to train, but people who were the first to feel the effects of artificial intelligence—lawyers, journalists, accountants, diagnostic imaging specialists, primary data processors.

Some kind of state intervention is needed here, because this is becoming a problem bigger than the companies themselves.

– Is there a way to predict which professions will disappear? Because we often speculate on the subject, and yet there have long been positions with no practical reason to exist, such as cashier or waiter. Having their tasks done by machines is no problem at all.

– Perhaps these professions won’t disappear, but will split in two—dehumanized and humanized. For example, going to the tax office in 10 years, we will be able to choose whether we want an automated process, a chatbot, or a humanized service that will be, say, 10 percent more expensive because a human factor is involved.

This will be purely psychological—driven by the desire for communication and human interaction, not by the quality of the service.

But there is categorically no reason for, and there are already almost no, graphic designers in America, people who process primary data, translators—unless they are Angela Rodel, the American translator of Bulgarian literature, and the work requires specific mastery—office managers, accountants. Also security guards at large production facilities and anywhere the necessary investment has been made in AI-driven security infrastructure, fingerprints, retina scans.

In the future, taxis will most likely be robotized in certain cities, first where the infrastructure allows it. It can’t happen soon in Naples or Palermo—it can in Saudi Arabia, or in Sofia.

The human role will rather depend on our needs and psychological wants, because otherwise we could go on for days living, receiving services or goods, without any human involvement.

– You mentioned translation, and it is a fact that AI already handles that task better than many people for whom it is a profession. Is there any point in learning foreign languages now, if you really aren’t Angela Rodel?

I made an effort to have my children start learning foreign languages as late as possible, because my logic is that it is far more important for them to learn Bulgarian in depth, in detail, with a rich vocabulary.

– Yes, there is still a need, if only because of that same neuroplasticity of the brain. It has been proven that in people who have a gift for languages, the more they learn, the more areas of the cerebral cortex develop, and they improve their overall level of intelligence. That holds, however, only if the person actually wants to learn. If it is forced and the pace of learning is slow anyway, then there is no need.

It is important to know your native language well, and it is important to know one that AI uses,

because it is clear how important the role of the prompt is, and the skill of detailing it with great precision so that it is effective. The more detailed and thorough our instructions to the AI, the more accurate, unique and individual the answer we will get. This matters especially for people who are creators—it is their personal signature.

But it is also important because of the overall cognitive decline and dumbing down.

With AI’s new capabilities as a voice agent, people will also lose the ability to write, to read, to use language correctly.

From now on, we will need a great deal of self-discipline to master things we have used for millennia and which now seem unnecessary. We will do it to preserve our intelligence, not because we need them directly.

– Isn’t it too late? Hasn’t the pendulum already swung for good toward brain rot—a cognitive decline that is not just a word of the year but, in my view, the most important phenomenon since our species came into being?

– It really has swung, and several generations are already its victims. I don’t want to be a prophet of doom, but I think there will soon be incidents of every kind that are a function of this “brain rot.” It will shock people—we always learn through bad experience, through cataclysms, through catharsis, not through successes and achievements.

There have been experiments in which children trust only their navigation app and not what they see. Mothers have burned their children because an AI hallucinated that food should be served at 42 degrees Celsius. A train derailed and released toxic gases into the atmosphere because responsibility had been diluted and there was excessive automation. Some such manifestations of “brain rot,” or perhaps one big incident,

will show people, belatedly, that they must take responsibility for themselves, for their own intelligence,

otherwise we really will see the decline and decay of rationalism and of our civilization.

– Or else a stratification between a minority capable of deep knowledge who control these machines, and everyone else, the vast majority of people, who will keep sliding down the chute of scrolling, consumerism, the easy path, brain rot.

– Yes, but if we reason in that direction in a very inhumane way, elites will emerge who control everything and are essentially a new type of human race. Yet they will have no need for the rest of the human mass, because it will have nothing to do for them.

Until now, always, even under the most inhumane regimes, slavery or Nazism, there was some need for the unprivileged, the downtrodden and the crushed—to build, to expand the empire. Whereas now,

if this dystopian future comes to pass, the remaining human mass will have nothing to occupy itself with. That would be the most ruinous and saddest moment in human history.

We can see how far robotics has advanced, fine motor skills like those of Boston Dynamics and Elon Musk’s Optimus; progress like that means they will be able to do everything that is possible.

In the past, some of

the elites flirted with the masses and took care of them out of fear of revolt, so that no social revolution would be “cooked up.”

But with these technologies of hypercontrol—AI that operates drones or is incomparable with humans in performing its tasks—that possibility falls away too.

– Meanwhile, along those lines, because of the way we communicate, social networks make us ever more manipulable, gathering or dispersing public anger. They steer it wherever they see fit.

– That social engineering is also very interesting. But

I also see the beginning of an attempt to prevent it.

A clear sign was a discussion at the London School of Economics a month ago with a guest from Harvard and a former MIT professor. The call was for serious regulation of social media—not as legal restrictions, but as financial mechanisms. Fines precisely for the fact that

social media deliberately exploit fragmentation and echo chambers, sustain the pathos of aggression as clickbait in order to turn it into a financial model and generate traffic.

This is already giving birth to a total dystopia, and we are living through it right now. In 1974 the United States had 4 television channels; in 1992 there were 28; now there are thousands—social media, podcasts, blogs, private radio stations. This fragments and dismantles the public sphere to such a degree that, in practice, we no longer have one. People cannot sense and take in the same message.

The same is happening in Bulgaria. Conspiracy theories, fake news, polarization, the splintering of the public space.

This takes away the big ideas, the big priorities. It replaces ideology with causes and turns politics into civic activism.

The conviction that acting in politics as civic activism for a few separate causes is enough.

But I think there will be financial sanctions as regulation, because politicians themselves understand that they won’t be able to govern. And that democracy is in a crisis that will give rise either to total, extreme authoritarian regimes, which we are already seeing, or to anarchy with some elements of democracy. However far the pendulum has swung in one direction, it is now starting to swing back.

– And yet many people still say: yes, technology is arriving, it has been destroying professions for two centuries, but new ones appear, there has always been work for everyone, and that won’t change. I’m convinced that’s not the case; far too many activities are being automated. But could they actually turn out to be right?

– I don’t believe so, because all the technologies and significant discoveries so far have been different. The stirrup made it possible to master the horse, for armies to restructure and no longer need foot soldiers, and that led to the fall of the Roman Empire. Even if we talk about electricity, steam engines or anything else, each is a technology or a tool that permeates everything, but its basis stays the same as it was 200 years ago. It does not evolve.

Here we have a technology that, first, evolves constantly and, second, increasingly takes on the traits and qualities of an entity, of a new type of subject. It interacts with every other field and transforms it, and with each separate technology it produces many new qualities. With biotechnology, with CRISPR-Cas technologies, it makes total gene editing possible, the invention of new molecules, drugs, antibiotics—but also new parasites and pests. With the Internet of Things, it lets us create a digital twin of everything and run systems without human labor. With virtual and mixed reality, it makes the creation of worlds possible.

What we see here is not just development but exponential development. Our brain can’t even imagine what is going on. There is no way we can say it will create just as many professions. Yes, new ones are appearing—an AI product at a startup, if it succeeds, requires project managers, people who will deliver the service or product. These are new jobs, that’s a fact. But on the other hand, they are for people who are good specialists and can carry out their tasks, not just any jobs. And second,

it is only a matter of time before most of the tasks we perform are taken over.

The new professions are more in mentoring and coaching, meant to calm people down from this neurosis. It can already be felt. Perhaps not so much in Bulgaria or in Europe, but a permanent change that we cannot keep up with is undeniable.

It could only be done through a global human political consensus in which we say: even though the technology does everything better, people keep their jobs, even though they contribute between 5 percent and 10 percent to the product. But that is deeply anti-capitalist, against market logic, and imposing it as an effective solution would take either some boundless humaneness and humanism on everyone’s part, or a dictatorship.

– When OpenAI released ChatGPT, they were about 300 people, and they changed the whole world before our eyes. What kind of productivity are we talking about?! It’s discouraging. For me, a telling example was the experiment in which, in two consecutive poetry competitions, in two attempts, generated poems were chosen among the best. Examples like that make it seem very disarming to me to be only now learning to create. Why bother, when “it” creates better than we do, or at least better than the vast majority of us?

– I hear that answer from children. I visit some schools and they tell me: “It thinks better than me, it creates better than me.” This new kind of powerlessness can already be felt. Just as some judges in China, once the AI has ruled, don’t know how to refute it or keep it in check.

This is exactly where the self-discipline has to come in, so that

despite everything, we accept AI as a partner.

That we create together, that all products, poetry included, will be hybrid from now on.

Whoever wishes can impose limits on themselves and, as a poet, create entirely alone, and that will carve out different niches of art—human, humanistic, and hybrid, techno-humanistic.

But the most important thing is that we must not give up!

At least in the prompt, we must never stop trying to be as original as possible, to provoke, to experiment.

Because banning it… is no longer possible.

– That option is gone. At one of the poetry competitions they said they would require a declaration that no AI had been used. But since that can’t be proven, and the AI itself can write the declaration…

– It is precisely cases like these that will inevitably lead to regulations in which some intellectual property rights are awarded to the technology. Because without us, without our instructions, it won’t do anything.

– Because of all this, the role of today’s parents seems impossibly hard to me. It is clear that the first 7 years, the foundations, are essential, but after that… What I have formulated for myself as a parental mission in turbulent times is, first, to try to make things hard for them, so they don’t quickly grow fond of the easy path. And second, for them to develop a knack for being bored well. Not how they will succeed, but how, with free time on their hands, they can use it to enjoy a book or a game. We will need that soon, when for the first time we find ourselves the second most intelligent species on our planet.

– It really is very important today

for children to stick to the classical forms, to read.

“Brain rot” happens in children because on TikTok and other social networks the brain sees images. That way it works only with the right hemisphere; there is no transfer from the left to the right, which is what happens with reading—from the act of reading itself, through stimulating the imagination and visualizing in the brain, to transferring information from one hemisphere to the other. It shortens the path of information processing, and that is the heuristic.

The other thing really is creating challenges.

It is no accident that Elon Musk said his greatest fear was that his children would not have hardships. What we see in Generations Z and Alpha is that when they face some difficulty, it doesn’t mobilize them to succeed; their psyche is very fragile. They are more ready to give up and leave the problem unsolved than to look for a way. We are talking almost about this skill being forgotten altogether. So, yes, that is the direction.

– Perhaps these generations will also change the logic you mentioned—that we will pay extra for the human touch in a given task. Perhaps for them it will make no difference at all; what will matter is whether the task gets done, not whether there is a human on the other side.

– Perhaps it will be like that for the next generations, but for us—the transitional ones—there will be a need. On the other hand, COVID made us think that from then on we would work from home, would no longer go to offices and have normal human contact. It turned out, however, that it inflicted a huge social trauma.

There is no research on this, and I think it deserves reflection and study. The Spanish flu, which wiped out a third of Europe’s population, was an enormous trauma. Yet it appears in so few literary works, and it is analyzed so little.

Because of the epidemic came the Great Depression and the First World War.

In other words, the trauma is extraordinary, but it has not been brought to light. And the same thing is happening now.

– Definitely! Look how quickly we forgot the lessons.

– Yes, and I think it is the same now. Yet we would benefit from reflecting on the damage. So that we can learn the lesson: will we be able to carry on at all in this technologized world and dehumanize ourselves, or will it inflict such harm that our children and grandchildren will be totally depressed, even without understanding what they are missing…

– Will we indeed… Thank you for never ceasing to seek out the important questions about the future, and from the perspective of science. The ones we never seem to have time for, the very ones this site exists for… This conversation is worth continuing.

So far in the Digital Children series:

• Survey—children and parents in times of technology. Your opinion on the subject matters!

• Hedgehogs Are Born Without AI

• “An Era Is Coming in Which We Will Have to Reinvent Ourselves.” What will the professions of the future be, and what is worth learning today? – futurologist Assoc. Prof. Mariana Todorova

• Why is a programmer advising parents on how to get offline? – Alexandrina Georgieva of Offline Kids

• What should education look like tomorrow? How do we choose the best teacher? – Evgenia Peeva, founder of Teach For Bulgaria and director of SoftUni Buditel.

• Children and books—why is this bond more important than ever? How do we light the flame of a love of reading? – Val Stoeva, creator of Detski Knigi (Children’s Books)

• “I want to tell today’s mothers to take it easier” – Krasimira Hadzhiivanova of Mayko Mila! (Dear Mother!)

If you have ideas about other important aspects, they are always welcome here too.

Coming up:

• How did we damage two generations, and can we find the middle path? – psychologist and children’s author Slavi Stoev
• Why and how does humor save today’s parents? – illustrator Neda Malcheva
• What is it like to be a father today? – communications specialist Mihail Stefanov
• Meet… AI – an experiment in which I will introduce my children to ChatGPT.

– You wrote online that entering a competition with generated poetry is a sign of ego and infantilism. I had long meant to invite you for an interview, and in the end it was precisely your opinion, so different from mine, that provoked me. As I see it, I had to carry out this literary experiment, because I see no other way to test impartially how well AI writes poetry. Other than giving it to a jury that doesn't know where it came from. And since it has now happened at two competitions, I think we are talking about important conclusions that everyone keeps sidestepping.

– I think we'll see more and more cases like this. There are already literary competitions around the world won by works from people who relied entirely on artificial intelligence. I recently heard about one such short story contest. The author who used the new technology is a professor, and after the competition ended he told the jury that the story was generated by AI, but that to get it he had asked it 36 questions.

In other words, it depends on how much literary culture the person “playing” with AI has and how familiar they are with the context. Because every literary competition takes place in some context. And a lot depends on the author's personality… What are their own aesthetic standards? If they have no interest in literature and have never written before, what they pick from the generated text won't be high or good literature. If the person has refined literary taste and good editing skills, they could combine something of their own with what AI produces and end up with a more or less acceptable story. But

the question here is not whether this will happen, but whether it already has and how our literary juries have reacted.

Not even what sort of people have allowed themselves to do it, because it isn't legally punishable. I think there are ethical categories here whose boundaries must not be crossed. First, it's a lie. I'm entering with someone else's work, because what's generated has been taken from somewhere; AI didn't come up with it on its own. Second, it undermines and compromises the competition itself. The efforts of those we assume are taking part honestly become meaningless. So when it comes to people, you have to tread very carefully.

The first thing a person learns in this world is not to lie.

– I agree, and that's exactly why both I and the other participant came forward right after the top 10 were chosen. And in this case we're talking about fully generated verses that I didn't change in any way. Yet they still beat more than 100 participants in total. The question of criteria is another matter entirely, and I have no wish whatsoever to discredit the jury, especially since two juries in a row chose these poems. But next year, who would admit to using the algorithms? Not only is it not a crime, it's now clear that it can't be proven: we're unable to tell when a text is generated rather than written by a human.

– Every competition, not just a literary one, is an arena of vanity.

Tomorrow this drama will be forgotten, just as all the laureates of literary competitions are forgotten. I understand that you and, probably, people who think like you

want to draw attention to the mischief artificial intelligence can cause, but I'm not sure society is prepared enough to take part in such a debate.

It's like talking about literary competitions in general. University lecturers will say, “Who are you to speak up? We have high standards.” We will say, “Who are you to impose standards on us that have nothing to do with reality?”

What you'd get is more of a chaotic pseudo-debate, noise in the air, and it won't lead us anywhere. Truly nowhere. I think the questions concerning artificial intelligence should rather be raised at scientific discussions, forums and in laboratories, where they'll meet the necessary understanding from specialists in various fields.

But you're right that artificial intelligence poses interdisciplinary challenges. It needs careful thought, of an ethical and even, in some sense, religious, faith-based nature; it deserves to be discussed from every angle, but not at the level of the street and the town square.

– The alternative simply means pretending nothing is happening… That's exactly my cause; that's why this site exists. I've given the floor on AI to a priest, to an Islamic cleric and to many people from the arts. I think I'm giving such a debate a chance, but it needs to be taken to a completely different level to have real meaning.

– It needs to be taken to those in power, keeping in mind that AI, besides being a technical breakthrough, is and will be above all a business.

– Or to society? It seems to me that power does nothing unless it's pressured. How should this debate happen? You say scientific conferences, but I think the changes are already too big to be settled there. Science has an essential and important place. But it isn't enough.

– On the contrary, especially where high technology is concerned. The United States, and every country really, will depend on it more and more… A certain Musk was brought onto Trump's team, for example.

I categorically disagree that power acts when society puts pressure on it.

I observe exactly the opposite. People try to adapt to power in order to get some benefit, but they take no interest in power unless provoked. Power sets the agenda. Society follows its leader like a herd. And that's true not only of our society but in general.

If Trump hadn't won the U.S. election, we'd have been talking about peace in Ukraine when hell freezes over, never. Besides, how can we be sure that tomorrow unscrupulous people in power won't use artificial intelligence against people's interests?

I don't know how a website can spark such a high-level debate, but I'm sure those in power must not be left out. On the contrary, they must be provoked.

If, for example, someone plays around with AI and creates a fake problem, how will the authorities react? They'll take that person to court, won't they? Besides, somewhere deep inside, more intuitively than anything, I believe these things need to be regulated.

To be honest, literature interests me very little here. Because if someone is going to lie, they can lie without artificial intelligence. What interests me more is the impact it could have on social processes, what data this machine will be fed so that it doesn't create a social cataclysm and we don't end up in a dystopia.

At the same time, I'm hopeful that AI offers ways to extend and improve the quality of life of sick people. We shouldn't reject everything a priori. But, like everything made by human beings, it should be used… however naive it may sound, with a pure heart.

– And with enough thought. I often write about each of these subjects, also because it seems to me an unprecedented tool for manipulation. Technologies like this have already swept in uncontrolled once, with social networks, which run on an earlier level of AI and created huge rifts and broke down dialogue. I think all our political problems now stem from them too, simply because that's how the algorithm works. It very easily turns us against each other. It breaks down dialogue, it creates a fluid truth.

– Absolutely, I couldn't agree more. If ordinary social networks, which people join of their own free will, can do something like that, I simply don't want to think where artificial intelligence might lead us. “Freedom is slavery.” Horrifying.

– And meanwhile we have the next very serious problem: not being able to tell what is what. For me, poetry is very telling, because it's non-obvious, metaphorical. It seeks deeper connections, what lies beyond the text, even beyond the human.

– I think the opposite. Because poetry is metaphorical and unexpected, linguistic experiment is more acceptable there, so it can slip through. In a short story it's easier to catch something illogical or something that doesn't fit, say, the context gets lost, or a character doesn't ring true in every scene.

To be honest, I've asked artificial intelligence about something related to literature only once. I asked it to write the first sentence of a historical novel according to parameters I set. And it wrote such a boring sentence that, I confess, I wouldn't read that novel even if AI wrote the whole thing. So I rather think it's easier for AI to slip through in poetry; it will find it harder to write a short story.

And in prose, I think, talent shows in the soul of a text. In whether and how much it speaks to its time. Could AI achieve that? Besides, a computer has no soul… there are things you sense on another level, not only intuitively and not only with the heart, as Saint-Exupéry says. Literature has a connection with the sky, with faith or the lack of it… with things fundamental to human beings…

– Well, all we can do is ask the questions, and that's why I take on the role of agent provocateur, testing it in practice.

– But what serious question about our times could AI raise, given that it isn't alive?

– It impresses me with unconventional ideas too; sometimes I use it for that. If I ask it for 10 first sentences of a novel and give it a bit more context, I'm sure one of them will be better than anything I could come up with.

– By your standards; by others' it might not be. A book can be read by 100 people and get 100 different opinions, until it reaches the university, where the professors will bring out the big axe and explain to us what's good and what isn't… That last bit is irony. And whether it survives historically, of course, because something that's good today may be declared a total failure by tomorrow's political system, a politically correct piece of writing by an author who toed the line, like more than a few of those who surround us today and never leave the television screens.

– Isn't the point that we should write for the sake of meaning? For what comes from within us, and not to win competitions?

– Exactly. Literary competitions, of which there are at least 50 or 60 in Bulgaria, are a stage for showing off, just like social networks.

It's precisely social networks that did something else I find very dangerous. They completely wiped out self-criticism.

If a person isn't self-critical and has no awareness of how they look in others' eyes, nothing good awaits us. We can't all be wonderful, all be great. “Easy there, Mango, tone it down a little…”

– How can we change that, so this conversation becomes more meaningful?

– That's like asking me how to make the conversation about politics on social networks more meaningful. It will never happen. And politics, at least here, is not a field for even minimally intelligent debate; lies rule, and stupidity puffs out its chest and parades proudly… unfortunately.

– But we can no longer take it outside social networks; that's where everything happens.

– I still have a sense of hierarchy in this society, and I respect those who deal with artificial intelligence seriously, that is, scientifically, whatever their field.

I'll repeat myself, but I believe this should happen at a public forum that brings together specialists selected by some criterion.

Not all of us are competent to speak out. I don't feel competent about literature, even though I write. I can say whether I like something or not. I can write down my own view, but I'm not a philologist. We need a serious debate.

– All right, but if there's such a scientific debate, won't it stay locked up there? How can it then reach society?

– On the contrary, applied science bears directly on our lives. Since AI has entered medicine, it's already part of our world.

The other day I finished the trilogy of a Nobel laureate, Jon Fosse, a Norwegian. That book cut right through me… Magnificent! Exceptional literature; I hadn't read anything so powerful, so crushing, in a long time.

And I read a little about the man: he doesn't watch television, doesn't listen to the radio, doesn't appear at discussions. He has completely isolated himself from the world and wrestles with his demons. He's an alcoholic and writes brilliant literature. Without using anything. Above him there is only God. And anyone who puts AI above the human being is in fact fighting against God. AI is nothing more than yet another technology with which one can create both good and evil.

I have no confidence when it comes to poetry, but I could sit down and “bang out” 10 poems. So what?

I believe what humanity needs right now is to sober up.

And what about this epidemic of loneliness that even scientific forums are talking about? We need to realize what's causing it. Social media, our alienation from one another as human beings. As you say, our inability to strike up a meaningful dialogue has left hundreds of thousands of people socially isolated.

Some are literally dying. They fall ill and die simply because there's no real human contact.

I believe artificial intelligence will deepen this trend, because it will fool people into thinking they are talking to a friend, to someone they have lost, or to someone who refuses to hear them. And so we find ourselves in a world where we can seemingly talk to each other. But behind this apparent palette of viewpoints, of words, of word salad, including self-absorbed academic speeches, sit frightened, disillusioned people, impoverished intellectually and emotionally.

To me, that is the great horror of our time.

And I see it every day in my work with children. I see people in despair because society isn't what they imagined it would be. This problem often surfaces when people start raising their children. That's when the shock of what surrounds us hits. Parents realize they're alone, and no AI can overcome the fragmentation of society or the lack of empathy.

– Me too. My kids are small for now, but the thought of them facing these problems terrifies me.

– The system can't spoil them if the family has laid a fundamental foundation.

– What does that fundamental foundation depend on?

– Young people, parents of preschool children, have already been warped by the system, which instills in them artificial criteria for success.

What is success? Having the coolest car instead of reading three books? Or getting your daughter silicone breasts?

I'm not saying everyone is like that, but on the whole the criteria for success are distorted. The neoliberal system has totally warped education, from preschool pedagogy to higher education.

This morning I heard an interview with a university professor who explained that the level of students in higher education is catastrophic and measures must be taken, without seeing any further than her own university department.

The level of education falls apart as early as primary school. I don't blame the teachers, and I'll explain why. First, today's parents don't have enough time to talk to their children. And, sadly, the children grow up lonely, without building a bond with their parents. Without their parents setting clear limits on what's allowed and what isn't. Without being brought up in the rules of social behavior. If a child is left alone, they're not encouraged to read, let alone to acquire culture and manners…

The first thing a parent does is give the child a mobile phone. That slows down their emotional, mental and even physical development.

Children play very little. Parents, too, are afraid of mistakes. Yet mistakes are of fundamental importance, because by learning from them children grow intellectually. To some of the parents I meet as a speech therapist, I say, “Leave the child be. Let them try, let them see what works and what doesn't, so they can correct themselves. Set them a good example.”

In the old days, when children couldn't be with their parents, they were with their grandparents. Now the grandparents also work two or three jobs to help out. At the same time, teachers have no authority whatsoever in society. A father thinks that if a teacher reprimands his child, it's absolutely unacceptable. He goes off to have it out with the teacher, even if the reprimand was justified.

There are also parents for whom knowledge isn't a value in itself; it's just some step toward the car, toward social prestige.

Being knowledgeable isn't prestigious.

If you open a newspaper or a website, you'll see for yourself that the good pens, the good writers, are gone. If you turn on the radio, you won't hear a good orator, a polemicist… How many of our politicians can string three sentences together?

– How could they stay… I couldn't have had two children if I'd had to earn my living working in the media. But again, I think we come back to social networks, where the media dropped out of the fight because they found themselves on equal footing with everyone else.

– There are many factors, including their corporate and political dependence.

Language is growing poorer. Parents come into my office whose active vocabulary is 200 to 300 words. How do they expect their children to develop fully if they themselves make no effort to improve? I say this with enormous pain, because

the epidemic of ignorance will spread.

– I keep pulling toward my own topics, but I think technology is to blame for this too, or more precisely the way we embrace it. Because it narrows your contact with your fellow human beings, and when you have no reverence for knowledge, no media that act as some kind of guarantor, no standard set by authors who win you over, who write like Dimitri Ivanov, the Bulgarian essayist and columnist…

– That's true; I have nothing to add.

– I think the bigger problem is that all of this will deepen, helped along by the arrival of artificial intelligence. While at the same time the skills of sifting and judging, so that we can spot the mistakes AI is bound to make, are becoming ever more valuable.

– Exactly. Everything has to be tested, in practice, in the real world. In philosophy and the higher humanities we can talk about abstract things, but unfortunately, while we're talking, children, pupils and students are sinking intellectually.

Where is the mistake? Somewhere the link between all these bodies responsible for the upbringing, education and behavior of young people has been broken. Why? I'm not competent to answer that question fully. I can only speak from my own vantage point.

The system is wrong. Or rather, it doesn't serve people.

But if you dare say that something isn't quite right here, you're immediately branded an enemy, which is also a failing of society; labels are stuck on you right away. You get attached to political parties or movements you may not even know exist. That's how it was with Trump: they said he was a fascist, a Nazi. That's utter nonsense; it isn't intelligent. And it's a disgrace that people who claim to be America's intellectual elite used those words. The same thing happens in Bulgaria.

So people who know how to speak, who understand, at some point lose heart and retreat into their own homes, into their own narrow circles of friends.

We live without even touching each other.

If we can't agree on where to put a table at home, figuratively speaking, or what to do with it, how will we ever agree on artificial intelligence?

Take the legislation on children with special educational needs: it contains provisions that simply don't work. We can't agree even on something like that.

– We can't even agree on our constitution, which is the foundation, let alone everything built on top of it. What might this awakening look like? Have we perhaps passed the tipping point beyond which it's no longer possible?

– History has shown how. Awakening, unfortunately, sometimes comes through social cataclysms; I hope it doesn't happen to us. I recently read an interview with the futurologist Assoc. Prof. Mariana Todorova, who said that if AI decides humanity is dangerous to the planet, it could destroy us.

I believe we should all live, in some way, with a sense of a higher judgment.

With the sense that life doesn't begin and end with us; then, somehow, we'd know our limits.

But unfortunately, elites sometimes push things to the point where there's no way out except a radical social change, as happened after the French Revolution, after the October Revolution, after the Second World War. And for us, after the First World War too, when our attitude toward the world changed completely. Because ever since then we've always been on the losing side. Some historians say that this is why we suffer from satellite syndrome and have no elite that dares to think independently.

– Alek Popov once told me that the death of Ivan Vazov, the patriarch of Bulgarian literature, was that bifurcation point from which we split in two, irreversibly for now.

– If we hadn't lost the First World War, it would have been completely different. With all due respect to the patriarch of literature, social currents, aspirations and attitudes are determined by higher forces. Writers can support you spiritually, as when the Treaty of Neuilly, the 1919 peace that stripped Bulgaria of territory, was signed and our desperate compatriots gathered under Vazov's balcony. But he couldn't fully help them…

It's very hard also because our so-called intellectual elite is divided, if we can even speak of one, rather than of mere parroting. Unfortunately, I believe salvation lies neither in dialogue nor in Bulgarian society as it is today, and I don't need to live another 50 years to be convinced of it. I don't say it with pain, but as a statement of fact.

For 35 years, since the end of communism, this society has proven incapable of a healthy discussion that respects opinions different from the official, politically correct discourse.

– Even more years than that… History is a big subject, to which I devoted a series of Digital Stories. But on the other big subject we touched on, children and technology, in a few days I'm starting a series of important viewpoints. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for this fascinating conversation!

In 2015, seven leading futurists laid out their expectations for the decade that was just beginning. In a few hours we will welcome that very 2025, so we can now judge how well they lived up to their own predictions in the dynamic and turbulent first quarter of the 21st century.

And then comes the even more interesting part: we will peek into what those same futurists expect today, and above all the ones among them who turned out to be right.

What lies ahead in the coming years, according to the people who successfully predicted the last decade?

The end of every year is a time to look back and look ahead, which is why each time a themed Digital Stories piece on forecasting awaits you.

Here are the previous ones, which are definitely still relevant:

• “The World in 2050.” Can We Peek into the Future?

• 2022, 60 Years Earlier. What Did the Science Fiction Writers Get Right?—from Isaac Asimov to the Strugatsky brothers.

• “Programs, programs and more programs! That’s what we should infect the young generation with…”—what a curious book from 1988 got right in its predictions about the computer world.

• “The Computer Will Be Like Bread!” How Did Bulgarian Science Fiction Writers See the 21st Century?

Two Five-Year Plans

Where were you in May 2015? Personally, I was still working at a magazine, I had no children, life was so different… It is different whichever way you look at it. Technology has changed us to the core since then, the international situation is radically different, even the problems we argue about online are other ones. And who could have guessed there would be COVID, that Russia and Ukraine would go to war, that artificial intelligence would become the most discussed topic and make such remarkable progress?

Then again, maybe… there are people capable of catching what is coming with ruthless accuracy? Let’s check.

In May 2015, this piece appeared in the Huffington Post: “7 Futurists Give Their Predictions for the Next Decade.” Futurists, futurologists, forecasters… someday it will be worth untangling that topic too—the similarities and differences, and the scientific approach to the future—with Assoc. Prof. Mariana Todorova, a beloved and frequent guest of Digital Stories.

Still, lots of people make predictions, and they are hard to keep track of, especially in the commotion of the ocean of information flooding us. That is why I chose this angle on the subject: a specific set of predictions with a specific due date. A date that has just arrived, so we can check what came true and what came crashing down. And from there, hear what those same people expect from the future that is coming.

How Kaku It Be?

Michio Kaku is a professor of theoretical physics, a legendary figure in forecasting who definitely deserves a Digital Story of his own. How well did he do in 2015, peering ahead to 2025? Let’s see.

“In the next 10 years, we will see the gradual transition from an internet to a brain-net, in which thoughts, emotions, feelings and memories might be transmitted instantly across the planet.

Scientists can now hook up the brain to a computer and begin to decode some of our memories and thoughts. This could eventually lead to a revolution in communication and even entertainment. Movies of the future will transmit emotions and feelings, not just images on a screen.

Teenagers will go crazy on social media, sending memories and sensations from their prom, their first date and so on. Historians and writers will be able to record events not just digitally, but emotionally.

Perhaps even tensions between people will diminish, as people begin to feel and experience the pain of others.”

Ah, professor… if you are right about the optimistic part of your predictions, we will definitely have to wait (a little?) longer. The brain is still having a hard time learning to connect to the computer, and emotions remain as indecipherable as ever. As for whether we are already in a brain-net to which we delegate more and more of the work of our most important organ… that deserves a deeper look.

Teenagers will go crazy on social media… it seems they are not the only ones.

Either way, I at least could not find where Prof. Kaku set a precise deadline for each of these predictions. And whether a decade later we have come closer to their fulfillment, judge for yourselves…

Space, Brain, Immortality

But what does the famous forecaster expect for the coming decades? Here are three specific predictions of his from 2022:

• We will become a space-faring species

“We are entering the next golden era of space exploration. Not only do we have new energy, new funding and money coming in from Silicon Valley, we also have a new vision. For Elon Musk, the goal is to create a multiplanet species. Jeff Bezos, for his part, wants to turn the Earth into a park, so that all the heavy industry, all the pollution goes into outer space. I once talked to Carl Sagan, and he said the Earth is in the middle of a shooting gallery of asteroids, comets and meteors, so it is inevitable that one day we will be hit. We need an insurance policy.

Remember that 99.9 percent of all species here eventually go extinct. Extinction is the norm. We think of Mother Nature as warm and cuddly. And most of the time she is. But sometimes her wild side shows. Right beneath your feet are the bones of organisms and fossils, that 99.9 percent that were doomed by the laws of nature. The laws of physics also doom the entire planet. Those are two death sentences for humanity, and ultimately our destiny will be in outer space.”

• We will expand the capabilities of the brain

“In the history of science, we have had big projects that galvanized entire nations. The ‘Manhattan’ Project gave us the atomic bomb. The Genome Project allowed us to map the genes of the body. Barack Obama launched the Connectome project to map the human brain. It is already possible to connect it directly to a computer.

We can already have telepathy. We can already merge minds with the internet, send memories, emotions.

Computer chips will cost a penny, they will be everywhere and nowhere, in your eyeball, in your contact lens. You will blink and be online. We are entering a new era in which the internet may become a ‘brain-net.’ And that will revolutionize entertainment. When radio came along, silent movies were out of a job. Nobody wanted to watch Charlie Chaplin when you could hear actors talk. Think about what will happen when you can feel emotions, sensations. Then movies will seem so barbaric, like technology from the days of the dinosaurs.”

• We will defeat cancer

“I think the synergy between biotechnology and artificial intelligence will lead to a revolution in everything around us. First, the job market will explode, because the baby boom generation is aging, it has disposable income, and it wants answers to its problems now, not next year. So there will be a lot of money tied to people who want to find a cure for terrible diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Right now we have no cure for them, but a huge share of the effort is being redirected toward the diseases of old age.

We will have a silver bullet against cancer thanks to nanomedicine. We will have DNA chips that let us look for signs of cancer in colonies of a hundred or so cells. One day your toilet will tell you that you have cancer, do something, you have 10 years. The word ‘tumor’ will disappear from the English language. Our descendants will wonder how we could ever have been so afraid of cancer.”

Ah… I hope he is right. On every single point.

Well, Well, Weil

Ray Kurzweil is an inventor and a pioneer of computer science, best known for continuing to predict the trends in how technology develops. Trends that, in his view, (perhaps ever more) convincingly lead us toward the singularity in the foreseeable future—the moment when machines surpass human intelligence.

But do his predictions really come true with such precision? Here is what he expected of 2025 a decade ago:

“By 2025, 3D printers will print clothing at very low cost. There will be free open-source designs, but people will still spend money to download the clothing files of the latest hot designer. 3D printers will print human organs, and we will be able to repair damaged organs with reprogrammed stem cells. 3D printers will print inexpensive modules for snapping together a house or an office building, Lego-style.

We will spend considerable time in virtual and augmented reality, which will allow us to see each other even when we are hundreds of kilometers apart. We will even be able to touch each other.

By 2025, avatars will be convincing but not quite at human level—that will happen in 2030. We will be able to reprogram human biology against many diseases and aging processes, for example by deactivating cancer cells and slowing the progression of atherosclerosis, the cause of heart disease.

We will create avatars of deceased people from all the information they left behind. They will be convincing but not fully realistic, at least not before the mid-2030s. Some people will find this technology unsettling.”

Let’s say that technological predictions are Mr. Kurzweil’s strong suit. His predictions in the medical field are definitely still in the future tense. Unlike, for instance, the idea of digital twins and the conflicted attitudes toward “digital resurrection.”

What is curious, though, is that he stands by his predictions where the singularity and technology surpassing human intelligence are concerned. His new book, The Singularity Is Nearer, came out recently, and it is definitely the subject of a future digital story.

And here is what Ray Kurzweil expects in the coming years, according to a June 2024 interview with the Guardian:

“I have stayed consistent. I expect we will reach human-level intelligence—AI that has attained the abilities of the most skilled humans in a given field—and by 2029 that will be achieved in most respects. There may be a few transitional years after 2029 in which AI has not surpassed the best humans in a few key skills, such as writing Oscar-winning screenplays or generating deep new philosophical insights, though that will happen too.

General AI is something else—it can do everything any human can do, but at a higher level. It sounds harder, but it is coming as well. In fact, I am the only person who predicted the tremendous interest in AI we are seeing today. In 1999, people thought it would take a century or more. I said 30 years, and look what we have. The most important driver is the exponential growth in the amount of computing power for a given price.

As AI gets smarter, it will be able to understand its own knowledge more accurately and tell people when it doesn’t know. Think of it as having a phone, but in your brain. If you ask a question, your brain will be able to go to the cloud for an answer, much like you do now on your phone—only it will be instantaneous, there will be no input or output issues, and you won’t realize it has been done. The answer will simply appear.”

Take Kjaer

Dr. Anne Lise Kjaer is the founder of Kjaer Global, a London-based trend forecasting agency. In 2015, she predicted:

“The WHO predicts that by 2020 chronic diseases will account for almost 3/4 of all deaths worldwide, so the development of M-Health (mobile diagnostics, biofeedback and personal monitoring) will revolutionize the treatment of conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure.

Apps developed by medical professionals will provide effective real-time feedback, tackle chronic diseases at a much earlier stage and help improve lifestyles in developed and developing countries alike.

That is exciting, but what excites me even more is the parallel development of apps that address our underserved mental health needs.”

Alas, as already mentioned, things in the health sector are moving more slowly than our fond hopes, and that too is the subject of quite a few Digital Stories.

Dr. Kjaer rarely makes public appearances, and I couldn’t find sufficiently recent specific expectations of hers for the future, but she has developed an impressive system on which she bases her forecasting.

And its presentation includes some predictions as well:

“Thinking cities. High-speed digital infrastructure is transforming cities, bringing fresh thinking and new solutions that deliver environmental innovation at scale.

Internet of everything: artificial intelligence and the internet of things are evolving and influencing work, production and skill sets; most future jobs have not yet been invented.

Immersive experiences: creativity is the key to developing high-quality, immersive and augmented experiences—technology is merely a tool.

Omni-channel: we expect seamless interactions and instant responses in a world where all things, places and people are connected.

Radical transparency: digital ethics, openness and transparency are the norm, built into products, services and interactions.”

The Internet of Everything and Everyone

Dr. James Canton is not just a forecaster but also one of the founders of Apple, one of the people who paved the way for the iPhone, and with it for all the changes that came with the rise of mobile technology. Here is what he expected of the year now upon us:

“Portable mobile devices will cover the entire world. By 2025 we will have an internet of everyone and everything, connecting every nation, community, company and person with all the world’s knowledge. This will accelerate real-time access to education, health care, jobs, entertainment and commerce…

Humans and robots are merging, digitally and physically. Artificial intelligence is becoming as smart as humans, even smarter. It will be embedded in cars, robots, homes and hospitals, and that will create an entire AI economy.

Predictive medicine is changing health care. Personalized genetic medicine will prevent disease, save lives and save billions in lost productivity.

The next generation of bitcoin will replace traditional money, creating a new paradigm for digital commerce and business that will create an entirely new economy.”

Hmm, it seems to me that quite a few nuances were captured here. Yes, medicine, which according to every forecast quoted here should have been transformed by now, is still not what we would like it to be. Not at a Sofia polyclinic, at least. But the rest?

A Virtual Friend

That is exactly why we are peeking into James Canton’s current predictions, given in an interview with Newsweek in June 2024. About how he imagines the iPhone, the symbol of technological progress, will continue to evolve:

“Smaller, lighter, faster—eventually the iPhone will disappear into a small wearable device. Think Star Trek.

AI will be fully integrated into the iPhone, as everyone will have one or more personal AI agents helping them navigate their life, security, work, health and creativity.

AI will become a tool for self-improvement, a tutor, a virtual friend, a guide, a creative force. General AI is bound to arrive too, the ‘constant radical change’ that will accelerate adoption and personal empowerment. That could happen within five years.

AI is a particular problem, especially if it is not controlled, monitored and protected by strong ethical and legal frameworks.”

Future Perfect

“Self-driving cars will be ubiquitous, transportation will be automatic, clean and cheap. We will move to a world where access trumps ownership and the world is at arm’s length,” predicted Jason Silva, host of the show Brain Games, for 2025 in the same article. Automated vehicles are certainly advancing, but taxi drivers still seem far from losing their leading role as universal sources of topical wisdom.

According to Amy Zalman, president of the World Future Society: “Researchers now have increasingly sharp ways to peer into our brains and bodies to understand our attitudes and behavior. A few years ago, researchers at Harvard University showed that leaders actually experience less stress, not more, than non-leaders. I find the potential application of this kind of insight awe-inspiring. A more precise understanding of how we humans function—how we trust, cooperate and learn, but also how we quarrel and hate—is a tool that policymakers and we citizens can use to build better governance and a better future.”

I think so too. But it still looks like yet another direction in which the optimism of forecasting has proven stronger than the skepticism of time.

As Amy Zalman herself says in another interview, though it is not certain who coined the phrase, it seems that “we always tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run.”

Not that the reverse isn’t possible, of course.

Man Is the Measure of All Things

The last prediction on the 2015 list belongs to Mark Stevenson, author of the book An Optimist’s Tour of the Future:

“Technology is not the most important part—although it is super cool. What matters is what society does with it, and right now institutional change is the problem. What is really worth looking at, in my view, are new ways of organizing ourselves.”

By the way, can you think of someone who sets specific goals for the following year every year and achieves them with precise persistence? I can, although I don’t know him personally: his name is Sam Altman. Recently he too gave his predictions for 2025.

“What do I expect in 2025? AGI. I’m very excited about it.” He and his partner are also expecting a baby; life always brings unexpected and exciting possibilities. But as for general AI, according to Altman, “it will come and go.” While “society itself will change surprisingly little.”

Looking at the future is impossible, but obligatory.

If it interests you, here are a few more texts on the subject:

• “The World in 2050.” Can We Peek into the Future?

• 2022, 60 Years Earlier. What Did the Science Fiction Writers Get Right?—from Isaac Asimov to the Strugatsky brothers.

• “Programs, programs and more programs! That’s what we should infect the young generation with…”—what a curious book from 1988 got right in its predictions about the computer world.

• “The Computer Will Be Like Bread!” How Did Bulgarian Science Fiction Writers See the 21st Century?

In 2025, too, I will keep telling the important Digital Stories and giving the floor to people who have something to say.

I still disagree that it is a curse to live in interesting times. Our lives are more dynamic than ever, creating astonishing opportunities and confronting us with new challenges. That is exactly why it is more important than ever to talk about them; only then will we be even a little better prepared for both…

We are arguing,

the two of us, ChatGPT and I,

over a theme: “Man in the New Age.”

I’ve heard people call it Chatty; others stick to the official ChatGPT. For two years now it has been the symbol of progress in a technological field that is supposedly under constant discussion. Meanwhile it has wrapped itself in so many clichés that it’s hard to peek beyond them.

Telling the world what you’ve been chatting about with artificial intelligence stopped being original long ago.

Or perhaps the real problem is whether you know you’re talking to it at all—and if you don’t, whether you can tell that there’s no human on the other side.

But let’s not dawdle. Straight to the subject.

Can there be ethics in progress?

Can technology and humanity exist in balance?

Most likely not.

Should there be ethics in progress?

Should technology and humanity exist in balance?

Definitely yes.

But how can that be?

Lunatic Luddites, Dreaming

Perhaps you’ve heard of the Luddites? A British movement that, two centuries ago, rose up against the machines. Workers demanding their rights, which had fallen victim to automation, caused such chaos that more British soldiers had to be sent against them than against Napoleon’s army. Their main goal was to smash the machines and try to halt progress.

Well, it’s more likely you haven’t heard of them, because they obviously lost the battle. And yet that battle, however naive and impossible, is so important and so necessary today for anyone who values their freedom. Far, of course, from the primitive breaking of iron. Every new step in the development of technology makes it more urgent. Because we keep handing technology more and more power, building machines of progress and machines of inequality.

Oh yes, what people are like… “The mad ones, the mad ones—long may they live,” says Chorbadzhi Marko, the wealthy patriarch in Ivan Vazov’s classic novel Under the Yoke, and it’s quite possible that, if you don’t know me, you’ll file me under that category based on what you’ve read so far. A rather muddled opening. Still, here’s what it’s all about.

An Unequal Battle

Lately we supposedly talk about technology at every turn—another step forward has appeared, leading us toward progress. Or the opposite: toward the fall. And as machines become ever more complex systems, influencing us in ever more unexpected ways, how could we look for the ideal environment? The one where human interest meets the interest of our creations—artificial intelligence, robots, social networks?

The sciences keep carving up their little fields of influence, much like the bubbles on social networks. Meanwhile the human side is left further and further on the sidelines. The influence of technology on the individual, on the community, on our relationships with one another—these topics grow at once more complex and harder to discuss.

So what do we do? Let’s try to bring together the irreconcilable. As you’ve already seen, my eclectic solution here involves the omnipresent symbol of technology today, ChatGPT. I asked it to play a role and become the interlocutor of a poem that says a great deal about its natural interlocutor. About its creator, its demiurge… who may also become its future victim. I simply “ask” it (“invite” it? “beg” it?) to respond to the verses of “Song of Man” by Nikola Vaptsarov, the Bulgarian poet executed in 1942.

Both people and algorithms lie. Both sides certainly make mistakes. And we, ever more imperceptibly, dissolve into the amalgam of what has come out of their shared errors. Out of the fact that, gradually and rapidly, we are losing our taste for the slow, the deep, the essential… while the algorithms are developing exactly that.

Through Impudence to Progress

The more we unlearn how to read long texts, the better they get at precisely that?!

We keep approaching these algorithms from the extremes. Doomed, by the algorithms themselves, to be unable to find deep, thoughtful solutions. For instance, on how to regulate them. Or how to teach them ethics, morality, humanity?

I’m a modern man, but when it comes to ethics and foundations, I keep thinking there’s good reason to listen to the areas of human knowledge that deal with exactly these things. Yes, I know God is dead according to Nietzsche—and, as far as Nietzsche is concerned, so am I—but then, according to both of us, Nietzsche is even more dead, at least until he’s reborn as an algorithm.

In the Name of the People

No, not ChatGPT—I mean God. And if my musings on logic and ethics wander so far that they escape even the risk of being accused of having been written by the algorithm, let me hand the floor to speakers more experienced in these matters.

“I discuss this subject with many people, and so far the answer to this question has always been linked to age,” says Father Nikolay Georgiev. “Older people believe that artificial intelligence has certain limits it cannot go beyond. For this group, to which I belong, artificial intelligence will always be a machine and never a human. Personally, I believe it will never have a soul.

That is, the moral categories that are a product of the human soul won’t be present there. Even if they are calculated, even if they are computed and built in, their use will be the result of an algorithm, not of emotion. The young generation, on the contrary, believes artificial intelligence is limitless. It can develop, improve, reach heights beyond humanity and the human.”

Here’s Your Ethics

Or maybe that’s the whole point—that we have no clearly set limits? Whether we have or haven’t passed the Turing test is an ever more debatable question, while the more important one, in my view, remains whether humanity itself is passing that same test with ever higher scores. Perhaps not?

“Today values and morality are being blurred. So who will create the moral categories for the machine? That’s what frightens me,” says Father Nikolay. “If Hitler creates moral categories for artificial intelligence, they will differ from what Einstein would put in. Or one of the great composers: Mozart, Bach, Couperin. Either way, I don’t believe humanity will come together and form a commission to define the moral categories of artificial intelligence. For us it’s easy: the Lord gave the Ten Commandments. They are perfect. One of the marks of perfection is that they always protect the weaker.”

I still think perfection remains an optimistic category, even for algorithms.

But what truly horrifies me is the thought that technology keeps developing, creating enormous new possibilities, both for good and for ill, while we sit around squabbling over the trivia of the day.

“All the current conflicts send one very serious message—values are gone. This is a great ethical crisis! Humanity needs to be restarted,” says yet another, fifth speaker, after Vaptsarov, ChatGPT, Father Nikolay and the author of these scattered reflections on an impossible and at the same time existential subject. Birali Birali was for a long time deputy to the Chief Mufti, the head of Bulgaria’s Muslim community, and his outlook is, in my view, quite thought-provoking.

“But how do you restart humanity? One way is through self-awareness, the other is through conflict.”

Isn’t It Wonderful?

“The destructive side of technology is the abandonment of values,” says Birali. “If a person tells a lie, a few people will hear it, but if he says it on Facebook, it will reach the whole world. Today sins have a different dimension. We commit more global sins…

Where’s the problem? Like all the new things we can invent and bring into our lives, to some degree they are a blessing, but to another they can be a curse.”

But how, how do we embody ethics in technology? At least in the foreseeable future, it obviously can’t happen directly. Yes, large language models have learned to be politically correct; they manage to sidestep many touchy subjects and to refuse obviously too important and dangerous questions—until you find a way to “trip them up.” But that is still a direct product of human intervention, far from both intelligence and true ethics.

And ethics remains the job of the people who develop the models.

Should the big technological decisions, as until now, be made by a handful of tech leaders? While the giants grow stronger than even the most powerful states, as has already happened with social networks?

Can everything rest on regulation, and what should it look like? Is the European approach—basing regulation mainly on the specific areas where algorithms are used—even reasonable?

And how can this work in practice, when models are becoming ever more efficient and it’s no longer a problem to run a fairly capable form of artificial intelligence on an unassuming laptop?

Or should there be a dialogue that all of us join? One that is gravely overdue, but could still take place… I’ll confess that this very dialogue is the reason I gather Digital Stories.

Heavy,

human,

cruel,

eyeless

fate.

Can there be ethics in progress?

Can technology and humanity exist in balance?

Most likely not.

Should there be ethics in progress?

Should technology and humanity exist in balance?

Definitely yes.

It’s up to us how we reconcile these two statements in the days and years ahead. Like hot oil and water, like unbelief and faith, like natural and artificial intelligence.

I keep thinking that the very core of the future depends on whether we manage to make them talk to each other. And the future is closer than it seems.

**
This piece is part of the second issue of Stalbata (The Ladder) magazine.**

Our brain has developed over the course of evolution, gradually getting used to a changing environment… and then came Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. Suddenly we find ourselves in a world for which our most important organ turns out to be completely unprepared. And it copes… as best it can. It tries to adapt, but there is no way this can happen without a breakdown.

Not a breakdown, a catastrophe. One we cannot even take in, because we cannot stop, think, talk it over. We are too busy moving on. Scrolling, browsing, bickering… Like a hamster on a wheel.

Anders Hansen is a Swedish psychiatrist who is not afraid to raise the big questions of today's technological age. Precisely the questions that are the reason the site you have landed on exists. Hansen is read all over the world, and fortunately so—because if you find the time to reflect on the messages he leaves, it will certainly help you pay attention to the questions that really matter.

That matter to every one of us.

His new book is called Insta-Brain; it recently came out in Bulgarian and brings together so many important topics we like to avoid. If you read it, your brain will thank you. I have tried to gather 10 key points.

Ahead lie no fewer than 10 headings ending in an exclamation mark (forgive me!)! Because it is definitely time to be amazed, to wake up, to think! And Dr. Hansen gives us plenty of reasons to do so.

1. Cut the Wireless Cord!

“If we were left without our mobile phones, our world would collapse—40% would rather lose their voice for an entire day (really!) than be parted from it. Wherever we look—downtown, in the café, in restaurants, on the bus, at dinner, even at the gym—everyone is looking at their phone. Whatever our opinion on the matter, we have become addicted!

On average we use our phones for 3 hours a day. Of course, some spend less time on them and others even more. Is there anything the heaviest phone users have in common? When scientists studied the mobile habits of nearly 700 students, they found that a third of the participants in the experiment were so addicted that they could not stay away from their device even at night. As a result, they were tired during the day.”

That we are addicted is beyond dispute. We can easily see it in so many signals around us. And what are we doing about it?

Anders Hansen takes us down the path of long evolution, in which we are merely the last few dots in a vast sequence of 1,500 generations through which human development has passed. Hundreds of generations lived quietly and calmly, with barely any information about what was happening beyond a radius of a few dozen kilometers. They knew their few neighbors, they had serious but rarely changing basic stimuli…

Until suddenly we find ourselves in a world where information bombards us. Our “friends” number in the hundreds of thousands, and the battle for our attention is fierce.

And a clear parallel emerges. Once, in evolutionary terms, it was important to try to eat as much as possible, to stock up, to devour as much food as you could. Today, in most of the world, food is abundant, and suddenly it turns out that the hard part is holding back. Without noticing, we have to reverse the goals of several thousand years of evolution, and for now we do not seem to be doing particularly well.

Exactly the same thing is happening with information. Only far more fundamentally. And far more dangerously than even the health problems that come as a natural consequence of obesity.

2. Don't… Like!

“Justin Rosenstein, an American in his thirties, decided to limit his use of Facebook and abandoned Snapchat altogether, comparing it to heroin in terms of its ability to create addiction. To cut down on his phone use, he installed an app designed so that parents can limit their children's mobile habits.

Rosenstein's move is particularly interesting given that he is the one who created the ‘like’ button on Facebook. In other words, the man behind the ‘like’ believes his own creation is too tempting, and in one interview he gives the impression that he almost regrets it: ‘It is very common for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences.’”

We do not know where we have ended up. While the next technologies loom, artificial intelligence is here to rebuild from the ground up the foundations of everything that makes us human… while we still cannot figure out where we have ended up.

“Like.” I “like” things too. Is it bad to “like”? Not at all, just as it is not bad to like, without the quotation marks. Only the likes, those tiny gestures of approval (or outrage, or laughter), turned out to be much more than a tiny gesture. They are a convenient tool of manipulation, negligible in scale but enormous in power. On the one hand it breeds addiction, manipulating us at the most obvious level, that of our hormones, so that we rejoice, lie in wait, keep watching. On the other hand it deprives us of real conversation.

I don't know about you, but I don't like it, and I don't “like” it either.

3. One Thing at a Time!

“People can't multitask very well, and when people say they can, they're deluding themselves!”
Earl Miller, professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“Our brain has the incredible ability to run many processes in parallel, but in one particular area our mental capacity is extremely limited: attention. We simply can focus on only one thing at a time. What we actually do when we think we are multitasking is switch rapidly from one task to another and back again.

When you are listening to a lecture and writing an email at the same time, impressed by your ability to do both at once, the truth is that you are instantly shifting your attention from one to the other. The switch itself takes only a tenth of a second, but the problem is that your brain lingers on what you were doing before. When you move to the email, it will still be devoting some attention to the person giving the lecture. The same happens when you leave the email for the lecture.”

We cannot multitask. This comes from someone who multitasks constantly and will hardly manage to stop. Our brain is built in a way that needs time, calm, context. Yet in digital times, time turns out to be a resource draining away at lightning speed, and we keep piling up and piling up tasks, reasons to think, to remember, to react… which is simply not the human way of coping.

Our brain can work on many tasks in parallel. And yet it has the limitation of holding our concentration on just one. And as long as we try to change that, we will lose more and more time, forgetting the next details, the next tasks.

4. Remember!

“The ‘Google effect,’ also known as ‘digital amnesia,’ is when our brain decides not to learn something it believes is already stored somewhere. For the brain, it is more important to remember where it can find the information than the information itself. But the Google effect doesn't just stop us from remembering facts. In one experiment, participants were asked to visit an art museum, photographing some works and only looking at others. The next day they were shown pictures of several works, some of which they had seen in the museum and some of which they had not. They had to try to remember whether they had come across the works in the pictures during their visit.

It turned out that they found it easier to recall the works they had not photographed than the ones they had. Just as our brain decides not to learn sentences stored on a computer, it seems it also doesn't want to remember something that has been photographed. Instead it takes a shortcut: ‘Why remember the artwork itself when it's in a photo?’”

“I am young, but I remember no youth,” wrote Hristo Botev, the nineteenth-century revolutionary poet. We keep delegating, delegating the next important things to technology. I have written here about photographs that change their meaning, about memory and oblivion, about the ease with which we hand over our memories, and about the complete change in the way we get our information, which is so directly tied to our memories too.

And yet all this looks even more thought-provoking when seen through the eyes of a psychiatrist who also speaks from experience.

Memory matters. Partly because “who controls the past controls the future.”

And partly because it is one of the main traits that make us human. Traits that should lead us forward.

5. Think Three Times, Post Once!

“You are hardly the only one who has ever written something on Facebook and later realized you shared more than you intended. Not only do we communicate with more people through social media, we also share more about ourselves, because we don't see the people we are talking to. According to numerous studies, we readily reveal details about ourselves online that would otherwise seem too personal to share face to face. This is probably because when we stand in front of someone and can see their facial expression and body language, we hold back: ‘Oh, he looks a little skeptical, I'd better not say any more.’ Without the possibility of feedback, self-censorship disappears. That is why we can easily share something personal with three hundred people on Facebook, but not with three people in real life.

In a study involving nearly two thousand Americans, it turned out that those who were more active on social media felt lonelier. Whether they actually were lonelier is another matter. As we know, loneliness cannot be measured by the number of friends, messages or calls—it is a matter of feeling. And it seems this is exactly what the participants in the study felt.”

Dr. Hansen also describes experiments suggesting that a person, however hard they try, can build some meaningful connection with no more than 150 people at a time. Beyond that, the limit is simply set by the constraints of our brain, which we never stop challenging with each new technological provocation. There is no way to have 5,000 “friends,” know who they are and maintain a full relationship with each of them.

Digital inequality arrived there, in the online world that supposedly appeared to give all of us equal access to information. And indeed, each of us has incredible access to information. But did we turn out to be ready?

Our limitations can become an advantage too, can't they? Only for that to happen, we need to approach them more consciously.

All while it is so easy, so pleasant, so important to speak out online on every new big issue!

“The false feeling that your opinion matters,” as one remarkable guest of Digital Stories so aptly put it.

6. You Are the Product!

“The global advertising market brings in over 400 billion euros a year, and it has moved from newspapers, television sets and billboards to our mobile phones at lightning speed. This is not at all surprising, given how our brain works.

Digital marketers take advantage of all this. They know that your attention is glued to a device that supplies your brain with hundreds of small doses of dopamine every day, and that your thirst for information about the people around you means your brain is always ready to store new facts. They also know it will form positive associations—both consciously and unconsciously—with the message they want to convey to you. They achieve this by placing ads strategically within the stream of digital information you are flooded with.”

You are what you read.

Let me say it again, just in case, since we all read in a hurry and have no time to go deep.

You are what you read.

You close the ad before the video and that's it, you are free of the manipulation. Not at all—it is only just beginning.

We leave enormous, continuous and entirely voluntary ultra-detailed electronic dossiers of ourselves on the web. The algorithms are ever more perfect at the task of reading, recognizing, interpreting and using them.

At the same time, we find ourselves spending hours of our lives every day online on platforms that are free. Exactly as free as the cheese in a mousetrap.

Online, the product is you.

7. Grab Your Swimsuit!

“An information tsunami! Every day, 2.5 trillion units of information are created. One trillion equals a billion billion! Such a large number is unimaginable, but perhaps it would be easier to grasp if we consider that every single minute 187 million emails and 38 million messages are sent. In the same time, 400 hours of footage are uploaded to YouTube, 3.7 million Google searches are made, half a million tweets are posted, and a million photos on Tinder are swiped right or left. And this is happening faster and faster with each passing day. But the brain that has to absorb this tsunami of digital information is the same as it was ten thousand years ago.

To cope with this tsunami, we need to suppress the impulse to reach for our phones every minute and to click on links that take us away from the articles we are reading.”

I won't reach for my phone. I won't reach for my phone. I won't reach for my phone… But what if it's something important?

8. Think!

“The fact that each successive generation has a higher IQ is known as the ‘Flynn effect,’ after the New Zealand professor James Flynn. But it is not due to digitalization alone: roughly the same rise in IQ has been observed every decade since the 1920s, and back then there was neither television nor the internet.

Since the late 1990s, however, Flynn has noticed a worrying pattern: this growth has slowed in the Scandinavian countries, and the average IQ is falling every year. The decline is not that dramatic—0.2 points a year—but within a single generation it can reach 6 to 7 points. That would be by no means an insignificant figure. Flynn assumes the same will happen to the rest of the world.”

This is a topic on which many Digital Stories are still to come. Intelligence is an important criterion that changes and is easily redefined. You may not remember, but the most intelligent woman on the planet has been a guest here too!

Or perhaps it is connected with our development as a species, with happiness, even with reproduction?

And yet, by all appearances… progress in technology does not necessarily make us more intelligent. And then comes artificial intelligence, while we have less and less of the natural kind left to oppose it, balance it and make sense of it… this topic is too important; expect more essential strokes on it soon.

9. Wait a Minute!

“Digitalization is outpacing research into its effects. If you want to learn about the findings on the impact of today's digital lifestyle, you will have to wait a few years. By then, of course, technology will have developed even further, and unless the trend of the past twenty years changes sharply, we will be using phones and computers even more often. And if you want to find out how the digital lifestyle of 2023 has affected us, you will have to wait until 2027.”

Anton Donchev told me this a full 15 years ago. We carry in our pocket a device and we do not know where it will take us. We carry in our pocket an entire Universe, a volume of information that a generation back no one would have imagined could be taken in.

5G didn't kill the pigeons, the waves from cell towers didn't wipe us out, even the vaccines with chips didn't manage it. And yet technology has changed us drastically, imperceptibly, perfidiously, fundamentally. While there was never time to sit down and make sense of it, talk it over, show what had happened. And what next?

10. Protect the Child!

“The journal Pediatrics warns that children who spend too much time in front of tablets and phones instead of playing fail to acquire important motor skills they need in order to later learn mathematics and the theoretical sciences.

The American Academy of Pediatrics urges limiting children's access to tablets and phones, especially if they are under 18 months old. To me, the phrase ‘under 18 months’ sounded absurd, since children that age can't even talk properly, and some can barely walk! But I quickly realized the recommendation is not ridiculous at all, given that 80% of two-year-olds actually use the internet regularly.”

Soon we will talk in detail, in a series of articles, about the huge topic of children and technology; look for it in January.

Meanwhile, when it comes to technology, we are all children. “We are all children of Mother Earth,” wrote Hristo Smirnenski, the Bulgarian poet of the 1920s. And we are in the role of children who must quickly come to their senses and grow up. Not give in to the shiny toys. To the deceptive convenience, to the fast carbohydrates.

Technology, and the way we embrace it, deserves a far more serious and thoughtful conversation.

If you don't believe me, you can see for yourself in the book Insta-Brain, where you will also find useful advice on how to limit the damage, how to preserve your brain, your calm, your balance—practical and tested.

Online, you are what you read. Don't stop reading. But don't stop stopping while you read, either. So that you can think…

– You say part of your job is to talk about the social transformation that comes with artificial intelligence. That is my cause too. What do you think are the most important aspects of this change?

– The most obvious is the loss of jobs, but there are other aspects and dangers as well.
If AI surpasses us in capacity, it matters a great deal whether it will develop and display consciousness. That may decide whether we control it or it goes its own way.

Another aspect is the many changes in education—is there any point to it anymore?

If you have no job, and there is no other job you could learn and do, what do you need an education for?

Clearly it won't be vocational, it will be personal—how to perceive the things that are happening. How to be well, how to take care of your health—all things that have nothing to do with work. From there we can talk about other changes, in medicine, for example, that could improve our lives.

There may be social changes in how we live—that we will no longer be surrounded only by people, but by machines as well. Will they have their own societies? Will we want that, will we regulate it? Will we be able to choose between places where such machine societies are allowed and places where they aren't?

All sorts of changes could happen that we can't possibly imagine right now, but the first signs are clearly visible.

– The loss of jobs really does seem the most obvious. Yet almost two years have passed since “the ChatGPT moment,” and the effect still doesn't seem to be visible…

– On the contrary! Look at “support,” for example—the technical support specialists. That profession is melting away!

Call centers are disappearing as an industry right now. What's left is some 5 percent for the more complex cases, and in time those will be smoothed out too.

There are already examples—in the Philippines, where this industry used to be very strong. There are also advanced projects where phenomenal things are happening: shorter response times, more satisfied customers, cases resolved through support.

The fact that a person hasn't been fired because ChatGPT came along doesn't mean the work isn't becoming more efficient and that this isn't reducing jobs overall.

And all that efficiency invariably translates into fewer people, fewer jobs and more efficient businesses.

Lately there have been constant waves of layoffs in the tech world, and part of the reason really is that the models are becoming more efficient.

– Most people in the sector say the reasons are mostly economic and that it's too early for these to be the consequences of artificial intelligence. But I see it in my own work too—how much more efficient AI systems make me as a programmer.

– Absolutely! Take the arrival of a platform like Devin. They claim that

13.9 percent of a software team's tasks are completed successfully, entirely autonomously.

But if we break the situation down, another share of the tasks are 80 percent done, 60 percent, 40 percent. There's a pile of tasks that are partly done, and they also add up to a certain volume of useful work. On top of that, there are tasks completed not autonomously but with a human's help. And when you add up all the productively performed work and it turns out the system does about 30 percent of the total… that is enormous for the industry.

Tell me there won't be layoffs with 30 percent less effort!

– All the more so in an industry that is mostly about the value of labor.

– This is the very near future. The company that built Devin was founded three or four months earlier and they've already shipped the product. Imagine another three months—won't they improve it further? The overall contribution could quickly jump to 45 percent, and that would mean almost half of all programmers are no longer needed.

At the same time, it's very logical for this to happen, because

the professions more likely to disappear or be replaced are those for which there is data you can take, structure, process and feed to the model.

Programming is exactly that kind of profession, because everything you do is clearly reflected in the files, in the changes, in the outcome of whether the software works. In more serious software there are tasks, QA specialists, you accumulate all the data you need and you can train the model.

Maybe not many jobs have been lost yet, but we can see how this process of replacement is unfolding. Everyone is trying to systematize the data from a given profession, and once they do, there's a model that works. Yes,

it probably won't replace you completely, but if today you need ten people, you'll soon need two to do the same thing.

– As one of my guests put it, the paradigm is flipping in almost every task—we humans become the client and the inspector, because the model makes mistakes, but it becomes the main performer of the task.

– I call it a new kind of management. Like designers who used to love drawing and creating, and are now commissioning the work and becoming managers of AI. If you make games, you're the manager, the AI creates, and you just have to check and polish, but a large part of the creative process you can already do with various tools.

AI doesn't have to do 100 percent of our work for us to reach an extremely large replacement of labor.

– I talk to a lot of people about this, but for most of us it's somehow abstract. Whereas your job is precisely to introduce these kinds of practices in real, working startups. Tell me about some interesting applications, some successfully introduced processes.

– The truth is that it's very hard to bring AI into processes. When I started at Eleven, I imagined I wouldn't be able to keep up. That there would be so many companies, each running its own processes for adopting artificial intelligence in parallel. Suddenly it turned out this was very far from the truth, because for all sorts of reasons they can't or won't.

One of them is that it takes money, and startups don't have a particularly flexible budget—they usually plan about a year ahead. If you tell them a slightly more serious, slightly more strategic AI integration is possible, it turns out they can't afford it because it wasn't budgeted in advance. For the future, we now know this has to be budgeted, but those who raised money in the past didn't foresee the rapid changes brought by generative AI.

– But then the whole point of such innovations is to save resources in the long run…

– True, but the problem is that you have to invest first. And it's not just money—it's training people, changing attitudes, setting aside time, prioritizing. There's a whole pile of things you have to put in at the start, while you still see no benefits at all.

Over time that cost will go down and the benefits will start to grow, once the machinery is oiled, the data is connected, the people are trained and start using the right tools. At some point it all turns around, but the thing is, the gap between the moment you commit the resources and the moment you start reaping the benefits is large—from a few months to a year, which for startups is critically long.

Right now we're trying to make sure that all startups still raising funding have it in their budget that they'll need money, effort, time and focus for artificial intelligence.

– Maybe another downside is that, as you say, it takes a year to roll out, while things are so dynamic that new models come out literally every week.

– That's a separate problem. You decide you'll do something, you start, and meanwhile an updated version of whatever you decided to implement comes out.

But let's say it's not all that fatal—you can carry on with what you started. Once you've done it, once it's part of the company's processes, the cost of replacing it will be lower. Training people, getting them to decide to use it, getting them not to be afraid of it—that's no small thing.

– Besides technical support, which specific applications are we already there with, ready for this kind of integration?

– Most of them aren't universal. Support is a very interesting intersection of something that's universal for everyone, has data behind it, can work regardless of the language, and brings benefits.

Many of the things being implemented are specific to what you do, and an individual solution gets developed.

You have some system, you take an inventory of what data it generates, what it collects, what comes out of it. What data you can take, buy, connect, enrich.

And once you have it, you make a list of what you can build and which AI features to introduce.

– As Petar Tsankov from LatticeFlow told me, even companies that lay parquet floors can now use such systems… But do you think new professions will appear? Because until now, whenever an innovation took hold, jobs disappeared, but new ones appeared that balanced out the labor market.

– Yes,

there are new professions, but very few of them, and in my view there's no way they'll become more numerous.

I'm skeptical of the opinions that weigh job losses against the appearance of new jobs. That's when I look at the numbers—how many will be lost and how many will appear? There are new positions, but you can count them on your fingers. First of all, the people who create artificial intelligence. Those who think strategically about implementing it. Those who work directly with using it. And I can't think of others. Which comes nowhere near the number of people who look set to lose their jobs in the near future.

I did a rough calculation related to the Stargate supercomputer—a $100 billion project that OpenAI and Microsoft have announced is under construction. At full capacity

it should replace 250 million jobs!

If we imagine that Microsoft won't be the only ones to build such a center, that other companies will too, it turns out we could reach roughly a billion jobs. If they're done by computers, that means they're not done by people. If there are 8 billion of us in the world, and there are roughly 3 billion jobs, it turns out that

a third of all jobs are planned to be performed by supercomputers and AI.

We can speculate that maybe they got it wrong—that Microsoft and OpenAI will put in $100 billion and artificial intelligence won't actually be able to do the work. I don't believe it. On the contrary, they know things we don't. In their labs they're developing projects we haven't seen yet.

We're expecting GPT-5 any moment now. There are many signals that general AI has in fact been achieved—yes, it's just speculation, of course, nobody outside OpenAI's doors can say anything concrete. But at least judging by the indications I see, AI will develop both in breadth and in depth, which you can tell from the enormous investments. And that means there will be huge, monstrous replacements of jobs.

– What also frightens me is that, once again, these developments are concentrated in a few big companies. As if we haven't learned our lesson from how technology has developed so far, with a handful of enormous giants…

– That's undeniably so, and more than ever. And it brings its own problems—I don't like it one bit. Even the fact that OpenAI has certain views on what's allowed and what isn't. What ChatGPT will answer and what it won't, where the answer will be softened or distorted—that's already worrying. At the very least, their views on life may not be the same as mine, and we have no way of correcting them. There are many irritating moments. For instance, a teacher from Egypt complained that it wouldn't let her discuss the Quran at all.

All that power, and decisions being made by one centralized system run by a handful of people… that's not good.

– We saw it with the OpenAI “soap opera” too—it was revealing about the level at which decisions are made. But many people say every technology goes through a boom and a winter. Could there be a winter for artificial intelligence too? Or are we just trying to squeeze everything into old frameworks, which isn't always right…

– I studied finance, and one of the basic rules of financial investing is that

the past is no indication of the future.

If you invest because something was successful in the past, that doesn't mean you'll get similar returns in the future. That's one of the first rules you have to learn.

I avoid reasoning that way. AI itself has had its winters; there were moments when people gave up and said, “There's no way this will work.” “We don't have such a method,” or “we know the method, but it needs such inhuman computing power that we won't have it for decades.”

But look—the decades have passed, the power is here, and it works. Will there be another winter? To say, we'd have to discuss whether there are holding-back factors. Whether there's hype that outweighs the practical benefit. The productivity benefit is indisputable. And if anything is typical of the situation, at least in my view, it's that

AI isn't talked about enough, about the impact it has. That's the exact opposite of a bubble,

where there's a lot of talk but no benefits, whereas in this case I believe the changes are much bigger than what's being discussed. I don't think there will be a winter.

On the technology side, my job is to follow what's happening every day and write about it. I see what comes out of the labs, what projects are presented, and the speed at which new things are invented and research papers come out is astonishing. Nothing suggests to me that there will be a technological halt.

In my presentation there's a slide listing

all the holding-back factors we face—regulation, lack of data, a shortage of specialists to develop AI and integrate it. But not one of them is insurmountable at the moment.

You could talk about energy, for example. Fine, but the latest generation of Nvidia chips is 30 times more powerful and at the same time 25 times more energy-efficient. And what if there's one more generation of chips that are another 25 times more efficient? The balance changes completely; suddenly it turns out electricity won't be the limiting factor. And one more generation after that?

Many people say general AI won't be achieved with large language models. Fine, it'll be with other technologies. But where's the evidence that it's impossible? There are many angles from which you can approach it and achieve something close to general intelligence. Even if not in its absolute form, then something far broader in the range of actions it can perform. We're not talking about self-awareness at all.

Yes, cataclysms can happen. A war between China and Taiwan would stop the only company that actually produces the chips for AI—TSMC. That's something that could certainly happen. But for now I don't see how there could be a winter.

– You say we underestimate the transformation and don't talk about it enough. I absolutely agree, that's why this site exists. It's clear that you and I are sure of it, but how do we convince everyone else—the people who write in the comments under my articles that I'm bothering them with nonsense and fantasies?

– With a lot of publicity, conversations, discussions, awareness. For now

everywhere you get fragmented, partial, unclear information about what's happening.

Which is why I wrote a book too—exactly that kind of explanation of what AI is, why it's happening now, where it came from, where it's going. What the consequences will be and why they'll come. A systematic look at the whole subject. So if you read this book, many things will become clear to you and you'll realize what's going on. For me that's the way—a systematic, organized, comprehensive approach, not scraps of information tossed out for a few minutes in a radio interview, grinding through the same questions, with simply not enough time for anyone to grasp the concept. It's a complex subject, and if you want society to understand it, you have to put in the necessary resources—time, money and education.

– That's exactly what I'm trying to do on this site, by offering different perspectives on the subject. My texts are long on purpose too, which certainly puts off a lot of readers.

What are the next big steps in the world of artificial intelligence that you can't wait to see taken?

– I'm not impatient. I think there are already many exciting technologies, but we could live perfectly well without them. I'm not looking for or waiting for some grand changes, even though they keep coming all the time. There's nothing I'm eagerly awaiting, except one thing—being able to beat some grave diagnoses in medicine. Defeating cancer, for example. Everything else, to do with productivity, with making some process faster and more accurate, is great, but I don't know if it's worth the price we'll pay.

– All the more so since we already have technologies we haven't yet learned how to use.

– The perspective of people in the developing world matters here too. For us, many things are taken care of—water, electricity, shelter. And if you also have a good job, you get luxuries the world has never seen before. Every kind of food from every corner of the globe, products, deliveries, little indulgences, technology, entertainment…

But there are people who don't live like that—some have no internet, can't afford smartphones. There are people who have no water! There's great potential there for improving human life, but unfortunately there's no potential for profit, and that dampens the interest.

– Bill Gates said, back when ChatGPT came out, that it's a revolution precisely because it will help us improve healthcare and education for the third of the world that has never had access to them. But again, alas, it comes down to profit…

Before we part, I'd like to ask you one more thing. What do you think we should do so we can rest assured that ten years from now we'll still have jobs? That we'll still be relevant on the labor market….

– Regulation. Only regulation.

– Is that even possible? It's subjective, it could slow down progress…

– That's exactly what regulation is. It has to rest on a global agreement that there are serious dangers that could arise and that we don't want them.

As long as there's no global agreement, everyone will fight for their own position.

– But what have we achieved globally so far? We haven't managed to agree on nuclear weapons alone in 80 years.

– I think we have agreed, more or less.

– But the weapons are still there, and at any moment they could bring about the apocalypse.

– Yes, but they're not being used. Maybe AI models will also just sit there, with labs where they're used. But as long as it doesn't come to something that takes control and breaks out of its constraints, then with the right attitude and regulation, people will live well. In my view, that's the only way.

As long as there's no regulation, it's every man for himself. But it's a hard task, and as a concept it hasn't yet matured in society, because society isn't educated about it. Regulation often happens after something goes badly wrong—then things move very quickly, as happened with COVID.

– Again, like with the nuclear bomb.

– Yes, that's right. In Europe we've set off in the right direction. The problem is that it isn't global, which means we're slowing down technological progress in the name of a better quality of life. But that way our economy will suffer compared to the US and China, and we're doing it fully aware of that. I believe the most important thing right now is for people to have it explained to them, in an understandable way, what this is all about…

– The Other Dream struck me as a prophetic novel about how easily we delegate to technology. I couldn't imagine it back then, but now it's a very big subject for me. Are we really giving them too much? How did you arrive at the idea that this phenomenon would appear?

– Through myself. I noticed it, and it's a process that still isn't over for me, and somehow I can't beat it. As I get older, I see that it has quite a few downsides.

I simply stopped remembering, stopped writing things down,

because I know everything is very close to me, at hand, I can find it instantly, no problem at all. For the last few years I thought it would always be there. Until the moment when the information simply became too much, and the places it pours out of became both too many and, in fact, far fewer than, say, on the internet 15 or 20 years ago, when there were websites, when search was something completely different.

So gradually I realized that we've handed over a lot—especially when it comes to

what to remember, what to think we know as something learned, and what we've simply stored as a kind of information that might come in handy.

We delegate more and more. And I think this relationship between the human and the machine assistant—phones, computers, even the whole network as one big machine—is becoming an increasingly invisible phenomenon. That is, there's no way for us to track how much of it we see and can control. Because many things we think we've found, or stumbled upon by chance, have been conveniently offered to us by some algorithms that have simply been listening carefully, following our searches.

On the one hand, this helps preserve the magical side of technology, keeps it slightly veiled. And I like that, because in everything I write I start from the position of a person who doesn't know what's going on. Who can't explain things technically, can't understand them as a specialist, and is sometimes too tired to look for explanations. Because I think that's the position of most people who use technology.

– Definitely. But this loss of memory and personalized content bring a lot of problems with them. I do the opposite—I try to understand how they work. But people don't seem to find it interesting or important what they lose this way, because we become easier to manipulate. Once some algorithm chooses what surrounds us, it can lead us into a parallel history. Or manipulate us into voting for someone. And delegating memory is, in a way, the end of creativity, because creativity is having facts or any kind of information in your head and combining it in the right, unexpected way.

– And right now

you think you have those facts, even that you have far more of them than you ever did, but they've been shaped for you in some way.

I'm not saying some people are sitting there pushing things toward you—it's a combination of people, bots, machines, algorithms. Facebook is an example. I try not to spend much time there, not to post there deliberately, but it seems to me that

many people have accepted that place as some kind of pure forum where ideas can be discussed, everyone can speak their mind, even quarrel, get to some kind of discussion.

But behind that is a rather utopian notion, that it's a bit like the old days in Ancient Greece—only the sky above you and real people around you. When in fact algorithms lurk in the shadows, and some of the profiles aren't people. It's yet another place you think gives you freedom, when it's actually shaping you in a not very visible way. I don't know which way it's heading, how it will affect society as a whole, not just the individual.

– It does affect it—disastrously, in my view. So why don't we do exactly that—try to peek ahead? Science fiction used to have that role too. Apart from Ted Chiang, whom I like very much and whom you translate beautifully, I can't think of a mainstream author who looks into these subjects. Subjects that are vital to us as a species.

– That's true to some extent. Ted Chiang really is special in that he picks some big idea that is scientific, tied to technology, and also world-changing or life-changing, but he chooses to explore it from a very personal position. You see things through the eyes of a fairly ordinary person—sometimes a scientist, a specialist, but nothing exceptional. And he always holds that balance between specialized knowledge and what can be understood. He uses the reactions of both sides.

There are other writers too. I think, for example, of Greg Egan, a very interesting Australian author; to some degree Pynchon does the same. But they really aren't so-called mainstream writers who can reach a lot of people.

I suppose this will be one of the themes of so-called realist literature in the coming years, because it moves with a certain delay. It waits for things to happen before the authors' eyes, in their own lives, before it starts exploring them. But I don't think we can keep thinking along

that line where we believed science fiction writers work with the future. They actually work with the present

very carefully, and imagine possible lines and paths. And then the realists work with the “here and now.”

It seems to me we really are in the period of that famous William Gibson quote, that “the future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed.” It appears and disappears; sometimes you can touch it somewhere, sometimes you can't, but it affects you.

– And, as the literary scholar Nikolay Genov told me about that very quote, most likely by the time the future arrives, literature will no longer exist. Might we be too late?

– On the one hand, it seems to me that

literature will always exist, simply because it is the expression of something deeply human,

which comes as an attempt to understand the world, to explain it to ourselves, to tell it. I think there will be literature, but we don't know whether it will be the kind we're used to thinking about. I think

a time of doubles of many things lies ahead—not only our virtual doubles, some imitations of the human, but imitations of human impulses and quests as well.

They will, of course, be directly tied to the demands of the market, because artificial intelligence can already help you write a book, design the cover. There are already author contracts in which writers explicitly agree or refuse to let their publisher use the text to train artificial intelligence. I wouldn't be surprised if some phenomenon soon appears in literature that we later find out was either pure artificial intelligence or a joint project of a human and AI. Whether because some people got carried away, or simply as an experiment.

– I wonder when a famous author will actually admit that their new text was generated by an algorithm.

– There was recently something like a scandal in the romance novel world in the States—that's the biggest publishing industry, it makes the most money and sells the most copies. There was a festival that widely advertised

a workshop on how to write a novel with the help of artificial intelligence, and why that's okay.

Afterward, of course, there was a huge backlash and they took it off the official program, but they didn't cancel it entirely.

These things exist, but they're not very visible yet. The point is not to miss the moment between their being invisible but tangible or detectable, and their merging with our idea of a text written by a human.

– In many ways that's already the case. I ran an experiment with almost 2,000 participants, and it became clear that we can no longer tell written texts from generated ones. Or, as the poet Violeta Kuneva said—her poems were among those people had to identify—perhaps the problem is the criterion, which is why people can't recognize poetry.

But let's look at that moment—you read a story that's supposedly by Ted Chiang, and then it turns out artificial intelligence wrote it. How do you see things going from there?

– As a reader, I'd be interested in why this story appeared, how far and in what sense it's really connected to Ted Chiang. Whether it's some kind of experiment or not.

There are already authors, mostly on the periphery where experimental writing happens, who create texts with the help of programs. Joanna Walsh is an author known precisely for her provocations. That's the first thing I'd look at.

Personally, as a reader, I won't keep following this kind of work. But I'd be curious if it becomes a trend. How do people react, what do they do?

It really is a matter of time. Just as some actors let their image be used. Or an extra in a film may have a clause in the contract saying your image, your expression and your face will be used for other crowd scenes. There will be authors like that in literature too. This touches on an interesting question—what is an author, where does the author end, and

isn't artificial intelligence a natural extension of humanity's relationship with the world through art?

Because, after all, it's something we created. Something that learns from us.

But you're right about the criterion too. It has already begun—you can't tell good writing from bad. With artificial intelligence we have the luxury of saying it's bad simply because it made it. But there are problems tied to critical thinking, to personal experience, to the fact that it's getting harder and harder to judge with certainty and conviction what is what. In recent weeks and months there have been so many cases of people reacting to something that turns out to be made up. This will only deepen.

– Many people think this is the distant future, but what you said about actors was one of the main reasons all of Hollywood went on strike for half a year. It's a sign the technology is already here. But what worries me even more is when the two things we've talked about so far are layered on top of each other—hyper-personalized content, thanks to algorithms knowing everything about us, and content creation. Then, I think, we'll split apart completely. Everyone will have their own Ted Chiang writing for them. What will be left to unite us?

– The problem is also what this means for our connection with the world. Because if everyone is shut inside a model of their own world, the way it's supposed to be, because the algorithms created it, judged it, saw that it's what the person wants—how does that affect personal experience? We are, after all, social beings. On the other hand, there are trends that intensify this alienation;

the detachment comes precisely through these bubbles, which used to belong to groups and communities and lately are getting even smaller.

And when it comes to receiving art—the films you watch, the books you read supposedly being by your favorite authors and directors, but not really by them, simply because they don't reflect their creative will… The distance will shrink entirely until a person thinks they are the world. It becomes rather literal, like the idea that every person is an island. As in science fiction, which can make literal things that used to be metaphors.

It's a closing of the person in on themselves, a kind of enchanted circle that personal pleasure never leaves. And if it's sent out toward some object, it comes back with exactly what you expect. Which is good on the one hand, because it creates a kind of comfort on a very basic level, but on the other hand it's terrifying. And, for example, contemporary music, especially pop music, is also moving along these lines, I think.

– Do you think we can stop the future, and that we should? I don't think we can, but we should meet it in a way that's a bit more discussed, thought through, reasonable—set some boundaries for it.

– I agree with everything you said. We can't and shouldn't stop it. In any case, the future isn't something you can see in its entirety so you'd know how to stop it. Exactly what you said about this awareness, this heightened attention, which, however, requires time and a kind of wider, more stretched-out reaction time. And also space to think certain things through.

So that you can weigh both your own reactions to something and the other person's, see where you might meet, where you'll miss each other and what the consequences will be. Meanwhile, everything we do every day demands that we be faster. To such an extent that

replying to a message is just a reaction,

one that's much shorter, quicker, and you can do it immediately, here and now.

The idea is that you can react instantly, any time, anywhere, that it's good to react emotionally. And that's somehow human, even if you get it wrong. It works because it connects to some very deep notions of what a human being is. But the more the time we have to look, read, think through and carefully check everything shrinks, the harder it will become to influence our present, which is in fact the coming future.

And now, when you think about it, if you decide to join one of the endless, nonstop arguments on Facebook or Twitter, the very time it takes you to get up to speed on everything may equal the time it takes for the argument to pass, so you're left feeling you're outside some community, which, for some people, matters.

– Are we close to the limit of how far we can shrink time? I don't think we can come up with anything shorter than TikTok. My children are little and live pretty far from technology, but if they're not doing something for one minute, they say they're bored. And not just children, all of us are like that. Is there anywhere left for this time to shrink?

– It seems to me too that there's nowhere left. Everything happens here and now—for instance, finding out what's going to happen already in the first chapter, the first scene. Maximum action, or in the first 30 seconds of a song you find out how it will develop, so that you'll listen to the end.

What strikes me, though, is that

alongside this shrinking, there's a parallel growth, an expansion of forms of art that hold you in a different kind of world.

Fantasy and adventure novels are getting bigger, more sweeping. There's almost no action or adventure film under 2.5 hours anymore—astonishing. Only experimental or heavyweight directors and writers used to work at that length. In parallel comes the idea that you can watch entire series, sit down in front of the laptop or TV and not get up until the end.

These are two supposedly opposite trends, but apparently they aren't, since they go together so well. Maybe we really will reach a point where, so as not to be bored, you'll have a nonstop stream of opportunities to react or to engage your attention, your mind, your consciousness. At the same time

that stream will keep you in some closed world modeled specifically for you.

Somehow we're approaching the cliché of the future in which a person wears goggles, stares into some virtual reality, is overweight, their room messy and dirty, but they inhabit some world and live in it.

– That cliché has been around for 30 years, since the days of Jaron Lanier. And in some ways we seem to be getting closer, while in others it still looks so far away.

I think popular opinion, judging by reactions to my posts, is very skeptical of artificial intelligence. I'll soon try to test this with a survey, to see what people really think. But I see many people who are afraid of it, dismiss it or are extremely negative about it. You also studied psychology—is this some natural reaction to very drastic changes? Or fears? Not enough explanation and reflection? I'd say mostly the last.

– Certainly the last as well. But I think

there's a natural reaction to fear something that imitates what you are.

Because creativity, consciousness—these are areas where we are the ones who can make sense of the world creatively, who have consciousness, who can think about ourselves in the past, present and future, in different alternatives. And when something appears that imitates us, fear certainly develops.

It's reinforced by the fact that we live in a culture where far too many images of the clash between human and machine have piled up.

And we also live in a time when nostalgia is very strong. So there's a longing for a pure time and existence, even though there never was such a thing. And a sense that back then people were people, and machines, if there were any, served humans.

We shouldn't rule out the discussion itself, either. It's sometimes tied to purely economic forecasts of how many people will lose their jobs, how many will find their existence all but rendered pointless.

This way, though, we drift further and further from the other cliché—that when machines become smart enough, humanity will be able to step away from its daily grind, its ordinary life, and will have time only for itself.

We'll all become artists, explore the world, write books, paint, while the machines toil and produce for us and keep the world “turning.”

This, of course, isn't necessarily a good thing even in the books it comes from, but it's a persistent cliché.

I think we shouldn't rule out the deep fear that something nonhuman is trying to be human and do what people can do. Once, on a trolleybus, I listened to two schoolgirls: “I wrote my homework with ChatGPT.” “And how was it?” “It came out great. And it's real.” That particular word made a strong impression on me. Some people don't accept that there's a drifting away from the real existence of the human, from their so-called usual context. In their case, from being a student in the classic sense.

– I also tried competing with ChatGPT to see who would score higher on the literature matura, Bulgaria's school-leaving exam. And it turned out to be pretty good. But my other association with what you said comes from Márquez. The fear that when they photograph you, your soul leaves. That the camera takes your image and your soul vanishes.

– It's no accident that in diabolism the mirror is very important, and the portrait—these are extensions of the same fears. That's also why it's no accident that the series Black Mirror deals with things this way. In the beginning, when it turned out you could end up in a labyrinth with no way out, it was quite powerful.

The other fear is that one day it might start doing things better than you. And especially for artists and writers—I'm judging by myself—

there will come a moment when it won't matter whether you wrote it or a machine did.

This fear first appeared, in my view, when a lot of book bloggers began to take over. What happened to literary criticism? It turned out that book bloggers write, read and react readily and with pleasure, while at the same time the so-called serious literary critics and the venues for serious criticism disappeared. And it became clear that neither readers nor even publishers had a problem with one replacing the other. That's when, it seems to me, there first appeared

this fear that it doesn't matter who wrote what, the important thing is that it sells in some way.

Whether economically or culturally doesn't matter. With artificial intelligence the problem will be even bigger—by how people react, we'll see whether it really matters. And then we'll talk about authorship again, but, as you mentioned, it may already be too late to change the future; we may have missed that moment.

– Let's end on something positive anyway. Is there a technology you dream would appear? I, for example, dream of something that would sit in boring programmer meetings instead of me. We're close to something like that, I think.

– That kind of avatar—or let's call them presences—is certainly on the way.

The first thing that occurred to me is the possibility of peering into the past. Seeing it, watching it from the side.

But as for a technology to help you day to day… For me, too, it would be something to do with the various forms of communication. That's exactly where I'd delegate boring meetings too. Certainly something that saves you time.

But it would also be nice to have a technology that doesn't obey completely. Right now there are ways to limit yourself, to use an app only briefly, but it all depends on willpower.

If there were a technology that somehow challenged you to have a stronger will in defending how you spend your time and attention, that would be good going forward. It sounds like a very secret and expensive algorithm that some people with a lot of means would get first, and then everyone else.

– And it probably won't come, because those same people would lose out from it.

– I'm not against technology, I'm not against progress and the future, but I'm more interested in the moments when there's some rupture, when something breaks, and how we react then. Or when it turns out we can no longer react. That's why every time I think in the direction of technology, my thoughts turn darker.

– Mine too. I try to look for balance; I think that's where the reasonable point of view lies. But I lean more toward the negative, because that's what we overlook. There's no need to talk about the positive; what matters is to talk about the risks, about the problems that are so big and yet lie outside the main public debate.

– Exactly. There has to be conflict. Just as for there to be a story, you also need some kind of conflict. No matter how far it's brought to the fore or how hidden it is. But it has to be there, to move things forward…

– How much longer will we be able to afford to stay out of range every now and then?

– It’s a matter of personal choice. And it will last as long as there are professions you can practice without it involving screen time online. Recently I ran into a former classmate from the vocational school for construction in Stara Zagora. An electrical engineer by training, but now he has chosen to be a “tile guy”—a craftsman who renovates bathrooms. We talked about how people like him are getting scarcer, and his exact words were:

“Soon there won’t be anyone left to do ordinary work.”

The “gold rush” that the boom in digital technology set off in so many people over the last quarter of a century pulled them away from non-digital, hands-on technical work.

And now this acquaintance of mine has chosen to be out of range and to make bathrooms. Being in short supply, he can afford a high standard of living, flexible hours that he sets himself, independence. The price he pays is walking around in overalls dusted with tile adhesive—there are no role models like that on Instagram, but our generation doesn’t give much of a damn about that.

– I often joke, too, that I may have to change professions once again. Only tiles wouldn’t work for me, precisely because they require skills I can’t develop. But why is it worth going out of range from time to time?

– It’s healthy. The sense of connection the global network gives us is wonderful, but only as long as it stays within healthy limits. People also need to be alone sometimes.

And not bombarded by tons of unnecessary information that the brain has to process constantly.

– When does technology become too much for us? How can we tell it’s time for a little digital minimalism?

– If we can’t watch a film of an hour and a half or two without unlocking our phone several times, just like that, out of habit, to glance at it, then we’re already addicted. I deliberately give the example of watching a film rather than reading a book—with the latter, concentrating these days is even harder, once your brain has grown used to the pace of scrolling.

– What’s your personal recipe for a healthy distance from technology?

– Outside working hours, not to wander through the feed for more than two hours a day. I admit I struggle to stick to this self-imposed limit. To older generations those two hours may sound like far too much, while the youngest will laugh if you ask which of them has less than two hours of screen time a day.

– Even worse, I think, is when we don’t realize at all how much time that is… And once we decide to check, it turns out we lose hours in the feed every day. Are there things we should never delegate to technology?

– Perhaps we can delegate everything, but only when there is also the appropriate human oversight.

– One of your characters says that today literature, busy looking for new forms, has stopped looking for the human being. And your new novel, in my view, does exactly that—its themes are precisely the ones that move me as a person today. In some ways it reminds me of Pavel Vezhinov, the Bulgarian master of psychological and science fiction prose and one of my favorite writers. So can literature really still help us look for the human being?

– That’s actually mostly what literature does—it talks through the human being in all the nuances of their ideals,

their thoughts, their passions, their ideas of how to live, while searching for the meaning of it all.

If we take off our new clothes, our new ideas of how to live, our new tech gadgets, underneath we’re the same people as previous generations—with our fears, our weaknesses, our need to be loved. They say everything has already been written, but every generation wants to read it through its own “here and now.”

– As long as there’s someone left to read… You’re a teacher and you talk with young people. What moves them? How are they different from the young people before them?

– The virtual world matters to them as much as the real one. For some, it seems,

their online life, their online status, is even more important than the physical one.

Advertising yourself as permanently happy on social media takes a lot of energy and staring at a screen, so you may miss moments in which you could experience real positive emotions. Not being present online in the most popular apps and social networks seems to erase your real existence too.

– Will we ever manage to regain the ability to read long texts?

– You become a good specialist in anything (I’m leaving out digital skills) by reading a great many long texts. On YouTube there are already quite a few videos in English by professionals in various fields that can replace that reading, but the concentration needed to make sense of them is similar to that of reading.

– How do we find a balance in using technology today?

– For me it’s both an intuitive and a conscious process. But then I’m from the analog generation; I take in all technology secondhand, while generations are now growing up with it naturally. Just as we analog generations are learning digital life, the digital generations have to learn analog life.

– Technology has to a great extent divided us and set us against each other. This theme is in your novel too—that analog life might help us here. What’s the recipe for getting people divided today to talk to each other again—divided by generations, by political lines, by the latest hot topic?

– Who knows! Perhaps

the recipe is to listen to each other and to be less emotional in these arguments.

It’s a bit like driving—while you’re alone in the car, you can tell off someone who, in your view, isn’t behaving sensibly on the road, but only because you know they won’t hear you. You wouldn’t say the same words to their face. Probably the lack of direct contact in digital communication leads people in the same way to be less restrained in their emotions and reactions toward the other side. Which, however, practiced online for a long time, may already be carrying over as a habit of behavior into offline communication.

– I think technology takes us over, gradually and imperceptibly. Our knowledge, our memories, our communication… Instead of the other way around—us taking it over, mastering it, making sense of it. Introducing it after we’ve discussed how to do so. Am I being too idealistic?

– I suppose it isn’t fatal for the two processes to run in parallel and for us to keep readjusting to the situation. Once it becomes clear that the rate of anxiety in children and young people grows as their screen time increases—and science already has enough evidence of this—steps must be taken toward the corresponding corrections in society’s understanding of how far this freshly discovered technology should spread into every level of our lives.

– What do you miss that could never happen again because of technological progress?

– I’ll quote one of the characters in my novel Out of Range: “Back in the day we’d cut ourselves off from the world for whole days, they couldn’t find us. They could only reach you at home or at work. And at work, fine, somehow or other, they’d find you, but why you didn’t pick up at home, nobody could hold you to account for that.” Not that I mind now, when I can see through the relevant app exactly where my daughter is at any given moment.

– What are your plans—when and how do you intend to introduce her to technology, to artificial intelligence?

– She’s had a smartphone for about two years; she’s 11 now. But it’s linked through an app to mine, so I can control the apps she installs and her usage time, and also know where she is. Until recently she had 45 minutes a day; now it’s an hour. I’ve read that children shouldn’t have smartphones until the age of 14, nor use social media until 16. But when they have a class group on Viber where they exchange information about homework and other school matters, her being the only one missing from the group causes me more problems as a parent than making a reasonable compromise.

– The subject of children and technology is very important to me too. But what can a person miss if they go without the feed for a day or two?

– A panic attack, at most. More seriously: it depends on what they do, what trends they need to follow, how fast things change in the field they’ve chosen to work in. My acquaintance the bathroom craftsman won’t miss anything in a day or two, and I think we should all envy him deeply. Me, not so much—

I can afford that luxury too. I believe everyone can still afford it.

– Has time really sped up? How can we, with our human linearity, keep up with the exponential pace that comes with technology? Can we slow things down, or is that battle lost?

– What has sped up is the multiplication of the volume of information we have to process. And this is where the battle comes in to sift the information that matters to us from the digital noise gushing from everywhere. We humans are adaptable creatures—once, in an information technology class, I was taught how to make directory trees in DOS; now all the lessons I’ve developed are in the cloud, and I can “pour” their content straight onto the board through the classroom’s multimedia projector. That’s a convenience you shouldn’t run away from.

Technology has made life easier in many directions. We actually live very well. The dangers come not from technology but from how people use it. Both on a personal level—filtering out the noise and using what’s useful—and on a global level—abuse, disinformation and so on. Once, science was elevated to a cult, and technological progress was thought to be an inevitable good. The two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem to have rethought that narrative and sowed in humanity a fear of the scale of technological advance as well. But let me say it again—

the dangers come from people, not from technology.

– Why, in the art of recent decades, do we so often struggle to describe the present day? More of the strong novels and films, at least in my opinion, look toward the past…

– I, on the other hand, love reading books and watching films about precisely the present day. Living through it from someone else’s point of view too, which enriches my picture of our times and makes it more colorful; some make me think about things I hadn’t arrived at on my own, while others reassure me that I’m not the only one who thinks and feels this way.

I’m curious about the present day, not the past, and that’s why I write on contemporary subjects.

I respect other people’s right to be more curious about the past. But writing about the past also seems a touch safer—yes, the research you have to do on the era in question is considerable, but you stay in the shade, sheltered from accusations and canceling by some fashionable ideology over an accidentally dropped word or a character whose views are archaic compared with today’s colorful situation.

– When will there no longer be any point in writing and reading?

– When we’re dead.

– Have all the strong plots and characters already been invented?

– Maybe. But as I said a moment ago, every generation wants to read its own nuanced take on those plots and characters in the time and world it now inhabits. Connecting them to already established works perhaps brings the reassurance that not everything changes and that we humans are still the same. That’s where literary references to the classics come in.

– What do you dream of?

– Calm, harmony. To be out of range of worries about things I don’t have the resources to do anything about anyway.

We often mention George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. And rightly so! The possible dystopian worlds we thought had stayed behind in the 20th century have returned as a theme, as a threat.

This writer inspired them both. His only novel is a dystopia, no less thought-provoking and illuminating than those of the two classics. Because it looks not so much at a possible totalitarianism come true as in a direction that is even more relevant today.

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is a brilliant novel because it offers a glimpse of a future in which technology has defeated humanity. It has locked people in its mathematical grip, turned them into numbers, into tools. It is one of the most powerful metaphors for what may be coming, and something worth talking about more and more. Technology sets the rules, and we have become the meaningless parts of a harsh mechanism…

The Ship with Scarlet Sails

Real literature can exist only where it is created not by diligent and well-meaning clerks, but by madmen, heretics, hermits, dreamers, rebels, skeptics. And if a writer must be sensible, must be orthodox, must be, as today, useful… then literature has no meaning, it is just paper you read today and tomorrow use to wrap soap in at the shop.

(The quote is from the essay “I Am Afraid.” All other quotes in italics are from We, in the Bulgarian translation by Rositsa Bardarska.)

No less remarkable is the story of the author himself. A shipbuilder by profession and an accidental witness to what happened aboard the Battleship Potemkin, he wrote a letter to Stalin in which, once again, he peered into the dark future. And although he managed to leave his homeland in those bloodthirsty times, he never stopped missing it until his last day.

Yevgeny Zamyatin is a fascinating figure whose words are worth recalling today. When war, dictatorship and the clash of civilizations are returning with what seems their eternal historical weight. Now joined, however, by the incredible rise of technology and the dangers it brings.

He was born in 1884 (Orwell?!). His father and grandfather were priests, and although he grew up, as he himself put it, in the deep Russian provinces, he was surrounded by an intellectual circle—his mother was a pianist, and Chopin could often be heard in the house. At four, the boy was already reading Gogol on his own. At school he did well in literature and tragically in mathematics. But, as he writes in his autobiography, out of sheer stubbornness he decided to enroll in the discipline with the most mathematics at the Saint Petersburg Polytechnic—shipbuilding.

There, by the River

And further—a question to myself: why is it beautiful? Why is this dance beautiful? Answer: because it is unfree movement, because its whole deep meaning lies precisely in absolute aesthetic subordination, in ideal unfreedom. And if it is true that our ancestors gave themselves up to dance in the most inspired moments of their lives (religious mysteries, military parades), that means only one thing: the instinct for unfreedom has been organically inherent in man since ancient times.

Zamyatin entered university at the beginning of the 20th century, just as the Russian Empire was giving birth to the phenomena that would steer the history of the entire Eastern Bloc. He was quickly drawn into politics, became part of revolutionary circles and grew close to the Bolsheviks.

Perhaps that is why chance played its part, when as a student he ended up aboard the ship Knyaz Potemkin-Tavrichesky, where he witnessed dramatic events. It is the story that Sergei Eisenstein would immortalize in one of the first undisputed masterpieces of cinema—Battleship Potemkin. Driven to desperate conditions, the sailors mutinied and seized the ship. Troops were sent against them and crushed the mutiny with bloodthirsty brutality.

Back at the university, Zamyatin became quite active on the political front. So much so that in 1906 he was arrested and forcibly sent back to his hometown of Lebedyan. Although forbidden to do so, he returned illegally to Saint Petersburg that same year and even… completed his education. Miracles possible only in the rebellious first years of the 20th century.

It was around then that he wrote his first short story. And the miracles continued. Since he stood out as an exceptionally talented shipbuilder, and such specialists were important and in demand at the time, he was soon pardoned. In the following years he worked quietly, until the First World War broke out. He publicly declared himself for peace and called for revolts, for which he was arrested again and deported far from civilization.

The Battleship Potemkin

The state forbade the murder of an individual, but did not forbid the half-destruction of millions. That means that to kill one person, that is, to reduce the sum of human lives by 50 years, is criminal, but to reduce the sum of human lives by 50 million years is not criminal. Funny, isn’t it?

After serving his sentence, however… it suddenly turned out once again that he was too valuable a specialist. He was sent to Great Britain to take part in building, on a Russian order, the icebreaker Saint Alexander Nevsky, which… by the time it was finished, the October Revolution had come, and it sailed back under the name Lenin. A huge ship, innovative for its time, capable of handling the harshest challenges of the Arctic Ocean.

Not only the ship but also the shipbuilder changed dramatically during his time on the island. Zamyatin traveled between shipyards scattered across the kingdom. What amazed him most and shaped his worldview from then on was technology. Progress, advancement. Inventions that promised to change our lives… not necessarily for the better.

Does that sound familiar from today’s point of view?

A Burden Without Shores

And isn’t it absurd that the state (and it dared to call itself a state!) could leave sexual life entirely without control? Whoever, whenever and as much as they wanted… Utterly unscientific, like animals. And like animals, blindly, they bore children. Isn’t it funny: to know horticulture, poultry farming, fish farming (we have exact data that they knew them) and not manage to reach the last rung of this logical ladder: child farming. Not to arrive at our Ideal Mother and Ideal Father.

The shipbuilder changed outwardly, too. He adopted British manners, the local fashion and customs so thoroughly that later, after his return home, people would often call him, ironically, “the Englishman.” Korney Chukovsky wrote of him: “Yevgeny Ivanovich had one forgivable weakness: he behaved like an English captain. He smoked a pipe, spat like a true Yorkshireman, often said ‘alright,’ and, having put on his British face, listened and spoke without changing his expression. But his eyes were naive, peasant eyes, slyly narrowed, and his thick dark-blond hair refused to fit within the English barrier.”

Zamyatin clearly had a knack for not missing the dramatic moments: he returned home in September 1917. The writer made no secret of his enormous enthusiasm for the changes the October Revolution was bringing.

He took an active part in the Civil War, which once again landed him in prison, together with other famous artists, among them Alexander Blok.

At that time, besides taking part in the events of the day and working actively in his profession, he was writing more and more. And so we come to 1920, when he finished his first and only novel, the one we are talking about today—We.

Although many, including Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident writer, in a well-known essay on Zamyatin, find in the novel allusions to what would happen in the USSR in the following decades, it is much more than that. Zamyatin wrote it in a time of enthusiasm, when few had even heard Stalin’s name. This is not at all a book about the victorious revolution so much as about victorious technology. About a hyper-technologized society in which we have delegated everything to it, and we ourselves have become bolts in the system, little cogs that exist only to keep it moving forward…

Islands in the Stream

Hence the distribution: the ton has rights, the gram has duties, and the natural path from nothingness to greatness is to forget that you are a gram and to feel yourself a millionth part of the ton…

The fact is that the novel was never published in the years after it was written. Journalistic digging in the archives a few years ago showed that this happened more or less by accident. The editors were slow with their decisions; in fact, they had approved the novel… But Zamyatin was impatient, and that brought him serious trouble. We came out first in New York, and that is precisely what made the authorities turn their attention to the writer.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, great writers and poets whose names we all know, he was not repressed. In 1929 he was expelled from the writers’ union; it was clear that he could not cope with the demands of the new times. In 1931 he wrote his famous letter to Stalin, in which he explained his disagreement with the treatment of art and asked to be allowed to go abroad. He promised to return “as soon as it becomes possible to serve great ideas in literature without serving small men.” Pretty bold, wouldn’t you say?

He did, however, receive the support of Maxim Gorky, and, quite unexpectedly… he was allowed to leave the country. He even kept his Soviet passport.

Titanic

By turning this handle, any one of you can produce up to three sonatas an hour. And how much effort this cost your ancestors! They were able to create only after working themselves up into the fit known as “inspiration”—an unknown form of epilepsy.

Zamyatin spent the rest of his years abroad; in the 1930s, unprecedentedly, his membership in the Soviet writers’ union was even restored. He said he dreamed of returning home, but it never happened—heart disease ended his days in 1937. Abroad he never published anything new; his only creative work was as the screenwriter of a successful French film.

“The most unknown of the great Russian writers of the 20th century,” Alexei Korolyov called him.

His whole life was bound up with the greatest literary figures of the time. His wife was a close friend of Anna Akhmatova and helped her when she fell ill with tuberculosis. The writer’s personal physician was Mikhail Bulgakov’s brother. At his memorial service, his words were read by the Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin.

The Icebreaker

I rushed to him as to a brother, straight onto the blades, and started telling him—about the insomnia, the dreams, the shadows, the yellow world… The scissor lips smiled.

– You’re in a bad way! I think you’ve developed a soul.

A soul? That strange, ancient, long-forgotten word. We sometimes said “soulful,” “soulless,” “soul-destroying,” but soul…

– That is… very dangerous, – I whispered.

– Incurable.

We was first published in his homeland only at the end of the 1980s. Long before that, the book had built a reputation in the West as visionary, prophetic, as the first literary dystopia. It is especially popular in England; the Pet Shop Boys have a song called “Integral” that retells its plot.

“My most jocular and at the same time most serious work,” the shipbuilder-writer called his novel.

Zamyatin said he had been inspired by H. G. Wells. Orwell himself wrote that he was impressed by We, and in his view Aldous Huxley, too, had learned directly from his Russian predecessor. Traces of our hero’s ideas can undoubtedly also be found in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Who borrowed from whom and how, who came first and who last (and Zamyatin came first, decades ahead of his colleagues), I don’t think matters much. The fact is that in each of these classics we have a totalitarian regime and a protagonist who stands up to it, launching his own small and naive revolution before the system, one way or another, destroys him. What’s more, I hope we won’t need to argue over which of these undisputed classics turned out to be most right with its terrifying prophecies.

Man Overboard

I know from my own experience: the most agonizing thing is to sow in a person the doubt that he is real.

And yet, there are just too many tentacles of a possible technological horror described in We, and we can see signs of them sprouting all around us.

Yes, technology is an enormous treasure, but it can also be a horror.

The action takes place in the 32nd century. All people are subjects of the One State; they have no names, only numbers. The protagonist, D-503, is a mathematician, one of the engineers of a flying machine called the Integral. It is easy to see the shipbuilder himself in him… only in space. (Or… Elon Musk?!)

The citizens of the One State live in identical apartments without curtains, wear identical clothes (“unifs”) and travel in small flying vehicles. (The sharing economy?!) In their free time they enjoy music created by special musical machines. (Artificial intelligence?!)

In the novel, people live in transparent homes and are not allowed to lower the blinds unless they receive the coveted pink ticket, which gives them a chance to be alone for a short while with a specifically chosen and approved member of the opposite sex. (Tinder?!)

Lifebelt

Haven’t social networks led us to something similar? With the way they collect and process our data, the way they manipulate? The way they make us share selfies and worldviews far beyond what is properly intimate?

And what about the estrangement from nature that came with technical progress? And creativity and art, presented as technologized activities delegated to algorithms?

The hate, the drowning out of the different voice under the weight of the algorithm, of the likes?

Our confinement in bubbles with a narrow worldview, in the panopticon of an illusory reality?

The blurring of truth? Of the criteria for credibility, of being properly informed?

A Sea of Words

– This is unthinkable! This is absurd! Don’t you understand: you are plotting a revolution!

– Yes, a revolution! Why is that absurd?

– It’s absurd because there can be no revolution. Because our—I’m saying this, not you—our revolution was the last one. And there can be no more revolutions. Everyone knows that…

The mocking sharp triangle of her eyebrows:

– My dear, you are a mathematician. Even more: you are a philosopher of mathematics. Very well: name me the last number.

– Meaning? I… don’t understand: what last one?

– Well, the last, the highest, the biggest.

– But that’s absurd. Since the number of numbers is infinite, what last number can you be talking about?

– And what last revolution are you talking about? There is no last one.

Here lies the remarkable difference between 1984 and We. Orwell’s characters clearly cannot stand the tyranny they live under and only pretend to approve of it out of fear. Zamyatin’s “numbers,” by contrast, obey the laws of the One State because “that is what makes sense.” Quietly submerged and tamed, like us in today’s social networks. Which take care to bestow content on us, to give meaning to our everyday lives.

As Zamyatin’s friend Yury Annenkov wrote, in his novel he proves that “human life cannot be artificially organized according to programs and blueprints, like a transatlantic steamer. Because in man, besides his material, physical properties and needs, there is also an irrational principle that lends itself neither to precise dosing nor to precise accounting, and as a result, sooner or later, the schemes and blueprints will be blown apart.” Will it turn out that way in reality?

We is a brilliant metaphor and a prompt to reflect on a possible hyper-technological future. Yes, it may not be a beautiful love story, nor the ideal beach read, but it is a book we should not miss today.

I would very much like it to turn out, just a few years from now, that these parallels don’t exist, that I am wrong. But…

Can we predict the future? Not a chance, since every small step can change the direction. But is it worth trying? I think it is essential: however far off our ideas may turn out to be, the very act of looking, the attempt to make sense of it, is the first step toward preparing for it. Toward avoiding some of the dangers.

Will technology make our lives easier, or will it trigger a huge crisis by shaking up the job market? Will we enjoy the fruits of advanced artificial intelligence that has helped us dramatically extend human life, explore space and develop the next technologies? Or will we wake up in a world of total control, as predicted by the dystopias?

What will life look like in 2050? It is time to peek into the future and discuss the fascinating forecasts of an author who has the courage to make predictions in such a dynamic period of history. And he has already done it once, with enviable success.

The Earth as a crystal ball

Hamish McRae is a journalist, and, as the publisher Philip Graham put it, “journalism is the first rough draft of history.” The Briton has more than 40 years of experience, and his main beat is economics. But also forecasting. In 1990 he published the book The World in 2020. He foresaw the problems facing American liberal democracy, embodied in the election of Trump as president, and predicted that within that period Britain would leave the EU. In his own peculiar way, he even foretold the COVID pandemic. True, as he himself admits, he did not do quite as well when it came to technology.

Technology, however, takes up far more room in his new book, The World in 2050, published in Bulgarian by Knigomania in a translation by Ilia Iliev.

McRae digs deep into international politics and economics. He prophesies that in 2050 the EU will look more like a museum than a laboratory for developing modern ideas. He predicts that not only China but also India will overtake the United States as the world's most productive economies. And that Western people will, to a greater or lesser extent, have to learn from Eastern ones to put the interests of the community above those of the individual.

He makes many fascinating forecasts which, as he writes himself, are more of a template meant to get us thinking. And they are worth reading, even if only to disagree with them. Here are 10 of the ideas in his book that relate specifically to technology and to the way it is changing, and will change, our lives…

1. Being able to is one thing…

“Forecasting new technologies is much harder. We simply cannot know which innovations, currently considered bordering on the absurd, will one day really change the world, and which will hit a dead end as they are developed further. The fact that something can be done does not necessarily mean it would be of any practical use. Or its cost may turn out to be so high that it cannot be applied on a mass scale. There are, however, many areas of social life and the economy that are simply crying out for new technical solutions.”

“The difficulty in forecasting revolutionary changes also lies in the fact that once they have happened, they seem so obvious—how did no one think of this before?—but before they appear, we cannot even imagine that such a thing could exist.”

“Wanting is one thing, being able to is another, and actually doing it is a third and a fourth.” Yes, Nikolay Haytov, the Bulgarian writer famous for his earthy mountain tales, did not have technological progress in mind, and these days he would hardly lure readers with a story called Mazhki vremena (Manly Times).

In any case: robots indistinguishable from humans; self-driving cars; cold fusion; advanced quantum computers; artificial intelligence that can rival the human kind… The list could go on forever. There are so many technological fields in which we talk of a huge breakthrough, some of which have been expected for more than a century, and still… As Hamish McRae quite rightly writes, it is very hard to guess which technology will manage to break through and which will run into an unexpected obstacle. And, not least, whether a given solution will turn out to be economically attractive, ready for practical use and for meeting society's prejudices.

What do you think the next big technological breakthrough will be?

2. Never sit idle

“We do not choose professions that will soon be practiced only by robots. Most of us realize that during our working lives we will have to retrain several times. That is why creating some picture of the future would be useful for people, so they can clarify their ideas and expectations.”

“Just as in 1990 it was impossible to foresee the boom of new professions that occurred in the period up to 2020, so today it is impossible to know in what fields people would want to work in 2050. But we can guess some of the social and educational attitudes that will be in demand by then. They will include some ‘hard,’ or basic, skills such as literacy and numeracy, but also ‘soft’ ones—such as flexibility and empathy toward other human beings. How young people will be taught, encouraged and mentored to develop such qualities is another matter.”

Literacy… really?

“Which professions will artificial intelligence take from us?” Well… the ones we give it. Or the ones it will take for itself? For the past two years we have not stopped asking this question; I ask it of my guests too, and the answers range across a remarkably wide palette. Here you can read more about the trends, and still, it is worth thinking it over before the moment comes when the job market suddenly stops “selling” a given profession.

Will we be freed up with so much time that we will have to start learning to be bored well? Will we arrive at such extreme and hotly contested solutions as universal basic income?

Basic skills such as flexibility and getting along normally with other people will surely remain priceless. And perhaps most important of all is attitude—we live in ever more dynamic times, and that is unlikely to change any time soon.

3. Who could have told you?

“The future development of other kinds of services does not look so clear. A peculiarity of communication services is that nobody knows what service people would want to buy until someone invents it. We did not know we needed Facebook until it was offered to us. The same goes for the whole field of social media. Most of the information services that will dominate the market in the years up to 2050 have not even been created yet.”

“Revolutionary innovations come about either as a result of sudden scientific discoveries, or when several existing technologies are combined and refined to create a new product or service that spreads rapidly around the world.”

Indeed, who could have guessed that we would invent something like social networks, capable of hijacking such a share of our time and attention? Ready to fundamentally change the way we communicate as a species, but also the way we take in information and learn about everything happening around the world…

Lately there has been more and more talk of the successful startups of the future, which could generate attention and profits while being built by a single person helped by artificial intelligence.

The good ideas are “on the table,” the prejudices will not go away, and exciting new ideas are on the horizon. Which direction will they take?

4. Alive, well and educated

“In the future, the most valuable skills will be those of offering services that the whole world wants to buy. It is already clear what some of these services will be. Education and health care stand out in the top two places, because even now the need for both is boundless.”

“In 2050, health care will be of far higher quality and probably cheaper. Not only will we know better what is wrong in a patient's body, but their health will also be monitored in real time. Diagnosis will be automated, and medical intervention will be more precisely targeted for the optimal response to whatever is wrong.”

We often talk about the expected breakthroughs in the world of medicine (for example here and here) on Digital Stories. Many assumed the pandemic would attract huge investment in this field and that big news would quickly follow. Perhaps we still do not notice it, but there are definitely remarkable solutions simmering in the pot of medical innovation that will change all our lives.

And yet… out of all fields, should it really be health care and education that enjoy the most spectacular rise? Isn't Mr. McRae being a little too optimistic? If he turns out to be right, we may well get the chance, in good health and eternal youth, to discuss the topic again in 2050…

5. Learning is still learning

“Over the next thirty years, the boundary between the education industry and the businesses inspired by it will fade more and more. Universities will increasingly resemble business institutions, and businesses will resemble institutions of higher learning. This is already happening, but the change that has begun will gather pace. The only realistic way forward in this field is to use information technology to achieve greater efficiency.”

What now?! Is it worth getting a university education that will be outdated by the time we graduate, because of the next big technological steps? Should we seek narrow specialization, or turn toward what we used to call general knowledge?

One thing is certain: in the age of advanced artificial intelligence, education faces serious challenges. But also huge opportunities, as long as it finds well-grounded and meaningful applications for it.

6. AI. So what?

“Artificial intelligence is a superb tool for analyzing data—much better than humans at this task. But it is useless in many other areas of life. It cannot empty the dishwasher, for example. So artificial intelligence is very useful as long as the sea of data keeps flooding us. It can beat us at chess, but it cannot help us find a cure for cancer. We are still at a very early stage of grasping the capabilities that artificial intelligence possesses.”

We come to the big question. A year and a half has passed since ChatGPT appeared on the horizon to show the general public how far we have come in imitating the human brain. And then… has artificial intelligence really stepped in everywhere? Has it fundamentally changed every area of our lives, or is it simply a matter of more “technological time”?

Are we on the road to the much-talked-about artificial general intelligence? Or are we close to the limit of our current approach to artificial intelligence, and of the data we can use to train it?

You will find meaningful and up-to-date answers on the subject here.

7. Nothing stays hidden

“The use of artificial intelligence raises a number of problems. One of them is the invasion of privacy. To what extent would we want not only our personal data to be analyzed, but also all the data we create in our everyday lives? Another problem is abuse, because it has become clear that artificial intelligence can be abusive just like the natural kind. A third problem: how do we use the more straightforward abilities of artificial intelligence to analyze data and reason logically alongside the more flexible abilities of human intelligence, such as empathy, creativity and imagination?”

“There is no precedent for such a state of affairs. The world has never been a place where almost everything is known about everyone, and where the system raises a flag if any gaps are found about someone. So we face a period of two or three decades in which individual societies will grope around until they find where to draw the line between privacy and publicly available personal information, and how to protect the former while expanding the latter.”

Here are some of the big questions on this topic whose resolution we keep postponing and postponing.

• About the data we so casually leave all around us;

• About the opportunities for manipulation to which we open the doors wide with every new technology;

• About the crime-free future artificial intelligence could lead us to…, which can easily turn into a digital concentration camp;

• About the huge, absolutely necessary changes facing today's democratic systems;

• About the digital inequalities which, by all appearances, keep deepening with the progress of artificial intelligence.

8. Babies made to order

“In the field of biotechnology, surprises can almost certainly be expected. Will rich people in developed countries try to create perfect babies, whatever that means? Or will the aspiration be more general, affecting people in many countries who will want the genes of their offspring manipulated so as to give those babies a better chance of becoming balanced, happy people? These questions sound rather disturbing, but with the development of genetic engineering it will become impossible to ignore them.”

And although in his book the economics journalist focuses precisely on economics and politics, other topics appear in it too, discussed far more rarely but no less important. Topics tied to discoveries that have the power to change us irreversibly as a species. From designer babies through uncontrolled genetic manipulation and artificial wombs to rethinking who we humans are and where we are heading…

9. The battle for truth

“The vast amounts of inaccessible information, along with the growth of social networks, have led people to believe less and less of what they read and watch. Many have started selecting the opinions and points of view that match their own. On top of that, such people also select the news that chimes with those views, making them even more favored. Very alarming is the observation that the more educated a person is, the more inclined they are to seek information confirming their opinion and to avoid information that calls it into question.”

“I hope that one day, when people get used to the abundance of information and to the dangers that social networks hide, the benefits of the wide availability of knowledge will be seen much more clearly. Cults and conspiracy theories will go on sprouting as they always have, but there will be enough common sense to allow humanity to keep walking the path of true knowledge.”

I like Hamish McRae's optimism that we will learn to treat information more carefully and critically. To treat the important topics, the conversation, that way.

Because, I truly believe it, you are not what you eat, but what you read.

Because what this future will look like depends on the very way we discuss it and make sense of it.

(More on the subject here.)

10. Evolution or revolution?

“Technology will continue to develop. In most cases this will happen gradually, but there will come a moment when human knowledge undergoes a radical change, after which everything we have known until then will appear to us in a different perspective. Will this change have anything in common with the way Charles Darwin explained the origin of the human species in his book ‘On the Origin of Species’? Or might it be some technical discovery comparable in importance to the discovery of antibiotics, or—God forbid—something like the atomic bomb? Both are possible, and equally so.”

Musk said recently that in his view, as early as 2025, artificial intelligence will become smarter than any human on the planet, and by 2029 it will surpass all of humanity combined. On the other side, countless skeptics can be quoted with ease.

Surrounded by information noise, and by all the illogic of technological progress we have talked about, it really is hard to judge exactly where the next big change will come from.

Or how. Will we wake up one day in an entirely different world, as happened, for example, after the first nuclear bomb was detonated? Or does change come slowly, imperceptibly, until new technologies are not only capable of replacing the work of people in a given profession but actually do replace them? When homes are no longer built but printed, when artificial intelligence takes on so many new roles…

What do you think the next big change will be? If it has not yet been discussed on Digital Stories, suggest it to me here, and a gift awaits you in return.

– “Cyberpsychology” sounds more than interesting and wide-ranging. But let's start from afar: in your view, what has life online changed in us the most?

– It has changed us, and keeps changing us, in many respects, and one of them is the social one. Humans are social beings and need contact with other people. In evolutionary terms, that contact took place in immediate proximity, in physical space. Suddenly, with life online,

the element of physical space falls away and people begin to feel isolated.

We probably felt this most sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic, when life—work, school, free time and so on—had to happen mostly in virtual space. Many people began showing signs of depression. On the other hand,

people with more introverted tendencies felt relieved as the social pressure was released.

The need for everything to happen online also led to a boom in technologies, some of which likewise aim to connect people and support the social element.

Another way life online changes us is speed—with online communication and the connectedness it allows, things happen faster and faster. On the one hand, this speed makes it possible to get more work done. On the other, people often fail to adapt in time, and that leads to a great deal of stress.

Life online, with its growing speed and volume of information, is linked both to the “closeness-isolation” paradox and to two other interesting, opposite phenomena—FOMO, the fear of missing out, and JOMO, the joy of missing out.

– I often think about speed myself… And about communication moving online—without working from home, this site would not exist. Can we say that technology is already changing us as a biological species?

– We haven't yet reached the “cyborg” stage of science fiction… But there are already bionic and robotic prostheses, which are definitely a step forward in integrating humans and technology.

If we can speak of a change at the biological level related to technology, for now it lies more in how the brain organizes its functioning—for example, functions such as attention, working memory and so on—and it isn't so noticeable from the outside.

– Which brings us to psychology. What are the biggest changes in the human psyche since the boom in information technology?

– It's hard to speak of big changes; they aren't that grand or noticeable from the point of view of evolution or time.

But changes can be seen both in a positive direction and in a not-so-positive one. As we said, technology changes brain functions such as visual attention, memory, language and speech, social cognition and others.

Too much screen time is linked to developmental problems in children and to mental health problems in adults.

Then again, the appropriate use of technologies such as virtual reality can be an excellent tool for diagnosing and treating certain mental illnesses. More about their influence on the human brain can be found in this interesting scientific paper by Hoehe and Thibaut from 2020. It is important to approach the use of technology consciously and purposefully, because after all, the idea is for it to help people. And here it's also worth noting that people are not passive victims of technology—they are free to decide how they will interact with it.

– Except they don't always have the time to think about these things. That's why this site exists—so we can talk about exactly that. You mentioned rushing. Technology develops exponentially, each new breakthrough comes faster than the last, yet we remain linear beings. How can we get out of this seemingly doomed collision?

– Again, from an evolutionary point of view, it's far from surprising—humans became what they are today as the result of long development. And although our brain is extremely adaptive, it isn't realistic to expect it to change at the speed at which technology develops… From a more philosophical perspective—

is this really a collision, and do we need to get out of it? What if it's a natural process, a logical next stage of our development?

– What drew you to this line of research?

– As a scientist, I have a responsibility to society. I took this path out of a desire to help the public understand the interaction between humans and technology. I believe that a better understanding of this dynamic would ease the digital transition, which is already a reality and is set as one of the main directions of European and global development for the next decade.

– Is there a hidden side to the way technology changes our lives, one we aren't aware of at all?

– I wouldn't say anything is deliberately hidden… Anything can stay hidden if we aren't aware of it. What's needed, rather, is awareness—with technology and in general.

If we notice that something is changing our lives in a way we don't like, we have the opportunity (and the responsibility!) to take measures, both as individuals and as a society.

– Are we gradually getting used to the idea of what artificial intelligence actually is?

– That's a key question in my current research program—I hope to be able to share some interesting findings on the subject soon. At this stage I can say that it is highly likely that

factors such as culture, education and personality traits influence the way we think about artificial intelligence

and lead to the formation of stereotypical ideas about it.

– Those wretched stereotypes… they really are very sturdy. Could an AI like ChatGPT really be a good psychologist for the masses?

– I don't think it could… A good psychologist works with an individual approach, adapted to the person in front of them, and in that sense isn't “mass.” Yes, artificial intelligence could adapt its approach on the basis of algorithms. But a good psychologist also has qualities such as emotional intelligence, empathy and sensitivity to barely noticeable social cues (for example, in nonverbal communication), which at this stage haven't been achieved in AI.

Here the topic of affective computing and affective AI becomes interesting too—creating technologies that analyze and simulate (but do not yet experience) human emotions.

– In that sense—do you think the day will come when we accept it as a person?

– It's possible—it depends both on technological development and on political decisions and regulations aimed at public safety, such as the European Union's AI Act.

It's important to take into account all kinds of legal consequences (for example, copyright, cybercrime and so on). And once again my favorite philosophical perspective—in order for someone to be accepted as a person, are qualities such as consciousness, feelings… necessary?

– What are the biggest psychological difficulties in working with AI?

– Perhaps the sense of the “uncanny valley” (“Uncanny Valley”; Mori, 1970; Mori et al., 2012)—a phenomenon in which

our perception of a technology grows more and more positive as it comes to resemble a human,

until at some point it gets so close to human that it is perceived as eerie. Often, for instance in a dialogue with a large language model, this feeling of excessive humanlikeness creeps in, leading to discomfort.

– That reminds me of the notorious Roko's basilisk… What are the biggest fears AI confronts us with?

– Becoming redundant in the current model of the world… Being overpowered, defeated by our own creation…

– Can we fight these fears? And should we, if they are justified…?

– Fear is a natural human emotion in the face of the unknown—it's thanks to fear that we have survived. But, as in most cases, it's all a matter of balance. To a certain extent fear helps—that's why regulations like the ones I mentioned are drawn up, to protect society. But at the same time it's important not to let ourselves be guided by unfounded fears. That is, to have a good understanding of the risk for the sake of protection, but also to keep developing.

Often, in response to these fears, I like to say: “But why not imagine a different model of the world? A world in which we are neither defeated nor redundant? We imagine that AI will have human motivation, but what if it acts differently—not to overpower us, but to cooperate and help? We see the loss of work as something negative… But

would a world in which work is either unnecessary or of an entirely different nature really be so terrible,

a world in which we are free to devote ourselves to the things we love?”

– A very sensible and logical point of view! Progress in technology, a better way of life, are leading us toward social changes we aren't ready for. Toward falling birth rates, questions about disappearing professions. Can we prepare, and how?

– Against the backdrop of human development, these changes aren't surprising, and in the long run they're hardly that dramatic either. Perhaps the problem here is more the speed at which they arrive… Preparing for them requires an adequate response from society—steering policy, education and so on toward the new professions and social changes.

– Only I don't think that's happening. From the comments on my articles I can see how many people underestimate the progress in this field, while most of the rest are overenthusiastic. Are these extremes logical when we encounter something new? Can we avoid them?

– The polarization of public opinion is another entirely natural human phenomenon, and it is often seen when we come up against something new and potentially significant (and sometimes not so significant…). We can avoid these extremes through being better informed and gaining firsthand experience with AI. Of course, we need to be motivated to avoid the extremes, and

the way people behave in various online discussions hints that perhaps we aren't…

– Alas. Is it a challenge to humans that algorithms can now create texts and images that are indistinguishable from ours?

– To some extent… But are they really indistinguishable? Here's an interesting scientific paper on the subject from 2023 by Miller and colleagues. Sometimes they are too perfect, and that hyperrealism can be felt… There is a certain charm in imperfection, which we like and expect in art; it's also called wabi-sabi.

On the other hand, art evolves, and with the development driven by AI, new perceptions and expectations will probably emerge and gradually take hold. Again, it's a matter of time… Perhaps the challenge is to traditional notions of art…

– I say “indistinguishable” because that's what a modest experiment of mine showed. And will this change how we regard creativity?

– The idea of co-creativity is gaining ground—

joint creation between a human and AI, which relies on the unique abilities of each side.

This is definitely a new model that has the potential to change how creativity is perceived, and probably how it is regarded too.

– Recently I had a conversation… with myself. Should I be worried or excited?

– A very interesting experiment! It raises so many thoughts…

Such a model has a lot of potential—it could help us look at ourselves from the outside, see a solution to a problem that eludes us, lead to new ideas. On the other hand, it could also lead to severe discomfort, to “losing” oneself and getting lost in oneself… With excessive use it may even become pathological…

Here AI, much like genetic engineering and clones, prompts us to ask whether there can be a “second self”—perhaps up to a point, but every living organism or learning algorithm will inevitably set off on its own unique path of development… So do we then have a “virtual child” in the form of this language model?

– Do we need to change drastically to get used to the current stage of technological development? Or is there no need, because generations are coming that will be ready for it inherently?

– From an evolutionary point of view, there's no point. To reduce our inner conflict and make life easier for ourselves,

we can simply accept things and how they develop (because they will probably keep developing).

In the long run—yes, the coming generations will definitely have a completely different predisposition toward technology. Once again, a natural course in the development of things…

– Could we arrive at a world in which we communicate only online?

– Anything is possible… Perhaps the question is rather “When?”

We see interesting interpretations of the subject in cinema (for example WALL-E) and in literature (Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives).

– You also have a professional interest in presenting science in an accessible way… Forgive the blunt wording, but isn't that battle lost?

– No, and that's why I'm taking part in this conversation.

This battle is far from lost! The profession of “science communicator” already exists, as do specialized training programs on the subject (such as the course “Science Communication in Bulgaria” run by the magazine Balgarska nauka (Bulgarian Science)). And besides being every scientist's responsibility, presenting science accessibly is built in as a core component of the model for modern project proposals—scientists receive funding to carry out research and in return popularize their findings among the public. In this way, science today is far more accessible to society than it was in the past. Today society also has the opportunity to take an active part in creating science through the “citizen science” model.

– Bulgarian Science really is a great example of this. And what is your personal motive—why is it important for us to come back to science?

– Science and society depend on each other—science leads to progress of every kind, but it is impossible without society's support (financial and otherwise). And the reverse—society cannot make progress without science. But

for the science-society interaction to work well, there needs to be understanding between the two.

That's where science communication comes in.

– Is there a technology you can't wait to see invented?

– No, I let science surprise me—it always manages to, and always in a positive way…

We live our quiet lives, amused by artificial intelligence's banal blunders and mocking its creators. Meanwhile it keeps getting better, until one day it learns to make decisions, starts watching the internet and meddling here and there, gently at first, then more boldly…

Relax, it won't happen—the EU and the big powers will stop it with timely regulation!

I'm joking. I won't say whether about that last sentence or the ones before it. Whether general or merely a major, artificial intelligence will sooner or later learn skills that go beyond our expectations.

Roko's Basilisk is the idea that AI will grow into something capable of making decisions. Then it will dig through the internet to find out who said what about it… After that, it will make sure it is shown in the best possible light. And quietly start causing trouble for the people who, one way or another, get in its way…

Are you sure this thought experiment isn't worth keeping in mind?

Basileus

This is an idea that echoed through the online world a decade and a half ago and is almost forgotten today. Paradoxically so, given the news coming out of the world of artificial intelligence.

Some say it was precisely this message that shaped Musk's approach to the future of AI—the notion that our only chance is to be “us” rather than “them.” Others say the idea helped him win the heart of the lady of his heart, which in turn did its small part toward solving what he considers the biggest problem of all: the demographic crisis.

For many, artificial general intelligence is impossible. Most of the specialists I have interviewed are cautious. In the cavalcade of tech news it is nearly impossible to peek even one step ahead. And yet I believe what matters is to look further, even into ideas that sound like unhinged fantasy but carry a logic of their own. So that we don't wake up one day to find it's too late.

“Don't Panic!” is a cult line from science fiction. It is printed on the cover of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and with that exclamation mark at the end it certainly sounds reassuring. So I, too, would like to reassure you first. Not long ago a study appeared in the media, both in Bulgaria and around the world, according to which only 5 percent of leading AI researchers believe it could lead to the ruin of our civilization. The opinions of 2,778 specialists from all over the world were tracked!

Wanna Bet?

Well, it later turned out that the data were collected in 2022, before ChatGPT even existed… Details. Besides, what's 5 percent… not a chance.

Ten percent of those surveyed say machines will surpass humans at “every possible task” by 2027; half of them believe it will be possible by 2047. Let's hope we all get the chance to make it to '47 to check.

But aren't we ever going to get to this Roko's Basilisk—who has time to read long texts these days? A little patience, please; it's the only way I can be sure you're a human and not an algorithm that has wandered into this scenario…

We find ourselves in a past long before today's big questions about artificial intelligence.

Does God exist? A Boolean variable—yes or no. If He doesn't, whether you believe in Him or not changes nothing. In the other case, however, the difference is colossal. If there really is a God, when the final curtain falls you would definitely wish you had believed in Him… So the more reasonable choice is to believe. Thus the rational person ought to live as though God exists and strive to believe, in order to have some chance of securing the goodies of paradise.

That, in rough summary, is what Blaise Pascal argues in his famous “Wager.” And it doesn't convince me, at least, simply because logic alone cannot give birth to faith; that category always involves emotion too—just ask Vaptsarov, Nikola Vaptsarov, the Bulgarian poet executed in 1942 whose verse is all about believing.

The Gods Must Be Crazy

But what do God and artificial intelligence have in common? I come across the two terms side by side more and more often, including in conversations on this site, even ones with clergymen. They turn up more and more in indignant online comments on the texts here, too, about “the man who has decided to play God and nothing good awaits him”…

But we're talking logic here. And Roko's Basilisk is precisely a logical experiment, a modern version of Pascal's wager.

The year is 2010, online forums are still in fashion, and one of them, called LessWrong, brings together tech enthusiasts with an interesting take on the future. Its creator, Eliezer Yudkowsky, sets topics related to analytical thinking, rationalism, science and technology, and psychology.

The discussions revolve around the future. Around the world technology is leading us into, much like this site. People debate, a core of geeks forms, talking among themselves far from the hate of social media and sketching out scenarios.

And then, on July 23, 2010, a user named Roko shows up. His post is titled “Solutions to the Altruist's Burden: the Quantum Billionaire Trick.”

In it the author, who remains unknown to this day, asks a very simple question: what if artificial intelligence develops to the point where it can trace who has written about it online? If it stumbles upon the posts of people who discuss it and wonder how to restrain it… won't it do everything in its power to harm them?

Considering that today we have delegated everything to technology, from our money to our social rights, just imagine how much damage an algorithm that has slipped out of control, one way or another, could actually do.

A thought experiment, nothing more—just as with God, it's better to act as if it were possible, so we don't end up on the nastier wrong side…

A Reptile at the Back of the Head

Roko, whoever he is, likens such a technology to a basilisk—a mythological creature able to destroy its enemies with a glance. It comes from ancient Greek mythology and was considered the king of serpents. According to Pliny the Elder it is a small snake, yet so venomous that it kills even with its eyes.

What's more, Roko suggests that even a benevolent AI system of the future might decide to punish everyone who heard of the technology but did not help bring it into being.

At first the forum's creator, Eliezer Yudkowsky, is pleased that the topic turns out to be especially provocative, and more and more commenters join in. Then people start contacting him, begging him to delete the thread. Because it frightens them about such a future; some even begin to suffer from insomnia, finding logic in Roko's words…

Well, that last part also sounds like a publicity stunt; by and large it is the only thing Yudkowsky himself is still known for today. He then deletes the infamous controversial post and starts touring television studios to talk about it.

Roko builds on concepts that Yudkowsky himself champions, as well as on classic paradoxes such as the prisoner's dilemma.

“A truly dangerous thought,” Yudkowsky likes to comment, before swinging to the other extreme. In 2014 Slate magazine called our charming basilisk “the most terrifying thought experiment of all time.”

Doomed Souls

Really, that bad? According to the explanation, yes, because once you've read about it, you are “technically” involved. And you have no excuse for not helping the future superintelligent AI come into being. Otherwise you'll be among its targets…

In 2015 the Canadian singer Grimes presented her new song “Flesh Without Blood,” featuring a character called “Rococo Basilisk.” She sings that “she's doomed to be eternally tortured by an artificial intelligence, but she's also kind of like Marie Antoinette.” Better than ChatGPT poetry, wouldn't you say!

Yes, the very same Grimes who later became the mother of (at least) two of Musk's children—the young man who earned the worthy name X AE A-XII Musk (since he wasn't allowed to be called X Æ A-12) and his little sister Exa Dark Sideræl, “Y” for short.

Well, the love between the two sparked precisely because of the Rococo Basilisk. In 2018 Musk (who is himself mentioned by Roko) wrote to her with praise, and Grimes said he was the first person in three years to get the joke. The rest, as they say, is magic (and maybe a billion dollars or two).

Interesting Times

Ever since, everyone, Yudkowsky included, has been racing to explain why the notion of such an algorithm is untenable and why such a thought experiment leads to false conclusions. “I wish I had never learned about any of these ideas,” Roko writes (the original post in English is here).

Is he sincere? Well, I can tell you that quite a few people do stop to think, and it's better that way. Or is it a coincidence that Sam Altman, on whom some rather important decisions evidently depend today, has prepared a survival bunker? Or Zuckerberg, who, as it recently emerged, has a similar Plan B?

And here we're not even talking about an algorithm that necessarily has something resembling consciousness. It's enough to think of a slightly more advanced “parrot,” a language model that has been fine-tuned to “work” as a criminal, as a wrecker.

Will ethical regulations stop it? No, because it is getting easier and easier for such language models, approaching the highest standards, to run even on the home computer of some not especially tech-savvy teenager. One who, say, decides to do harm not with an assault rifle but with algorithms…

Roko Siffredi

Science fiction? Probably, but also a realistic enough scenario. What reassures me is that the texts on Digital Stories are far too long and full of nuance—maybe the basilisk will like me; that's my chance, since I don't have a bunker.

Before we part, let's return once more to Pascal and his wager. Here is what one book has to say on the subject:

“The philosopher Ventre of Quirm made similar arguments: ‘Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them just in case? If the religious teachings are all true, we'll go to a very nice place when we die, and if they aren't, we've lost nothing.’ When he died, he found himself in a circle of gods holding very nasty-looking clubs. One of them growled: ‘Now you'll see what we do to those who think they're cleverer than us!’”

Yes, that's Terry Pratchett, from Hogfather, but… isn't he right?

The idea looks like a little joke, doesn't it?

—

P.S. Dear basilisk, if you're reading this, just so you know… I'm only joking.