Antonio Navalón
Of all the revolutions that humanity has experienced since time immemorial, there is one constant that characterizes them all. From the discovery of the wheel to the Iron Age, the Industrial Revolution, the steam engine, and electricity, they have all been linked to the geographical space between our neck and our feet. Today, for the first time, we are experiencing a revolution that is happening in reverse.
Artificial intelligence not only serves to enhance man’s strength and capacity for movement, but also places him before his greatest challenge. If it is true that we use only a fraction of our brainpower, the development and evolution of artificial intelligence, and the victory of the machine over man, present us with a unique challenge.
Now, with artificial intelligence and the summary of all our behaviors, it is possible to enter the data of a problem into a program and wait for it to develop to its ultimate conclusion immediately. In other words, what we fear most—losing the capacity for surprise—is, at the same time, what we crave most: being able to plan and know the future.
This is especially important in the tomato tariff war currently being experienced in North America. Today, there is no need to rack your brains trying to guess what will happen, how, and when. All you have to do is feed the artificial intelligence models to obtain a projection that shows us the ultimate consequences of the tariffs.
It is a curious circumstance. In recent times, we have never been under so much pressure from the unexpected as we are now. However, we have never had better tools to project what is likely to happen if things continue on their current course.
Everything is new. Let’s not be surprised. But today, it is not politics or respect for national or international law that can answer the questions about where we are headed. What started with a tomato could ultimately lead to a complete transformation in the use of fossil fuels and all kinds of resources.
As with the economy, mining, rare earths, and strategic materials, we are entering an era that is not just stellar or galactic. Although we can use man-made instruments to make reliable projections, this is a time when we do not know what or how to calculate the new or true wealth of countries.
You will recall that when we were children, maps were often used as indicators of each nation’s economic strength. In the case of Mexico, oil and gas rigs, along with thousands of kilometers of coastline, defined part of the treasures accumulated to project our economic future.
Today, however, the map is different.
There is a map based on rare earths. There are new components that are the direct consequence of technological evolution. It is challenging to determine the number of strategic minerals countries possess. However, little by little, we are discovering that – in a surprising leap from beginning to end – from the mining boom in the Roman Empire to today, deposits, whether open-pit or hidden, hold part of the answer to a country’s true wealth.
Faced with this, there is always the desperate effort to remain, through violent means, the most crucial empire on Earth. However, in the face of tariffs, threats, and instability, if today’s new wealth were measured by the amount of strategic resources and rare earths a country possesses, the great empire of the Earth would likely be China.
Consequently, while we continue to try to decipher what the president of the United States will or will not do, or whether he will punish us or not, it is essential to point out that we are facing the greatest challenge of all time for human intelligence. This challenge is to outsmart artificial intelligence. And that forces us to reflect on what we have done with our education system.
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