I don’t know if the same thing happens to you, but I feel the perplexity of our growing future. Not only when I hear statements from important leaders that take me back to 1914, but also when there are preventable deaths every minute, when I observe that the GDP is doing much better than our real economy or when I hold my breath before each electoral contest with my sights set on the most significant of all: next November in the United States.
And I fear that this perplexity, when clothed in anxiety and anger, is what is behind the growth of the extreme right that we will see in the next European elections. We would do ourselves a favor if we accepted that fighting it is not easy. We can resort to nostalgia, to “when everything worked better” – I do it sometimes – but it is evident that it is an absurd refuge. Or we can accept that there is no choice but to try to navigate the wave, knowing that having a direction and a toolbox in good condition is essential to reaching port. Come on, the same boring recipe as always: politics and policies. Project and reforms. Vision of what is coming and transformation of what we have so that it continues to serve.
And it was precisely for that reason, to combat my perplexity with some constructive recipe, that I wanted to dedicate my article today to artificial intelligence. That’s what everyone talks about, that’s going to be key to navigating our future. It even had a good starting point, the phrase of the writer Joanna Maciejewska: “I want the AI ??to do the laundry and wash the dishes so that I can dedicate myself to art and writing, not for the AI ??to write and draw for me so that I I can do the laundry and wash the dishes.” Don’t you think it’s brilliant?
However, I came across a piece of information that seemed more revealing to me and that indicates the absence of intelligence, not just artificial but analogous, the kind that we should demand from those who govern us. In the next ten years, 51% of public employees in Spain will retire and it seems that no one is willing to apply will and intelligence to take advantage of the situation and undertake one of the least sexy but most necessary reforms: that of the administration public. A reform that should not spark major ideological disputes.
Both professional entities and recognized experts (Ramió, Longo or Jiménez Asensio) have long made the diagnosis and proposals: reorient the human resources model towards meritocracy and the professionalization of managers, improve transversality and agility, evaluation and innovation. Not to mention the two great blind spots of the system: the eventuality and the Spanish anomaly of the figure of the advisor –basically political–, who are also not subject to any transparency.
Juan Moscoso del Prado made a very interesting proposal some time ago about a mixed access system, breaking the monopoly of the opposition model. But the lack of analog intelligence means that no one undertakes this reform and that Spain scores very low in the government efficiency indices, at the levels of countries like Malta and behind Qatar.
How would you rate something important that we know we have to do and how we should do it but don’t do it? Well, I guess they would say it’s stupid. Analog or artificial, but stupidity, after all.
Artificial or analogue, collective intelligence is doing things according to a utility and general interest. When did Peru get screwed, Zavalita?
