Artificial Intelligence has been talked about for years but it is this 2023 when the debate has spread more widely to citizens. Aware of this, the Hay Festival of Segovia has made AI one of the main threads of its eighteenth edition, which begins this Monday in Barcelona, ​​a city that it is visiting for the second time, and which will last nine months for different locations, such as Madrid and other parts of Castilla y León, beyond Segovia.
What is considered one of the largest meetings of literature and thought in Spain, which is why it received the 2020 Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, will take advantage of the Catalan event to announce the official programming, as well as to raise the Possible future AI scenarios.
The meeting, which will take place at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) at the hands of Fundación Banco Sabadell at 6:30 p.m., will be attended by computer engineer Nuria Oliver, one of the most prestigious researchers at the world; Sonia Mulero, director of the Banco Sabadell Foundation; and Miquel Molina, deputy director of La Vanguardia. All of them will reflect with the public on a humanist horizon with AI as a tool to improve people’s lives and will try to provide answers to questions such as: What space is left for humanism, for happiness and for nature? What will the new power relations be like? How will history be written?
MarÃa Sheila Cremaschi, director of the Hay Festival Segovia, points out that the solution to all these questions must be sought in “literature, the arts, thought or science”. For this reason, the event brings together some of the most prominent names in these fields, such as the film director Robert Hardman, the political adviser and writer Giuliano da Empoli, the social scientist Arthur Brooks, the architect Ben van Berkel or the writers R osa Montero, Julia Navarro, Santiago Posteguillo, Eva Orúe, Alice Kellen and Javier Pérez de Albéniz, among others.
In the nine months that the programming will last, there will also be space for workshops around letters, such as the one that will lead the founder of the Intramuros magazine that will take place during the Madrid Book Fair and that will allow participants to become authors of their own autobiographies. Also during the month of June there will be a meeting between the writers Violeta Gil and José Félix Valdivieso with different reading clubs.
Tickets for the different events are on sale from this Monday on the festival’s official website. The dates for the Segovian event remain, as every year, in September, from the 14th to the 17th.
The Hay Festival was born in 1988 in Hay-on-Wye, a small town in Wales where international personalities from the world of literature and music met to discuss what the world was like then and how it could become.
The first edition in Segovia was held in 2006 and, since that year, the city has not stopped bringing together some of the best writers and thinkers in the world at the end of the summer to talk about the world that surrounds us and will surround us.