I don’t know if it’s the same for you, but I feel the bewilderment about our increasing 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 see that GDP is doing much better than our real economy or when I hold my breath in every election contest with my eyes set in the most significant of all: next November in the United States.
And I’m afraid that this perplexity, when coated with anxiety and anger, is what lies 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 turn to nostalgia, to “when everything worked better” – I do it sometimes – but it is clear that it is an absurd refuge. Or we can accept that there is no other choice but to try to navigate the wave, knowing that having a course and a toolbox in good condition is essential to reach port. Well, the same boring recipe as always: politics and politics. Project and reforms. Vision of what is to come and transformation of what we have so that it continues to serve.
And it was precisely for this reason, to combat my perplexity with some constructive recipe, that I wanted to dedicate my article today to artificial intelligence. This that everyone is talking about, this that they say will be key to navigating our future. It even had a good starting point, the sentence of the writer Joanna Maciejewska: “I want the AI ??to do the laundry and wash the dishes so that I can devote myself to art and writing, not the AI ??to write and draw for me so that I can do the laundry and wash the dishes”. Don’t you think it’s brilliant?
However, I came across a piece of data that seemed more revealing to me and that indicates the absence of artificial but analogical intelligence, which 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 up to the task of applying will and intelligence to take advantage of the situation and undertake one of the least sexy but most necessary reforms: the of the public administration. A reform, moreover, that should not arouse great ideological disputes.
Both professional organizations and recognized experts (Ramió, Longo or Jiménez Asensio) have long since made the diagnosis and the proposals: reorient the human resources model towards meritocracy and the professionalization of managers, improve transversality and agility, the ‘evaluation and innovation. Not to mention the two big blind spots of the system: the eventuality and the Spanish anomaly of the figure of the adviser – basically political -, which are also not subject to any transparency.
Juan Moscoso del Prado made a very interesting proposal some time ago on a mixed access system, breaking the monopoly of the opposition model. But the lack of analogical intelligence means that no one undertakes this reform and that, as a consequence, Spain scores very low in government efficiency indices, at the level of countries such as Malta and behind Qatar.
How would you rate an important thing that we know we need to do and how we should do it and don’t do it? Well I guess you’d say that’s stupid. Analog or artificial, but stupidity, after all.
Artificial or analog, collective intelligence is doing things in accordance with utility and the general interest. When did Peru screw up, Zavalita?
