A thread through the archive · 66 essays
Possible futures, technological risk and the choices that remain ours to make.
Search within this topicOn estrategIA’s third anniversary, Fernando Nieto Lobato examines accelerating AI progress and the political preparation needed to protect rights and share its benefits.
An argument for independent AI safety oversight, proportionate controls and broad access, examining regulatory capture and the human costs of unjustified delay.
Electricity, compute, oversight, people and capital: what countries need to turn a claim of AI sovereignty into the power to decide.
A historical account of GPT-6 Astra and an interactive municipal planning experiment, examining what better AI capabilities mean for public explanation and judgement.
Seven political lessons from the 2026 summer fiction: meaningful oversight, public choices, autonomy, accountability, resilience, attention and a shared reality.
A fictional public consultation explores how personalised explanations can make a policy accessible while hiding the common choices citizens need to debate.
When AI makes political accusations cheap, a fictional MP discovers how the competition for attention can displace serious public scrutiny.
A story about an automated public-service contractor, and why a human signature means little without the authority to overrule the system.
Summer fiction about allocating scarce public AI capacity during a heat emergency, revealing hidden dependencies and unequal local resilience.
Summer fiction about an older woman, an AI care assistant and rebuilding human support without surrendering control of life at home.
Summer fiction about an outgoing minister whose AI memory must be divided between institutional continuity and personal privacy.
Summer fiction set in 2032: a mayor whose administration runs smoothly with AI must choose between two legitimate but incompatible public needs.
The first summer historIA of 2026: a fictional council officer in 2032 confronts the difference between a recorded human signature and meaningful oversight.
How democratic institutions can plan under AI uncertainty through staged commitments, flexible structures and systems for detecting change.
Two principles for public AI strategy towards 2030: governing emerging capabilities and ensuring meaningful universal access.
Three alternative AI futures for 2030 — plateau, sustained ascent and rapid take-off — and why strategic preparation must work across all three.
If technology can separate income from employment, the political task is to share its gains—and the freedom they could make possible.
Five Simpsons storylines connect satire with autocorrect, smart homes, machine learning, alignment and technological unemployment.
A political reading of Dario Amodei’s technological adolescence and Claude’s Constitution: institutional wisdom, oversight and the limits of corporate sovereignty.
A historical assessment of CES 2026: universal AI access, Nvidia's physical AI infrastructure, on-device assistants, autonomous agriculture and preventive care.
Luis Eduardo Paniagua Martín explores physics as a bridge between mathematical ideas, algorithms and hardware, with an illustrated explanation from the original newsletter.
Five perspectives on AI’s future—from geopolitical urgency and technical control to economic incentives and relational ethics—and the case for addressing both future and present harms.
A reading of State of AI 2025 for public policy, covering reasoning, energy, geopolitics, commercial adoption and safety, with the report’s full prediction slides.
A second-anniversary comparison of AI adoption, task capabilities, falling costs, investment and public perceptions, preserving the October 2025 evidence and forecasts.
A Claude Sonnet 4 satire imagines a union of bots, a technology strike and the rediscovery of civic debate.
A Gemini 2.5 Pro story imagines a rapid AGI transition and the consequences of failing to prepare institutions and the social contract.
A Kimi K2 story follows a campaign manager through a day of AI systems, ethical safeguards and human decisions in 2032.
A Grok 4 summer fable set in Mexico City in 2045 explores civic participation, empathy and an AI that learns from human stories.
A fictional AI travel diary, created with GPT-4.5, visits four places associated with the development of artificial intelligence.
How collective forecasting can inform AI policy, and why probabilities require critical judgement rather than blind trust.
Sam Altman’s vision of superintelligence is read alongside Amodei’s employment warnings, Bengio’s alignment concerns and the political question of who benefits.
Seven findings from BOND’s AI trends report, covering adoption, investment, falling inference costs, China, work and the next technological frontiers.
Google’s May 2025 announcements, from Gemini and Veo to local AI models, and their implications for creating, searching and communicating.
On the eve of International Workers' Day, a look at humanoid robotics, its possible effects on jobs and the policies needed to manage the transition.
A Holy Week reflection on Antiqua et Nova, the Vatican's view of AI, and the place of human dignity, solidarity and philosophical judgement in technological change.
An argument for debating universal basic income before large-scale AI disruption, covering its history, purposes, funding, uncertainties and social meaning.
A review of José María Lassalle's Civilización artificial, its case for technological humanism and its account of AI, power and the future of work.
MWC 2025's AI announcements and the implications for mobile networks, public administration, regulation and future services.
AI-assisted scientific discovery, from Google's Co-scientist to new biomedical models, and the political questions raised by accelerating research.
A review of Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato’s Superagency, its qualified optimism and its political case for measured regulation.
A January 2025 assessment of Stargate's projected investment, infrastructure ambitions, historical comparisons and the Musk-Altman dispute.
Gary Marcus and Miles Brundage put money behind competing expectations for AI, with ten tasks and a deadline at the end of 2027.
Five policy requests for 2025: make AI a priority, develop it safely and quickly, protect people, redesign institutions and plan for the long term.
Fernando Nieto Lobato argues that rapid advances in AI reasoning demand serious preparation by governments, businesses and individuals, including for a possible transformation of work.
A November 2024 outlook on deregulation, ideological bias, energy, competition with China, military applications and Elon Musk's possible influence on US AI policy.
A Halloween essay by Pablo Martín Diez uses science fiction to explore AI alignment, emotional manipulation and the risk of willingly surrendering human control.
A review of the State of AI Report 2024 across research, industry, politics and safety, including its assessment of earlier forecasts and predictions for 2025.
A historical account of OpenAI o1, its reasoning capabilities, benchmark results, limitations and possible applications.
A September 2024 outlook on new models, synthetic media, falling costs, mass adoption and the technologies expected to reach the public that autumn.
Seven themes drawn from the summer fiction series: efficiency, human connection, ethical judgement, democratic control and collaboration with AI.
Grok 2 mini supplies the final summer story: an AI candidate faces a human activist who questions its promise to optimise collective happiness.
An updated Gemini model tells the story of Perseo, an AI policy adviser whose impeccable calculations raise disturbing ethical questions.
Created with Mistral Large 2, this story follows ATHENA, an AI cabinet member whose success provokes a political conspiracy.
A fictional AI designed to advise governments becomes a political force in its own right, in a story created with Llama 3.1 405B.
A summer satire created with Claude Sonnet 3.5: an AI campaign assistant detects one problem too many in a presidential debate.
In this summer story created with Gemini 1.5 Pro, a bored programmer disrupts the speeches of an impeccably rational digital ruler.
The summer fiction series begins with GPT-4o's story of Políticus-Prime, a humorous AI candidate facing a flamboyant human rival.
A July 2024 reading of Ray Kurzweil's vision of superintelligence, human–machine integration, abundance and the choices society faces.
A historical reading of WWDC 2024 and Apple's strategy of integrating AI into everyday devices, Siri and its operating systems.
A historical account of OpenAI's GPT-4o launch and Google I/O 2024, examining multimodal assistants, search and the prospect of ubiquitous AI.
A six-month retrospective on disinformation, models, European regulation and the AI trends identified for 2024.
Sora’s February 2024 announcement, its potential for political communication and the need for a coordinated response to realistic synthetic video.
Employment, disinformation and science at Davos 2024, and the tension between AI optimism, regulation and inequality.
Five AI trends predicted at the start of 2024, plus the expected impact of AI on the US elections and public perceptions.
ChatGPT's first anniversary, viewed from December 2023 through adoption charts, competing models and early evidence about AI in consulting and education.
The 2023 Bletchley Park summit brought agreements on AI safety, while leaving difficult questions about regulation, openness and international cooperation.