Behind Closed Doors

Views on Life Changes During Pandemic Times, 2019-21.

Luis Moreno & Raul Jimenez

To Eloísa, Iris and Teresa

2 Foreword.

This essay book is a compilation of articles published in various online newspapers, social networks and scientific blogs during the period of the Covid-19 pandemic (2019-21). Most of the texts were written originally in Spanish. To accomplish the task of translating them to English, we have used different automated translation tools, a.k.a robots: Deepl and Google Translate, but extensive copy-editing has been done by the co-authors, both academic researchers who develop their scientific tasks mainly in the language of Shakespeare.

This edition groups 40 articles in six thematic areas which were of particular interest and relevance for the analyzed impacts produced by the pandemic in our daily life. Some of them relate to particular events but, as a whole, they deal with impacts that substantially affect ongoing human existence and future scenarios. In particular, we have been very interested to see how the ongoing robotization is changing our societies and how they will adjust and evolve to not only preserve our current democracies, but enhance them to achieve a more just and equal society, especially in times when our biggest risk is climate change.

Some particular cases and instances relate to situations in Spain, our hosting country where we reside most of the year, although we spend long periods of time in Italy, USA and London. In the main, our analyses cut-cross global areas of examination and inquiry.

We are grateful to the media networks where we published our articles: Agenda Pública, The Conversation, Catalunya Press, Galicia Press, Press Digital, and Público. At the end of each article information and

3 links are provided regarding authoring, publishing dates and newspapers. We have maintained the chronological sequence of releases of the articles. Links used in Spanish in the original versions of the articles have been updated to English. The book contains all references as embedded hyperlinks, thus it is more useful as an e-book; however, those readers that prefer the physical format can find that embedded hyperlinks are underlined and highlighted in blue in case they want to follow up on them.

At the time of writing this book both authors have been already vaccinated for the Covid-19 virus. This is an amazing achievement of science. The fact that the vaccine was developed in a question of weeks, is something never seen before in the history of humankind. Also, as important, is that it was thanks to the social welfare promoted by governments that a campaign to vaccinate the whole population was put in place. Science and good government got us out of the pandemic; this is something to reflect on when we think about how to deal with global warming, which is our current and imminent, albeit delayed, danger.

We want to thank those co-authors with whom we have collaborated in some of the articles: Daniele Conversi, Amal Rahmeh, Licia Verde, and Rabih Zbib.

Madrid & Barcelona (and the cloud) 1st June 2021

4 Table of Contents

FOREWORD. 3

TABLE OF CONTENTS 5

INTRODUCTION: FROM ‘OLD’ NORMALITY TO AN EPOCHAL CHANGE. 9

Fighting the Maligned Covid-19. 10

Digitalization, Artificial Intelligence, Robotization. 12

Life-styles, Bureaucracy and the Online World. 16

Technological Lords and Industry 4.0. 19

Individual Agency and Social Life. 23

Recovery and Global Readaptation in a Climate of Uncertainty. 26

General Remarks. 30

1. FIGHTING THE MALIGNED COVID-19. 31

1.1 Coronavirus: Hush, Little Baby, Don't You Cry... 31

1.2 Aging and Social Eugenics. 34

1.3 Pandemic and Blame Avoidance. 37

1.4 Coronavirus, Confinement or Coffin? 40

5 1.5 Covid-19 Contagions and Random: Let us Pay More Attention to the Models Provided by Physics. 44 1.5.1 Neural Networks and Quantum Computers 46

1.6 Patents of Life and Death. 47

2. DIGITALIZATION, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, ROBOTIZATION. 52

2.1 Banking Robotization. 52

2.2 Quantum Supremacy of the Future. 56

2.3 Coronavirus, Robotize as Much as You Can. 60

2.4 Indeed, Artificial Intelligence Could Have Stopped Covid-19. 65

2.5 Unfinished Crisis: Who Controls the Robot? 68

2.6 Serfdom in Times of Robotization. 74

2.7 Digitalize Me, Please. 81

2.8 Should We Let Artificial Intelligence Optimize Society? Maybe Yes, but with Controls. 84

3. LIFE-STYLES, BUREAUCRACY AND THE ONLINE WORLD. 87

3.1 MGTOW, Men Going Their Own Way. 87

3.2 With ‘Traditional’ Bureaucracy There Is No Science. 90

3.3 Online and Classroom University. 95

6 3.4 Digitalized Civil Servants? 101

3.5 Endemic Pandemics and Global Households. 107

3.6 How is it Possible that Longer Working Days are the Norm in Times of Robotization than Before the Pandemic? 110 3.6.1 The empire of investment funds 112 3.6.2 Rudimentary algorithms 112

3.7 Where is the Agora in the Virtualized Society? 114

4. TECHNOLOGICAL LORDS AND INDUSTRY 4.0. 120

4.1 The New Useless Social Class. 120

4.2 Google, Neo-Feudalism without Taxation. 123

4.3 New Technological Feudal Lords (NTFL) go to Capitol Hill. 126

4.4 The Social Dilemma of Surveillance Capitalism. 130

4.5 The Capitalist Class Goes to Paradise. 133

4.6 Cryptomoney: Is China Taking the Lead? 136

5. INDIVIDUAL AGENCY AND SOCIAL LIFE. 143

5.1 Social Escapists. 143

5.2 Let Them Do The Selling. 146

5.3 The Rich are Smarter. 152

7 5.4 Encrypted Privacy. 155

5.5 Snowden, Deserved Honour to the Whistleblower. 161

5.6 Does the Chafing Bothers You? Just Take an Opioid. 165

5.7 Minimum Income Support and Picaresque. 168

6. RECOVERY AND GLOBAL READAPTATION IN A CLIMATE OF UNCERTAINTY. 172

6.1 Me-Myself-I and Climate Change. 172

6.2 Climate and Virus, It All Makes Sense. 175

6.3 EU, the Hard Birth Job was Accomplished. 178

6.4 After Covid-19, All Centenarians? 182

6.5 Gaia Earth, Green I Want you Green. 187

6.6 Imminent Dangers: Where to Go from Here...? 191

EPILOGUE: SOME FUTURE SCENARIOS IN A NEW BRAVE WORLD 195

8 Introduction: From ‘old’ Normality to an Epochal Change.

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed much of our vision of the world, or Weltanschauung. Indeed, it has brought about transformations which demand for new worldviews. Advocates of the ‘old normality’ refuse to take on board such a re-adaptation paradigm and desperately seek to go back to pre-pandemic times in managing scenarios of life and death.

Our primary mission with this book is to encourage the reader to think about life changes. There is hardly a way out to escape from the challenges that the pandemic has made us to face up to. The overall purpose of this essay book is, therefore, to stimulate the reader's assessment of the processes affecting the pandemic world and the prospects for its indeterminate future.

Epistemologically, our aim is to meet the need to explain the phenomena observed by following the general guidelines of the inductive application of maieutics. We attempt to adapt the Socratic maxim of inquiring into the truth latent in each reader by means of the exposition of analyses and reflections that stimulate his or her own exploratory reasoning. In this general task, the comprehensive hermeneutics of the Weberian Verstehen is used in order to interpret the meaning of the phenomena analyzed and the rational motives used to understand human actions.

The recourse to situational logic, which is tailored to the nature of the effects of the pandemic, pursues a way of explaining expectations and,

9 eventually, intentional and anticipatory social behaviors in times of epochal change. Fighting the Maligned Covid-19.

The first chapter of the first section of the book deals with the very extension of the maligned Covid-19 and its far-reaching consequences for public health around the globe. Not long after its initial phase in China (Wuhan), a general fear of becoming infected --and eventually dying irretrievably as a result of it-- settled in ‘advanced’ societies, particularly in the so-called First World. The then ineffable US President Trump launched his own ‘piece of advice’’ stating that in the face of the threat of the Coronavirus one could only pray. In particular, our prayers had to address the tragedy concerning our elderly, as in a few weeks time they died by the thousands in nursing homes and geriatric centers.

The growing number of deaths of the aging population in care residences was an acceptance, even unintentional, of the eugenics theses. In Europe, the elderly have been considered a priority social group for care. As reiterated in surveys, we want them to live well and as long as possible. Eugenicists, on the other hand, want to put an expiration date on their lives. Would it be about shortening their life courses to 75, 80, 90 years? What would be the “reasonable” age for our parents and grandparents to start putting up daisies? That is a question which was formulated in a subsequent article and which remains unanswered.

The initial governmental wrongdoings in the management of the crisis, and which has persisted as a pattern throughout the pandemic, was the deployment of the politics of “blame avoidance”’. As illustrated by the case of decentralized Spain, where health and social care powers and responsibilities are shared by central and regional layers of

10 government, blame avoidance practices have been intensively put into effect. In political terms, all that mattered in multi-level Spain was about passing the 'buck' of the tragedy caused by Covid-19 to “the others”. The tiers administrations involved refused to appear before their voters as responsible for the drastic adjustments and the outcomes produced during the pandemic.

As a way out, multi-level governments sighed for the arrival of the “deus ex machina” vaccine, the development of which was to be the final solution. In the meantime, politicians continued to try to avoid the blame. At the time of writing these lines, it is expected that most of the Western Hemisphere countries could reach “herd immunity” by the end of the summer in 2021.

“Confinement or coffin?” is the title of an article which vividly exposed the drama of keeping elderly population confined in infected nursing homes. In Spain, and between March and August of 2020, half of the deaths with Covid-19, or compatible symptoms, occurred in these residences. Once again, intersectoral coordination between health and social services was the great pending issue to confront while waiting for the “miraculous” vaccine.

In the face of an ever-growing rate of infections, we put forward that the correct way to model the contagion phenomenon was to use the scientific tools provided by statistical nonlinear physics. One of the most interesting results of these models accounted for the “drift” effect. This means that, due to the non-linearity of the system, “points of attraction” of unexpected phenomena occur which are not to be expected in a purely linear system. An interesting fact has been to see how areas in the US in which the transmission and expansion of pandemic has been very high had a very large drift.

11 The most useful tool to model and explore drift is offered by artificial intelligence and deep neural networks. Coupled with future quantum computers, which can explore many situations at once, they would be crucial in modeling future pandemics and helping governments decide how to use resources or optimize confinements.

In the last article of this first section the question, yet again, is whether public health should take precedence over any other consideration in facing the devastating and cross-cutting global health emergency crisis of Covid-19. Patents of vaccines are for life as well as for death, not only in a world region like the EU that pays high prices for purchasing the needed doses. Other areas of the planet cannot afford these prices, or if they do it is at the cost of their own economic development. Can the common good of our societies set the limits of the unbridled greed of the pharmaceutical industries behind the shield of patents? Digitalization, Artificial Intelligence, Robotization.

The second chapter of this volume concentrates on the implications of the pandemic concerning digitalization, artificial intelligence, and robotization. These areas of analysis were largely dealt with in our previous book, Robotized democracies. The article on banking robotization refers to the fact that, already in May 2019, the Santander Bank, one of the leading clearing banks in the world, announced the closure of one in four of its offices in Spain. In the US, more than 4,400 bank branches closed between 2017 and 2020 -a 5.1% drop from 85,993 to 81,586.

It is certainly the process of massive robotization which has favored the gradual disappearance of routine jobs whose functions can now be functionally carried out using our computers and smartphones --at the

12 cost of user’s time, needless to say. The nature of the banking system operations is suitable for a full robotization of procedures and transactions. All this becomes possible with the development of new tools of predictive algorithms based on the so-called machine learning. As a consequence, there are already virtual banks with a minimal presence of physical offices for the attention of the public.

Other labor sectors, especially with regard to routine functions and occupations, will follow the same path. Some social agents reluctant to accept such changes, and other nostalgics of the old industrial relations developed after the Second World War, will resist the abandonment of the past. It would be better for those workers who could face a situation of structural unemployment to embrace the cause of a citizens’ minimum income. Other than reasons of social equity, the criteria of productive efficiency should also meet the needs of those new “serfs” left behind in an increasingly robotic world.

Quantum technology is about to come according to the latest breakthroughs in this field. The revolution that quantum computers would bring about is related to the performance of an enormous number of operations to sort out problems that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the search for patterns cannot carry out (yet) at the present time. A necessary regulation is more than evident to be implemented in order to avoid the potential perverse effects of this latest technological development. Its application to artificial intelligence, and especially to neural networks, could be crucial to solve pressing problems for humanity and thus advance the well-being of our societies.

Taking advantage of the coming quantum computers, it would be possible to have them working frantically so that the molecular structure of new viruses could be discovered (what in technical jargon is known as folding). These computers are "supreme" in looking for

13 patterns in a system that is what is needed to develop a vaccine or antiviral.

When patients see doctors, all their data are recorded in a central medical record. Such data is constantly being analyzed by quantum computers looking for infection patterns. As soon as it is detected, the focus is located and the patients are isolated at the same time that the search for the vaccine is investigated. This carries a counterpoint, of course. It means in simple words that we lose our private health information. As pointed out in the article about Coronavirus and robotization, the alternative could be to stay locked up at home for months with a shattered economy, as Covid-19 has forcibly shown.

The robotization of our democracies is unstoppable and irreversible. But a big question remains unanswered: who controls the robot? Other replying questions can serve the purpose of articulating sound responses: Wouldn't it be fairer to think about what is being done without making decisions burdened by the urges of random situations? Wouldn't it be more efficient to equip robots with ethical rules as the means to propose the best solutions for a cost function that maximizes the happiness and well-being of citizens?

The following article on serfdom in times of robotization highlights how big technological companies (New Feudal Technological Lords- NFTL) are on their way to control our data and privacy or, rather, the lack of it. However, one should avoid becoming too cynical. Despite all the buts, tech companies are making our lives easier . How can we build a society that is not totally focused on work and superfluous entertainment? With the technological revolution of massive robotization, we should introduce timely regulation so that our lives are those of human beings and not that of disposable subjects.

14 This case of the Republic of Estonia, where its society is virtually digitalized draws our attention on how the democratic interaction between citizenship and public administration can be achieved. The platform e-Estonia provides citizens of Estonia with the possibility of making administrative procedures telematically in a simple and efficient manner, including the use of smartphones. Operationally registering a company, obtaining a birth certificate, or voting in elections, are some examples of this private-public digitalization. Furthermore, digitalization has allowed the Baltic country to keep on running its public administration without any drawbacks during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The great transformative innovation of the 21st century has been the advent of “big data” and deep machine learning, i.e. Artificial Intelligence (AI). In the case of the Coronavirus pandemic, AI should not only optimize society's responses to pandemics, but other aspects of our lives as well. Why not? After all, in most cases, politicians are trying to optimize their options: How many roads to build? How much to pay for the national health or pension system? How many wars to fight? How to make the economy greener? It could be argued that these are political decisions in which "quantitative" and concrete data and facts play no role. In reality, these decisions are made by maximizing a cost function that will inevitably be skewed by human factors and interests such as the enrichment of the politician and his constituents (e.g., the “pork barrel” politics).

In the final article of this section, we reflect on the advantage of having algorithms that can remove human biases from decision-making processes. So why not give algorithms the ability to manage and “digest” data, proposing optimal solutions from an objective point of view? One important reservation concerns biases. Biases can also be embedded in the algorithm itself. Hiding them behind AI does not

15 guarantee ethical and egalitarian decision making --ethics have to be built into the algorithm itself. Does it sound like a Catch-22?

Life-styles, Bureaucracy and the Online World.

With the acronym MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) it is intended to mean a social phenomenon originating in Anglo-Saxon societies that promote personal commodification. It is referred to a type of generally heterosexual men connected to their telematic cord and who have chosen a philosophy and lifestyle that avoids romantic relationships and legal commitments of convivence with a partner. In the opening article of this section, we underline that MGTOW selfish behavior has little to do with a social model --such as the European one-- based upon a sharing of policies and services. For an “asocial” life project, no greater citizen commitments are needed in common life and manspreading individuals aspire to manage their relational resources according to their sole benefit. However, as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic, and despite an increased life-style and telecommuting behind closed doors, many of them will have to come to terms with the “life of others”.

The following text puts forward the idea that scientific and research activity is hampered by an inappropriate administrative management. A bureaucratic cobweb has become a real obstacle to optimizing public monies, as illustrated in the case of Spain. In general terms, and in line with the experiences reported and contrasted by other scientists, it can be calculated that researchers spend around 60-70% of their useful working time on administrative “paperwork'”. It can be inferred that for each hour of genuine research work, two others of a bureaucratic

16 and administrative nature are to be carried out. This implies that the salary of the scientist includes 2/3 of a bureaucratic time that does not add any value to research activities. Let the readers ponder. With outdated and ‘traditional’ bureaucracy there is no science --to defeat the Covid-19, for instance--, and without science there is no future.

A return to a “new normality” is anticipated when the long lasting home confinement due to the Covid-19 pandemic is over. As concerns university education, will it be a return to the old face-to-face normality or a reinforcement of the “new” virtual normality? In line with the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, a pioneer in conceptualizing global versus statist analysis and parochial countries, we can only stress the importance of households in shaping socioeconomic relations and as basic units of the future global system. The confinement due to the Covid-19 pandemic has unquestionably rendered evident the communicational optimization of all kinds of educational, economic and entertainment activities.

Is it convenient to promote distance education based on virtual technologies? Our answer is an unequivocal yes. No one seems to assess a more efficient way of teaching to address an audience of more than 300 students with a megaphone from a practically invisible blackboard for those students farthest from the teacher's podium. Confinement has made clear the functionality of distance learning, from primary education to doctoral studies. The pedagogical model of the flipped classroom could allow, the transfer of learning outside the classroom, although it would not eliminate the convenience of face-to- face teaching time to increase the so-called “meaningful learning”; that is, the possibility for a student to associate new information with the one already learnt in order to readjust and improve his knowledge and cognitive skills.

17 The following article returns to the issue of “digitalizing” public civil servants. The Covid-19 crisis has called for the full digitization of our Public Administration to be implemented without further delay. However, not a few public employees are desperately clinging to the desire for things to go back to the way they were before 2020. They fear for its “inevitability” and want to preserve their jobs the same way it used to be. Big mistake. How is it possible that all kinds of banking operations --including investments in financial funds or in European or Spanish stock exchanges-- can be carried out with a self-generated password, and the online system of the Public Administration remains in the Pleistocene of telematic communication?

In her last State of the Union address, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, referred to the Digital Decade. She pointed out that of the 750,000 million euros of the recovery plan, 20% should be directed to actions in the digital field, among which 5G connectivity should be highlighted. Indeed, the primary interest of public employees should reverse their modus operandi of avoiding making something formally wrong into doing something good for citizens’ sake.

And when the Coronavirus ends will we go back to the previous situation? The conviction that the pandemic will pass into the trunk of memories is widespread among people. A trunk of bad memories for its harshness and socioeconomic effects. But will social processes really resume their “normal” course as before 2020? Our prediction is a resounding No. The generation of networks must remain active and to achieve this it is necessary to continue researching in technology and innovation. This will improve virtual connections between the most delocalized and “empty” populations and the hyper densified population urban centers. As paradoxical as it may seem, this will be a benign consequence of the emergence of the malignant Coronavirus.

“How is it Possible that Longer Working Days are the Norm in Times of Robotization than Before the Pandemic?”, is the self-explanatory title of the subsequent article reproduced in this section. In their first year at the investment bank Goldman Sachs, junior analysts work an average of 95 hours a week. That is, almost 14 hours a day. They sleep about 5 hours and there is no more time available for other tasks. They do weekly sessions of 80 hours. In Europe, a 32-hour one is requested in four days. The disparity of these work models is obvious and meaningful.

It is highly counterintuitive to think that with the unstoppable digitization and robotization underway, we will end up working more and with a worse quality of life. Even during the times of the first industrial revolution it is doubted whether the working hours were that long. Now it is unheard of to consider that one hundred hours of work per week can be reached.

In the final text of the third section we reflect on where and how the new Agora can develop in a virtualized world. All things considered, the exigencies of the pandemic ought not to dictate the permanent shape of the future. We keep hearing of the prophecies of the different world that will transpire at the other end of the pandemic. The question is where will we find the Agora in that world-to-be and how will it unfold. Where will we encounter the face of the Others once they reappear from behind their facing mask?

Technological Lords and Industry 4.0.

The fourth section of the book deals with new approaches and developments regarding the economic texture of our societies and the

19 transforming nature of capitalism around the world. As pointed out in the first text of this group of articles, the Covid 19 pandemic crisis has highlighted the emergence of a new social class on the outskirts of the formal labor market. And it is not simply a question of a group of temporary precarious employees expecting to return to the ‘old normality’ of the workplace, as interpreted by some traditional unions of salaried workers. It is a new class which some authors have labelled ‘useless’.

Would we condemn this new useless class to ostracism, extreme poverty, and even their physical disappearance as Coronavirus-induced eugenics has so painfully shown us in nursing homes? In a scenario of neo-feudalism that we are witnessing, the few are determined to control the resources of the new "servants from the glebe'' and of the members of the new useless social class. Large corporations are becoming more and more powerful and, therefore, untouchable. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckeberg are already talking with US Presidents as “equal” peers (imagine their relationships with authorities of small national governments). Faced with such a state of affairs, there is little that "sovereign and independent" states can do individually.

The neo-liberal champions of the unrestricted market consider it anathema that the neo-feudal initiatives which have generated so much business in recent decades are fiscally limited. However, think of those global New Technological Feudal Lords (NTFL) that have returned to their American winter quarters to pay their taxes, taking advantage of President Trump's tax cuts in 2017. After the convulsion caused by the Coronavirus pandemic, the European Social Model suffers the neo feudal onslaught of large global corporate interests that tortuously evade the principles of tax justice so necessary for the maintenance of the Welfare State. This institution is the champion guarantor of

20 citizenship rights in Europe. The alternative is submission offered by the NTFL.

The third article of the section gives thought to the telematic sesion of the NTFL at the Washington Capitol Hill. The bosses of Amazon (Jeff Bezos), Apple (Tim Cook), Google (Sundar Pichai) and Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg) responded to the US parliamentarians to be “accountable” for their business practices. The New York Times itself described the audience as one of ‘withering questions’, meaning how stale and outdated they were in a world that has already changed its epochal era. Note that on July 28, the very day of the parliamentary hearing, latent capital gains for the NTFL amounted to more than 16 billion euros.

Surveillance capitalism, as dealt with in the subsequent article, makes reference to the commodification of personal data accumulated by the NTFL in exponential quantities. The information extracted from the massive and permanent use of smartphones (estimated at 2 billion users worldwide), is used for monetary profit by the NTFL. Through the computation and maximization of new artificial intelligence technologies and efficient digital algorithms and data mining, the traces compiled from users' frantic surfing are monetized. Such information obtained from clicks on our mobile phones and other telematic devices

21 are standardized as a commodity to be bought and sold to advertising companies, which appear seamlessly on the screens of our telematic devices.

Beyond the conceptual discussion about the scope and effects of historical materialism in people's lives, the last two world crises of the 2007-08 financial quasi-liquidity and the Covid-19 pandemic have resulted in “won paradises” by the capitalist class. Whatever the databases are used, it is found that the rich are getting richer and richer. Those crises clearly delimit the borders of those who win and those who lose. Unequivocally, the NTFL win, and a lot, and the nation states also lose a lot. More do the poor and disinherited. But the NTFL do not want to pay more taxes. Notwithstanding, without collecting taxes and avoiding tax evasion, it is difficult to govern for all citizens and to meet their economic and social demands.

The last article of this section ponders the future of crypto money. In particular it reflects on the initiative taken by the Chinese government to start migrating the Renminbi, its legal currency (also known as Yuan in the West), to a cryptocurrency platform. This means that the Chinese currency would not have hardware support and would move into the virtual world of blockchain in a database that can not be changed.

Blockchain technology may encourage some to realize the American libertarian or anarchist dream of living in a society without any government, and where only self-regulation would work --rather, the fittest's law alternative. Now, the great world power on the rise is the one that has decided to free itself from controls. Why? It seems obvious that it is because the cryptocurrency is controlled by the Chinese government in a pyramidal and hierarchical way, as corresponds to the communist capitalist model. If China decides to

22 transfer its economic operations to cryptocurrency, the possible sanctions to try to pressure the Chinese authorities to respect human rights, or limit their levels as the world's absolute greatest polluter, would be innocuous.

The European Social Model should be on the lookout for the events that have accelerated in recent times in the Far East and that, without the slightest shadow of a doubt, frontally question the survival of its emblematic institution, the democratic welfare state.

Individual Agency and Social Life.

If you are not happy, you better die. The construction of a world of our own in continuous vital excitement is alpha and omega for the philosophy of life of many people. The first article of this section analyses people’s “escapism” which in the case of the US is reflected in the rampant use of painkillers and opiates. For not a few frustrated American losers --in a society of “winners and losers”-- the comfort of gorging on medical drugs is enough to get through the days and hours.

As social beings, humans count on others for happiness and well- being. Or is it no longer like this? According to the proclamations of “possessive individualism”, each one is the sole owner of his skills and abilities, and he owes little to his fellow men for this. Economic globalization and the spread of the neoliberal Anglo-North American globalization model reduce the forging of self-sufficient individual identities to a purely matter of taste, orphaned from the common effort of citizens and the protection of public institutions.

The phrase “let them invent” is associated with the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno in the beginning of the 20th century.

23 The phrase depicted the unease of a society unable to adapt to the technological development of the time and to favor a knowledge society. Nowadays, Spain spends just 15% on research of what Amazon does. The article comments upon the recent announcement of quantum supremacy by Google as another example of how the New Technological Feudal Lords (NTFL) invest. The enormous research effort that Amazon makes affects a technological domain that not only can be functionally controlled. It may enable NTFL to gain a position of market dominance and sell its technology monopolistically everywhere. It is not just about inventing, but also about selling, which exemplifies the pilot experience of its supermarket AmazonGo.

The article, ‘The rich are smarter’, makes reference to the news that some famous rich people --again the glamor and fascinating charm of show business-- used tricky shortcuts to get young members of their progeny to enrol --despite their low grades--- in prestigious American universities, such as Yale, Stanford, or Georgetown, all of them highly respectable academic institutions. Their qualifications of access were rigged so that they could sneak in.

Young Americans know well that a college degree from a reputable university is often the springboard to get into the best conditions in a highly competitive job market. For those who are not rich, the money to pay for their university education is very high and they need to go into debt to get it. According to data at the end of 2017, more than four million indebted students had not made the repayment of their payments for at least nine months. The figures were worrying when one takes into account that the total of credits that were in a situation of non-payment amounted to US$140 billion. The danger of importing predatory behavior against meritocracy in the Old Continent is a pattern of behavior that the rich-and-smart “casino capitalism” advocates.

In our progressively robotized society some are surprised by what is considered an irremediable submission of our privacy. In the following article of this section attention is drawn to preserve our privacy in a robotic society. The key technology is the so-called blockchain. The key for preserving the blockchain in the private domain lies in cryptography, that is, in keeping the data encrypted in such a way that those useful parts of the data are used without revealing all our personal characteristics. Or, simply, keeping private those data that we do not want to reveal or share. The European Commission itself has encouraged six initiatives that use blockchain technology to ensure social well-being and underpin our European Social Model.

Much of the debate on encrypted privacy was advanced by the whistleblower, Edward Snowden. The following text of this compilation plays tribute to Snowden, who for some powerful people epitomizes the figure of the “traitor” who should be eliminated without further ado. For many other citizens, the whistleblower now resident next to the Moskva River ought to be credited with international recognition for his courage and bonhomie in warning us that the true “traitors” have been those who claimed to protect us for the sake of public safety, and mischievously took full advantage of invading our privacy without permission.

As stated in the subsequent article, the US Department of Justice had sued Walmart, the retail distribution giant, for its role in the opioid crisis. Many of its 5,000 stores, which have pharmacy outlets, had turned a blind eye to accepting prescriptions for “suspicious” drugs, thus causing hundreds of thousands of deaths because of addiction and overdoses. opiates can not only fulfill the function of alleviating pain but also favor escapism by providing a state of sensitive

25 satisfaction to their users. In the US there is a legion of working poor who, even with their salaries, do not reach to overcome the standards of poverty. The lack of support from social networks or strong family ties has led to a lack of help in extreme situations, such as the lack of salaried work. All of this has contributed to generating situations that lead to irreversible addictions to opiates in order to escape reality.

The last article in this section deals with the use of robotization to avoid malpractices in the implementation of public policies. The scheme of reference is that of supporting income benefits implemented in Spain right after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. If all transactions and interactions between beneficiaries and public administration were done digitally, there would be no picaresque capacity to thwart the citizens’ minimum income scheme. The obligation of vulnerable citizens who receive the minimum income benefit to make their annual income statement would be something simple to comply with (they would also receive their draft as is now the case for common taxpayers, ready to sign and send telematically). Even in a sector as “humanized” as that of personal care and the fight against vulnerability and poverty, it is necessary to robotize everything possible. Time is running short if we want to preserve welfare in our societies.

Recovery and Global Readaptation in a Climate of Uncertainty.

Citizens seem to become increasingly aware of the threat of climate change, especially those corresponding to younger generations. It is hardly surprising that the Old Continent has taken initiatives to contain the inevitable march towards the destruction of our mistreated Gaia.

26 Consider, for example, that in Sweden, the country of Greta Thunberg, the young environmentalist activist, less than 1% of household garbage ends up in dumping landfills thanks to its so-called “energy waste” system, which converts garbage into energy (the so-called Waste-to- Energy centres). Indeed, the younger generations, to whom we wish a long life and better health, are the first who should be mobilized so that they can enjoy a healthy and livable environment in the future.

As pointed out in the following text of the final section of the book, there is little doubt that the main effect of the very rapid spread of the virus is its global nature, as it could have been the spread of the Black Death in the 14th century. Beyond the Coronavirus and the enormous economic and social crisis produced by the pandemic, climate change remains the greatest threat to all living beings on the planet. In reality, global warming could potentially be much more destructive and dangerous than the Covid-19. The crisis puts into question the entire economic model that has pushed us towards a radical alteration of the relations between human societies and their natural environment.

For the first time in its journey since the signing of the Rome Treaties in 1997, the EU agreed to borrow to finance an economic contribution of 390,000 million euros in subsidies and 360,000 million in credits. Therefore, the principle of mutualization of common risks is assumed. The added value of the community decision for the establishment of the Recovery Fund to face the economic damages generated by the Coronavirus pandemic is that of the unanimity of all the countries involved. As normatively put forward in this article, the EU ought to invest in new robotization and artificial intelligence technologies to make up for lost time. The Reactivation Fund agreement should enable new investments without endangering the public health of our societies, or ceasing to support our precarious fellow citizens. Now that we have the financial resources, inaction is to be avoided.

Life expectancy for humans averaged around 35 years until the end of the 19th century. Since then, it has more than doubled, especially in Mediterranean countries where it now reaches almost 85 years. The current global pandemic of Covid-19 has reminded us how exposed we are to infectious diseases. The development of a vaccine against Covid-19 illustrates the possibilities and efficacy of current technologies. Advances in genomic sequencing and DNA and RNA synthesis techniques --which relied on advances in both experimental as well as computational methods-- had allowed a record time in developing several effective vaccine candidates.

In the light of such ongoing and potential developments, our life expectancy could well increase in the foreseeable future. Given the fact that we could live for more than 100 years and robots are going to occupy half or more of the jobs, how can we articulate a productive, social and egalitarian society where “entrepreneurship” and welfare can be fostered to all? As warned in this article, living longer could end up as a self-defeating strategy that may drift into the eugenics of eliminating centenarians in poverty. That may be the aim of policies which seek the discrimination --and even elimination-- of those who are already in weak socio-sanitary positions, as the elderly frail.

The latest non-linear evolution we are experiencing could well cause a contingent change in trend in what we uncritically assume with “human progress”. We seem to be bent on denying the evidence of the merciless destruction of our beloved Gaia. The text on Green Earth ponders how the “excess” of liquidity made possible by the Recovery Fund, together with the measures adopted by the European Central Bank that announced 500 billion euros (and that was to last until March 2022 guaranteeing a total volume of 1,85 trillion euros), should allow the implementation of a new Green New Deal in Europe. This would

28 favor citizens having the right of access in their countries of residence to basic goods such as food, infrastructure, transport or energy. In parallel, the right to salaried work would be preserved and basic income for citizens would be provided, ensuring the provision of quality housing, education and health in a sustainable and environmentally friendly environment.

The last article of this final section deals with imminents dangers. When faced with non-imminent danger, the lack of worrying is perhaps the most telling sign that humans are products of Darwinian evolution. It is common to observe that human beings rarely put the effort to solve situations that do not present a clear and imminent danger. The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that when faced with a real and imminent danger the human race reacts immediately and with immense efficiency. Indeed, the development of the BioNTech vaccine in a few weeks with mRNA technology has been a feat, never seen before in humankind history.

Negationists of all kinds refuse to consider a future without life, or even the disappearance of the only hosting planet of intelligent life in the universe, as we dare to state according to the evidence so far available. The reader will by now wonder whether the “resolution” of the pandemic and other imminent dangers are as sufficiently threatening to humankind as to foresee the end of our existence. In any possible, probable and desirable future scenario the need is no other than to take action.

29 General Remarks.

As it could not be otherwise, there are inevitable thematic overlappings and repetitions in the compiled articles which follow. They can be regarded as expressions of the very central concerns of the authors running through the period of time of the Covid-19 pandemic (2019- 21). The chronological sequence in the dates of the publication of the articles also provide additional information as far as the ‘up and downs’ in development of events of the crisis, and its implications for the daily life of people in Spain, Europe and the World.

Despite that analyses have followed a pattern of scientific accuracy and robust data, we have preferred not to overwhelm the reader with bibliographical references. In fact, these articles included reflections of an opinative and divulgative nature. Wherever appropriate, we have incorporated links to other sources of documentation, such as those provided by Wikipedia, or to other media and social networks from which we have borrowed ideas that we felt they should be accredited. Along the same lines, we have tried to use accessible language for the understanding of the general public. Such an effort, however, should not be understood in any way as a trivialization in the topics under examination.

30 1. Fighting the Maligned Covid-19.

1.1 Coronavirus: Hush, Little Baby, Don't You Cry... “... if it is not cured today, it will heal tomorrow ... “ This is the verse of a little song that used to be recited to children in the face of any minor bruise or injury. Could this be the case of the Coronavirus? Judging by the great social alarm that has been generated in countries like Italy, where schools and universities have been closed, it seems unlikely that people's fear of being infected by the virus will diminish in the short term.

Beyond the symptoms and effects of Covid-19, a general fear of becoming infected and eventually dying irretrievably as a result of it has settled in our ‘advanced’ societies. The ‘homo economicus’ sponsored by the always triumphant neoliberalism has been paralyzed in its expectations of an harmonious existence before the appearance of the unexpected virus. It is as if a world of compulsive happiness had collapsed in anticipation of progress and prosperity. In other words, it is as if we had gone back to past times of plagues and lethal pandemics that were believed to have been overcome for good. As happened with the "Spanish flu."

In reality, the Spanish flu was not Spanish at all, but it was responsible at the end of the First World War for the death of some 50 million people. Some estimates put that figure at nearly 100 million. Are we capable now of internalizing these figures and comparing them with, for example, the 150 deaths by Coronavirus in Italy in recent weeks? It should be remembered that the then "Spanish flu" took the lives of

31 more people than those who died during the war between 1914 and 1919: 10 to 31 million people, between civilians and military.

Is the amazement of the lethal virus outbreak justified by the information provided on its progress and consequences? The Italian newscast bulletins (telegiornali), for instance, devoted most of their broadcasting time to news on the spread of Coronavirus. In our world, that we experience in real time, there do not seem to be other issues with equivalent economic, political and social implications.

The fact that 1,500 people died in traffic accidents in Italy in 2019 is barely mentioned in reports comparing news related to Covid-19. It is simply overlooked. It does not happen the same way with the number of commercials for cars and SUVs (some of them offered to the potential buyer with the easy payment of instalments of ‘only’ 250 euros per month, according to the advertising campaigns). Today he/she who does not drive a 4x4 in the city has not achieved the status of a successful person in our post-industrial society of winners and losers.

The ineffable President Trump (four more years?) launched his latest ''piece of advice’’ stating that in the face of the threat of the Coronavirus one could only pray. If we include the agnostics of all kinds who are in the world, it would be fair to agree that prayer is necessary, but not necessarily worshipped to the providential powers of those who believe in omnipotent gods. It should be enough to pray to epidemiological researchers and those who are determined to find appropriate vaccines to combat the volatile virus.

As a recent New York Times editorial pointed out, the non-war weapons that science provides us are the only ones available to us to confront the ominous challenges that the media and social networks

32 shake before our eyes. Ongoing breaking news programs usually forget with shameless ease the environmental threats, already announced for decades. Such kind of news fits badly with the lifestyle of our hypermodern lives in countries of high consumption, as those in the Western hemisphere. Meanwhile, scientists are still waiting for more support and means that would enable their findings to preserve the health of our societies. And witnessing the undesirable commodification of health, as pointed out by the newspaper The Guardian a few days ago, with the millionaire purchase by US private insurers of the medical records and histories of more than 55 million users of the British National Health Service (NHS).

Scientists and researchers are there to remind us that we cannot forget them, nor their warnings about the excesses and the destruction that global capitalism is frivolously and systematically wreaking on our beloved Gaia. Trump himself reiterated a few days ago his denialist faith in the face of climate change. Are there any readers of these lines who still dare to maintain such an antediluvian posture now?

Yes, our hope and confidence is that those scientists and researchers subject not only to the tortuous academic peer review processes, but also to the unprecedented bureaucracies that interfere in their research activity, could be capable of applying their reasoning, rigour and competence to find remedies to control Covid-19. If it is not cured today, it will be so tomorrow. Because without science there is no future.

Luis Moreno (Público) (Catalunya Press) (08Mar2020)

33 1.2 Aging and Social Eugenics. Our elderly die by the thousands in nursing homes and geriatric centers. In Spain the latest figures point to about 8,500 deaths, of which more than half correspond to the region of Madrid. It is a heartbreaking tragedy, to which the political misery of the political leaders is to be added.

On February 26, a second positive case for Covid-19 in the Madrid region was reported. Since then the number of deaths has increased more than exponentially. However, the regional authorities look the other way (more specifically the central government) by putting into practice once again the diabolical game of ‘blame avoidance'. Remember that the Region of Madrid has full decentralized powers to deal with health matters, something which includes the management of epidemics in the region. To one's own managing incapabilities the accusation is that others are responsible, especially if their political color is different. What seems to matter in the first place is whether you are red or blue, not capable or incapable. Dismaying.

It is of little use to reiterate that Spain’s National Health System is generally assessed as one of the best in the world, despite what biased journalists and academic colleagues of the latest catastrophic vein put forward. Everything serves to pontificate without the required support of empirical evidence. Discouraging.

A main lesson should be learned when seeing the thousands of coffins in the sepulchral outbuildings of the municipal Ice Palace. And it is none other than the great failure of socio-health coordination with which it is intended to stop the ‘massacre’ of our elderly. This is the result of a compartmentalized understanding of public policies, in which each ministry or governmental department entrench itself with

34 its responsibilities and powers in a patrimonial way. My duties are mine and I do not share them with anyone. Misguiding.

It is essential to analyze which coordination mechanisms between the different levels of government and the different public policy sectors are necessary to propose an effective response in situations of crisis such as that caused by the Coronavirus. This coordination has to occur in the three main stages of crisis management:

1. To understand what has happened, what is happening and what can happen next.

2. To make decisions and to apply them in a coordinated way, determining what collective efforts should be made in response to the crisis and ensuring that they are applied consistently.

3. To socially construct the “definition” of the crisis, which, regardless of other implications, and in terms of management, can have important consequences when it comes to ensuring that decisions are intersectorally acceptable; by shortening or lengthening the duration of the crisis; and by reducing or expanding the objectives of the results sought.

The inaction of a perspective such as the one described is an acceptance, even unintentional, of the eugenic theses. Do you remember the theses of those English scientists (eg. Francis Galton) who proposed the improvement of the human race, and who laid the justification for the monstrous practices carried out later on by the Nazis in order to preserve the pure Aryan race?

The origin of modern eugenics (the ancient Spartans already threw those born crippled or malformed down the ravine) is associated with

35 the social Darwinism of the 19th century. In simple words, eugenic proposals are to eliminate those citizens who do not reach physical or mental standards set by the canons of the elites and hegemonic classes of society. Or, simply, of those that already ‘surplus’ and do not contribute anything special to the insatiable rate of capitalist accumulation. In other words, the old ones among others.

Cultural considerations naturally take a backseat. In Italy and Spain citizens take care of elders in a preferential way. Research reminds us once again of such an axiological assumption. Our attention and care to the elderly are highly legitimized and are part of our philosophy of life and our civilization. Elderly are a priority and we want them to live well as long as possible. Eugenicists, on the other hand, want to put an expiration date on their lives. It would be about shortening, in other words, their vital courses: 75, 80, 90 years? What would be the 'reasonable' age for our parents and grandparents to start putting up daisies?

And among us, with an often contrived voluntarism, a change in our Mediterranean welfare famililistism is advocated so that we follow the Scandinavian model. That is to say, to axiomatically exchange our system of values for those of the continental north. Legitimate is to propose it. Is it fair to achieve it through social eugenics, even if it is carried out in a passive manner?

Allow me a personal note. For years I have altruistically collaborated with the Scientific Advisory Committee of the European research program, ‘More Years, Better Lives’ (JPI MYBL). The aims of its scientific program synthetically explains its effort to stimulate the decent life of our elderly and to promote what, somewhat euphemistically, is called ‘active aging’. Many EU countries are involved in this scientific initiative, as well as Canada. The

36 administrative secretariat is based in The Hague, a country with an infamous government that refuses to mutualize Corona Bonds. My resignation from the Committee for moral reasons should be interpreted as a ‘cry’ of rejection towards an understanding of the European Social Model as self-interested and nationalistic. Without solidarity there is no united Europe. All that remains is the Europe of merchants, of tax evasion and the exploitation of the financial advantageous positions of corrupt ‘barbarians’ in the north. Meanwhile, our elders continue to die. Feelings of pain count for little in this world of ruthless bogus capitalism. Painful.

Luis Moreno (Público)(Catalunya Press)(12April2020)

1.3 Pandemic and Blame Avoidance. It is a symmetric pandemic. It has affected the whole world, without differences on the five continents. Naturally, its effects have been devastating in those communities of precarious and vulnerable citizens, and in people without basic access to public health systems and in need of obtaining material resources for their survival. In the case of Europe, where its effects were forcefully manifested after the identification of Covid-19 in China, the situation has tempered until the present 'second wave' which has arrived and has caught with the foot changed government systems and governance, some of which are asymmetric, centralized or decentralized.

In the two core countries of the EU (France and Germany), which are models of centralist Jacobinism and cooperative federalism, the incidence in the numbers of the infected and the dead varies, although the supposed greater Germanic efficiency has not prevented the deceased from reaching almost ten thousand (in Spain they are triple

37 that number, to date). The deceased are too many, but comparatively few, if we take into account the group that heads the list of countries with the highest lethality adjusted with the demographic corrector (United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Sweden and France). Belgium ranks first with a great difference compared to other European countries.

Incidentally, the symmetry of the pandemic is somehow exemplified in the case of centralized Sweden. With an approach of certain self- sufficiency, his government applied the thesis of ‘herd immunity’ when the pandemic broke out at the beginning of the year. That is, in simple words, the plan of doing nothing. Swedes would already be immunized ‘naturally’ as if it were another seasonal flu. You just had to let time pass for its excellent public health system to take care of serious cases, while the common people would individually avoid the lethality of the virus. Now Sweden is one of the countries where the number of deceased has grown the most proportionally to others in recent months.

Is the government and governance system so important in the fight against the Coronavirus? The answer is transversal and depends more on the effectiveness and efficiency of the administrations, be they unitary or compound. Comparative evidence certifies this without palliative. There are federations, like the USA or Brazil, in which the situation has dramatically worsened. Although at the sub-state level there are examples of ‘good practices’, as is the case in the densified city of New York, where Governor Andrew Cuomo promoted effective measures. But he has already warned that he could order the closure of bars and restaurants in the Big Apple again if compliance with the strict regulations in operation does not improve.

In decentralized countries with multilevel governance, such as Spain, the management of the pandemic and its effects on public institutions,

38 has become a matter of political confrontation. And such a confrontation illustrates very well the so-called ‘blame avoidance’ and ‘credit claiming’ policies in the implementation of public policies at the various state, sub-state and local levels. Both are analytical tools that serve to explain, with a high degree of plausibility, what is now facing the central government and the regions (Autonomous Communities), especially in terms of avoiding blame.

Politicians are motivated primarily by their desire to avoid blame for what they understand to be unpopular measures, rather than taking initiatives that could be proactive and effective in fighting the pandemic. Naturally, the ravages of the virus are a matter beyond the comprehensive control of the administrations involved. But the 'negativity' of blame avoidance practices prevents innovative action by politicians. In short, it is about passing the 'buck' of the tragedy caused by Covid-19 to the other administrations. An example of such a procedure is in the rejection of the majority of the Spanish regions to the offer of the central government to support the eventual establishment of the state of alarm in their own territory, if they would request it to be implemented accordingly. They refuse to appear before their voters as responsible for the drastic adjustments that such measures would require, despite the fact that some have seen the number of infections rise stratospherically in recent days.

Such practices go in the opposite direction to the fundamental principles of Europeanization concerning subsidiarization and democratic accountability. Some observers argue that the payoff - even electoral - for innovation outweighs the advantages of the uniform characteristic of those vertical models of governance by ‘command- and-command’. That is, the greater the need for innovation - for a new problem or solution - the greater the logic for this function to be assumed by a sub-state government. But, in reality, many of the

39 regional political authorities follow the centralized guidelines indicated by their own party hierarchies. Thus, they go for the practices of standardized party indications in order not to be seen as "guilty" of their possible risky decisions.

As long as the online intergovernmental conferences were operational during the long period of the state of alarm, an effective performance was achieved as a whole. But let's not forget that when de-escalation was implemented in gradual phases, some Autonomous Communities with the highest population weight went from the penultimate to the last phase in a single day (!). They decided in that way, believing that everything had passed, that the "old’ normality was something of the past. Now they do not seem to want to risk being "blamed" for a new deadly wave in their territories. In such a scenario, the central government could return to the approval in Parliament of a new state of alarm for all of Spain and, in so doing, derive the perception of blame for the new deaths to the central coalition government.

In such a situation, governments - and citizens as a whole - sigh for the arrival of the “deus ex machina” vaccine, the development of which is to be expected and final. In the meantime, politicians continue to try to avoid the blame. Maybe they think that life is not haphazard by nature…

Luis Moreno (Público)(Catalunya Press)(28August2020)

1.4 Coronavirus, Confinement or Coffin? The title of this article refers to two paronyms (coffin, or “ataúd” and “confinamiento”, both in Spanish). Both sound similar and have rhetorical charge which hardly expresses a real dilemma: both speak

40 for themselves. Only the ‘enlightened’ negationists argue that the relaxation of the confinement and other mobility restrictions have not been - and are not - the main cause for the increase in lethality in social community transmission in this second wave of the Coronavirus. The increase in deaths has been unappealable not only in Spain, and in particular in the region of Madrid, but in all EU countries (the United Kingdom included, even if it is a member which so far is not official outside the EU). Confinement in nursing homes has in many cases been devastating. Its deleterious effects have increased the number of deaths exponentially. Between March and August 2020, half of the deaths in Spain with Covid-19, or compatible symptoms, have occurred in these centers. The POSEB Research Group ('Social Policies and Welfare State') of the CSIC has carried out a study within the framework of the international McCovid-19 project by conducting 25 in-depth interviews with heads of nursing homes (directors, managers and medical directors) in different Autonomous Communities, as well as those responsible for the management of social services and health in the regional and central administrations. Dozens of documents have been reviewed that have highlighted the difficulties of managing the pandemic faced by the organizational and institutional managers of the nursing homes for the elderly in Spain (access to the full 113-page report here).

All seems to indicate that, if there had been measures to prevent the entry of the virus and to control infections in elederly residences, the number of deaths in Spain could have been notably lower. The POSEB study has identified Covid-19 management difficulties faced by the organizational and institutional managers of residences for the Spanish elderly between January and August 2020.

41 It has been repeatedly argued that Covid-19 is a 'disease of the elderly'. For the younger cohorts of our society it was even thought that the effects did not affect them in the same way and, therefore, the elderly who were in the residences had to stay there at the mercy of their fate and the care of a staff that was overwhelmed by the lack of means and the confusion of the various protocols to be implemented. In some residences, posters such as: "We are alive, do not forget us" were put up on the facades.

There have been three elements that have made the elderly particularly vulnerable to Covid-19: their advanced age, the frequent presence of concomitant diseases and their generally limited autonomy, something which implies the need for daily human contact to be cared for. Out of these elderly people, more than three hundred thousand do not have an alternative home: the Residence is their home. These centers are an essential service and their care during an epidemic should be a priority for the whole of society.

Intersectoral coordination between health and social services has been the great pending issue to confront in a pandemic like the one we are still suffering, waiting for the “miraculous” vaccine. A common purpose of action between ministries and between regional councils, and between residences and health centers, should have been considered before the start of the epidemic. The lack of coordination between the two health and social sectors has been extremely serious, as has been repeatedly noted.

In Spain, 73% of citizens believe that the crisis in residences has been poorly managed (according to a survey of the POSEB study, with 7,175 cases, carried out between the end of August and mid-September 2020). Responsibility for the management of residences is clearly distributed: 45% of citizens believe that the main responsible for

42 management are the Autonomous Communities, 24% think it is the central government and 28% both levels of government. However, the politicization of the crisis by multi-level governments makes citizens doubt how seriously they should comply with public health measures. It is necessary to develop coordination structures between the health system and the social services system and avoid the "medicalization" of residences, exploring alternatively "sanitarization". The excessive mediatization of the data with the profusion of surveys in the media, often in search of the most striking or impressive headline, should also be avoided.

Beyond the shortcomings of management and effectiveness in institutional coordination, it is unavoidable to wonder if the elderly are a priority generation in familistic societies like the Spanish one. From the eugenicist perspective, it is beginning to be considered what would be the limit of a “reasonable expectation” of life, beyond which society as a whole would have fulfilled its responsibility towards the elderly. The idea of "the elderly first", as they appear in some means of transport that take our elderly to their day centers, seems to lose consensus. Until now our care and attention to the Third Age has been highly legitimized as part of our philosophy of life and our civilizing values. For the eugenic alternative, it would be about smoothing the vital courses of the elderly: 75, 80, 90 years? What would be the 'reasonable' age for our parents and grandparents to put up daisies?

Luis Moreno (Público)(Catalunya Press)(14Oct2020)

43 1.5 Covid-19 Contagions and Random: Let us Pay More Attention to the Models Provided by Physics.

Statistics are usually explained with the example of chickens: if one person eats two chickens and another none, statistics say that they have eaten one chicken each. Bad example. Statistics is not that. After all, in the example above one person could have eaten two chickens and the other none. The first example is deterministic, but statistics are somewhat different: it describes processes that occur with a stochastic or random factor.

A more appropriate example would be the following: imagine that two people decide to eat the only chicken they have by rolling a dice, at random. Whoever got the number greater than 4 would eat the disputed poultry. As a consequence, it would be trivial to mathematically calculate the odds for each diner to eat the chicken. Or, simply, that one of them would have eaten it after having rolled the dice a number “n” times.

Covid-19 transmission is a complex, non-linear, stochastic phenomenon with a strong clustering component. Trying to describe its development in deterministic or fixed figures would be in vain and even counterproductive. Scientists have developed stochastic models for decades to describe the contagion process. The models are statistical because contagion is a probability and not a deterministic factor.

The reader can ponder on the specific case of Covid-19. It is now known that contagion depends especially on so-called supercontagators, individuals and events capable of infecting a very

44 high number of people, even dozens. Part of the explanation is that contagion is dependent on lung strength, environmental conditions, and proximity. This is an initial stochastic factor. But the problems in describing the contagion phenomenon do not end there. The next contagion after the first depends on other variables, non-linear as in the first case, with respect to the mobility of the subject, physical proximity, environmental conditions (moving in a ventilated place or not) that generate new difficult situations. model.

We believe that the correct way to model the contagion phenomenon is to use the scientific tools provided by statistical non-linear physics. In the case of these efforts alluded to here, we advised readers to visit the website of our colleague Niayesh Afshordi. There he rigorously describes a mathematical model --neither the only nor, perhaps, the best-- of how the pandemic should be modeled.

One of the most interesting results of this model is the "drift" effect. This means that, due to the non-linearity of the system, “points of attraction” of unexpected phenomena occur which are not to be expected in a purely linear system. An interesting fact is to see how counties in the United States in which the transmission and expansion of pandemic has been very high have a very large drift.

There are useful mathematical models to describe this process. These are the collision models, advanced by physicist Ludwig Boltzman about 150 years ago. It is these same models that Allied military intelligence used to determine how to bombard more efficiently the beaches of Normandy in such a way that Allied soldiers were to enjoy greater protection after landing on the beaches. Bombing the beach without rhyme or reason, in a deterministic way, would have been counterproductive.

45 1.5.1 Neural Networks and Quantum Computers

In such complex processes we have discovered that the most useful tool to model and explore them is offered by artificial intelligence. Specifically, the study of deep neural networks. Since these are statistical by construction, they can be used to model the process in a more efficient way. Not only that: coupled with future quantum computers, which can explore many situations at once, they could be crucial in modeling future pandemics and helping governments decide how to use resources (which will always be finite) or optimize confinements.

At the time of writing, such confinements appear to be the most effective linear alternatives to contain the spread of the pandemic. We must also pay more attention to the stochastic factor when it comes to causality in community human interactions. There are many unforeseen scenarios where the aggressive and contagious coronavirus acts. The ways in which it affects its mode of manifestation and spread are uncertain.

Few epidemiologists now question that the decay effect between the moments of contagion and its subsequent manifestation can be established more or less linearly (summer holidays, greater interpersonal socialization and subsequent emergence of asymptomatic infections). Less is known about what the elements are of haphazard contact between people who have contributed to accelerate or halt untimely the lethal increase of the current second wave.

Let's pay more attention to scientists who have been modeling complex processes for centuries.

46 (Raul Jimenez & Luis Moreno) (The Conversation)(25Nov2020)

1.6 Patents of Life and Death. A year ago, southern Europeans, which were hit hardest by Covid-19, were confined in households (Italy, Spain). Citizens living in nursing homes died in the ensuing months in the thousands. In many cases they did so in the most ruthless solitude and in a statistically disproportionate way with respect to other age groups (see, among others, the report prepared in the international McCovid-19 project).

It is perplexing that the two representative countries of familistic welfare have mistreated their elderly mercilessly. It has happened precisely in societies that have repeatedly placed the family as the most important institution in their lives. In Europe as a whole, the demographic group that generates the majority consensus for social care is precisely that corresponding to the elderly.

As a consequence of the dilemma between the health of the elderly and the encouragement of economic activity, and according to eugenic approaches formulated explicitly or implicitly by some political representatives, those who have suffered an "excess" of deaths have been the elderly. Does any reader know of any citizen who has starved to death due to a lack of groceries in the last year?

Until now our care and attention with regard to the Third Age has been highly legitimized as part of our philosophy of life and our values of civilization. Will it be like this again when the vaccine --the only foreseeable final solution to end the pandemic-- becomes widespread provided to a majority of citizens? This would very much depend on

47 overcoming the difficulties regarding the serious problem that the EU faces due to the lack of vaccines.

The issue of patents for pharmaceutical companies to produce vaccines has a perspective of legal legitimacy that is little questioned. In the case at hand, its moral legitimacy is much more questionable. According to my view, public health should take precedence over any other consideration in this devastating and cross-cutting global health emergency crisis of Covid-19.

Despite its various characteristics and implications, the case of the AIDS / HIV (AIDS) epidemic in the Republic of South Africa illustrates the extent to which a health emergency situation could 'reconcile' the profitability interests of Big Pharma with public health. Remember that between 2000 and 2005, 330,000 people died in South Africa as a result of the human immunodeficiency virus epidemic. At the end of 2001 the United Nations reported that more than 25 million people in the world were victims of AIDS / HIV, and that in 2000 2.4 million had died.

The cost of retroviral treatment varies enormously depending on the country of residence of the patient. In the US, the drug ibalizumab- uiyk (Trogarzo), for example, can be received as a monthly injection that costs US$ 9,000. Some medicines cost less than others, naturally. And the generic ones much less.

Thanks to popular pressure, the pharmaceutical industries had to bow to South African demands, which had resorted to importing cheaper anti-AIDS drugs. Gone were the mind-boggling anti-denial allegations of President Mbeki, much in the vein of today's anti-vaccine apostles and negationists.

48 In 1998, the almost 40 pharmaceutical companies that had denounced South Africa agreed that the government would buy drugs marketed at the cheapest price available in any country in the world, and at the same time they facilitated the diffusion of generics. During the three years that the tenacious legal fight lasted, the argument of the pharmaceutical companies was that the lack of compliance for patents and international legal regulations put their businesses at risk, in which so much investment had been made (as would now be the argument regarding to Covid-19).

According to the activists who fought in such a long legal battle, the aspect that helped the most in their campaigns was related to the ‘bad publicity’ that it generated in the image of greed displayed by pharmaceutical companies. These appeared as refractory to the objective of keeping people healthy. Despite the later 'cheaper' availability of anti-AIDS drugs, the prevalence rate for the entire South African population aged 15-49 years was 19% in 2018, remaining the highest in the world.

In contrast, consider that sales of Viagra from Pfizer, one of the producers of the Covid-19 vaccine, reached US $ 2 billion in sales in 2012. Subsequently, sales fell substantially as a result of the loss of the patent. However, in 2019 sales reached US$ 500 million.

Another of the classic arguments used by the pharmaceutical industry to impose its prices in a ‘free’ market is related to the fair return of their investments, many of them in human capital and high-cost research that are not always recoverable. It is true that patents provide a ‘profitability cushion’ that compensates for previous disbursements that are not always generalizable to other products with little or no commercialization. But in our Old Continent, and according to the assumptions of our European Social Model, a good part of the most

49 expensive investment expenses correspond to the payment of training and salaries of researchers. And this is mainly in charge of the member states and EU’s all-embracing research programmes. In fact, the research that has led to the antiviral patent has been financed mainly with public money.

An illustrative example is provided by the case of a scientific researcher who has dedicated 40 years of his scientific activity to the CSIC (Spanish National Research Council), the first research body in Spain and the seventh world public research institution. During this period he will have received --roughly and after applying the cost of living / inflation corrector to make the figure more understandable at today's current prices-- around 2.5 million euros. Are these monies included in the profit and loss accounts of the pharmaceutical companies that hire researchers already trained in the public sector with a more ‘competitive’ salary?

For Mario Draghi, current president of the Italian council of ministers, who is being reviewed in an inquisitorial manner due to his past as a banker (“whatever it takes”, remember?), his executive decision regarding the embargo of the doses produced by AstraZeneca in Italy is exemplary. It turns out that the English parent company that nourishes the massive vaccination campaign in the United Kingdom, intended to ‘export’ to Australia doses made in its Italian production centre. Meanwhile, EU countries were facing supply difficulties to meet the goal of achieving ‘herd immunity’ by summer. Draghi’s action shows commendable political clairvoyance and dignity.

Patents are for life as well as for death, precisely in a world region like the EU that pays its price in ‘gold’ for vaccine doses. Other areas of the planet cannot afford these prices, or if they do --which they are doing-- it is at the cost of their own economic development. Can the

50 common good of our societies condition unlimited capitalist growth and, in our case, the unbridled greed of the pharmaceutical industries behind the shield of patents?

Luis Moreno (Público)(Catalunya Press)(Press Digital)(14Mar2021)

51 2. Digitalization, Artificial Intelligence, Robotization.

2.1 Banking Robotization.

News has shaken the media due to the magnitude of its figures: Banco de Santander, the first private bank in Spain and one of the largest in Europe, has proposed to the trade unions an ERE (employment regulation scheme) with layoffs of 3,713 of its workers. This would lead to the closure of one in four of its offices in Spain. At the same time, Caixabank (now merged with Bankia and number one in the bank ranking according to active assets) continues with the development of its remote banking system (InTouch) which uses “Big data” tools on a massive scale.

Other than circumstantial reasons, as has happened with the recent acquisition of Banco Popular, which involved the dismissal of 1,100 employees of the former bank now integrated in Banco Santander, the justification for such job cuts was digitalization. The authors of this article use the robotization term with reference to the ongoing processes of industrialization 4.0 technology. This entails a productivity revolution driven by the spread of the internet and automation, which intensifies as artificial intelligence (AI) encourages production maximization. Eventually, the processes in place are already making redundant the need for much of the salaried employment, mainly regarding those labor routine tasks that are replaceable by robots. The episode of Santander's proposal does nothing but to test a future just around the corner.

52 More than ten years have passed since the great recession of 2008 broke out. Since then, bank branches in Spain have been reduced by 43%. Currently there are about 26,000 bank branches, but their number is inexorably decreasing. While the perplexity of citizens and social agents increases, one might wonder, however, why many bank branches remain still open. From the viewpoint of a strict efficiency criteria, the activities such traditional branches perform are redundant and anachronistic.

In the US, more than 4,400 bank branches closed between 2017 and 2020 --a 5.1% drop from 85,993 to 81,586. In Spain the rate of closure is about 2,000 a year, but the population is seven times lower than the US. In 2018, there were approximately 75,000 bank branches in the North-American country. It is a factor 3 less than Spain for a population seven times higher and an area almost 20 times larger than that of Spain.

Certainly, the phenomenon of the acceleration in the process of closing down bank branches coincides with the effects caused by the Great Recession. But it is certainly the process of massive robotization which has favored the gradual disappearance of routine jobs whose functions can now be ‘comfortably’ carried out using our computers and smartphones --at a cost of user time, needles to say. The nature of the banking system operations is suitable for a full robotization of procedures and transactions. All this becomes possible with the development of new tools of predictive algorithms based on the so-called “machine learning”, along with the ever growing capacity calculation of new computers and together with the arrival of the network 5G (with data transmission speeds at a factor 20 times faster than the standard current 4G of our smartphones) . Providing 5G fiber optic speeds in our mobiles, and virtually anywhere in the world, makes the entire physical infrastructure of

53 fiber optics irrelevant. The Internet is to become ubiquitous anywhere on our planet.

There are already virtual banks with a minimal presence of physical offices for the attention of the public. In the US, for example, the financial bank e*trade has just 30 “boutique” branches, where customers can have a coffee or a snack while interacting with an expert regarding a transaction or the management of a financial activity. It is true, however, that the 50 largest banks worldwide remain with an important physical presence, with the exception of ING, which pioneered telematic transactions early on.

An illustrative telematic case is provided by that of the pension fund and investment bank TIAA, which is the pension fund for teachers in the US and whose operation is virtual. Some telephone operators are available to deal with “rare” queries, but most of the standard operations can be carried out using its website.

When it comes to day-to-day disbursements, many people already make all payments with their mobile phones or through their smart watches. In Europe, Scandinavian countries are already virtually 'cashless'. In these Nordic countries, less than 10% of monetary transactions are made with physical money. The London Underground is another example where no other means of payment is required other than the mobile phone itself.

Given the technological maelstrom of payment applications and money transactions, it is not difficult to foresee that banks, as we have known them until now, will disappear in the not-too-distant future and banking will be an economic sector fully robotized. We witness an anticipatory scenario on how robotization will shape our jobs and daily life..

In front of our eyes we can see the development of what robotization of economic activities will bring about to our societies. If the banking sector were to be an example to follow, then we will certainly see an almost absolute robotization of all routine tasks. There will be few job opportunities for non-highly skilled labor. The number of workers associated with this sector, reduced to a number of highly specialized computer scientists and to high-level economic analysts will continue with its primary aim of benefit maximization. As a final note, it should be remembered that robots do not get sick and that, despite the enormous initial financial outlay involved in robotizing activities, the medium-term returns are to be enormous. Attention ought to be paid to the strategies of the technology giants (Google is a licensed bank in Ireland to operate as a bank in Europe) when they fully operate in this sector.

Raul Jimenez & Luis Moreno (PressDigital)(Catalunya Press)(Galicia Press)(17May2019)

55 2.2 Quantum Supremacy of the Future.

A recent announcement by Google has gone almost unnoticed by the media, social networks and the general people. The internet giant claims to have achieved quantum supremacy, something that would imply precisely quantum social effects in our next future just to come around the corner. The revolution that a computer of these characteristics would bring about is related to the performance of an enormous number of operations to sort out problems that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the search for patterns cannot carry out (yet) at the present time. If what Google claims is true, the consequences would certainly be crucial, as pointed out in a recent article by John Preskill, the renowned Caltech physicist who coined the term quantum supremacy. However, there has been a sudden statement from the computer giant IBM denying such a technological conquest.

Quantum computing was developed in the late 1980s aiming at articulating a new paradigm to simulate quantum systems. A classical computer is very inefficient when calculating these systems, and it was thought that a new Turing machine could be developed; that is, a computer, but quantum. In quantum mechanics, the states of the bits can be both superimposed and entangled and, therefore, instead of having 1 or 0, all possible intermediate states are available. A single processor of this type is as if it had millions (formally infinite) processors working in parallel.

However, it should also be considered that the quantum computer is faster than the classical one only in certain situations and for certain problems. The advantage is that much more efficient algorithms can be designed for the former. As the experts say: all the profit is in the algorithm.

The other consideration to take into account is that building it is very, very difficult, and it is not evident that they can be manufactured on a very large scale, although a revolution could occur with the new topological insulators.

Quantum supremacy would mean that a computer is capable of performing more operations per second than any classical model, no matter how gigantic it might be and even if it had all the time in the world to perform endless calculations. Even the fastest one currently in operation ('Summit', at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA) would be an abacus compared to the computer that Google claims to have developed. This would reach 53 qbits, which contrasts with the Spanish efforts to build one of about 1-3 qbits. In other words, it is like contrasting a coach wagon with a Ferrari Testarossa, if we can compare both. Should the Spanish Ministry of Science seriously consider whether the efforts to be made in our country are worth it to catch up with the enormous advantage of other countries, China included? We do not suggest giving up the effort, but rather the opposite. More than ever, a policy is needed to develop quantum technologies and artificial intelligence systems. We are already behind an almost insurmountable delay and if it is not invested now, we would simply become clients of others.

However, Google's announcement is a half-truth. Exaggerations are often infiltrated into this king of news for implicit mercantile purposes. What Google has apparently achieved is a quantum supremacy in solving very specific problems that does not extend to larger-scale problems. Consider scaling a quantum computer to more qbits is an extremely complex matter from a technological point of view; But it is also true that it does not seem impossible to develop them so that the scaling is large and that they can solve problems of the real world and

57 of our social future. This directly affects matters that concern daily life, such as 'ransomware' or data hijacking.

In the world we live in, our digital security depends on the protocol RSA (cryptosystem), which was developed in the late 1970s. In detail, the algorithm is complex and uses elegant mathematical theorems to get a secure key. But, in essence, the only thing the algorithm does is dividing into its two factors any number that is a product of two prime numbers. Trying to do so is exponentially difficult for a classic computer. It seems trivial to know that the number 15 is divisible by 5 and 3. But try to divide by its factors 556087729429485651547102109239 and wait for a “miracle”. Without the help of a computer it is an impossible mission.

It turns out that classical computers are more and more powerful and can find the two factors of increasingly large prime numbers. The American intelligence agency NSA, in which the whistleblower Edward Snowden was employed, has computers capable of dividing prime numbers of 124 digits (expressed in binary notation). And that is why no public application is allowed to do it with larger numbers, since the US Government reserves the right, for security reasons, to decrypt any phone or password in the event of a threat to public security.

When quantum computers come into play, the factors of the prime numbers can be found. All of this is achievable with monstrous capacity and efficiency, if that may be allowed for expression. For these teams, the problem of solving the factorization of prime numbers is not exponential, but linear. Consequently, if someone had a computer capable of quantum supremacy, the authority of governments would disappear ipso facto, unless they were able to effectively stop such

58 “hackers” equipped with these weapons of “mass destruction” in their homes.

At current, security in the digital age depends on the fact that computers are NOT capable of factoring prime numbers. If someone had a computer capable of doing so, then it would be a trivial thing to be able to enter, for example, the operational computer centers of banks, and being able to disable the encrypted keys that until now guaranteed security and peace of mind to users.

Without using catastrophic or science fiction parallels, the social effects of quantum supremacy can be encapsulated in the practical illustration just outlined: what would happen, for example, with the spurious and malicious use of these computers with respect to the security of our bank accounts? It would be trivial for any possessor of this technology to manipulate all banking transactions. For example, every time the bank charged the electricity bill, the hacker could execute a command to double the amount and to forward the extra money to their cryptocurrency account. Or it could even be smarter so as to charge us an opaque commission of 50 cents on each transaction we make that would go unnoticed. Who looks in detail at the exact amount of our electricity bill? Such kind of misuses could be disastrous for the whole of society. The hacker could simply manipulate the electricity supply of an entire country, causing blackouts at will or increasing their intensity and provoking blazes. As simple as that…

For all the above said situations, a necessary regulation is more than evident to be implemented in order to avoid the potential perverse effects of this latest technological development. Both the US Government (with a truly world-class statesman at the helm) and the EU institutions themselves should effectively regulate the use of quantum computers to avoid their use without limitations, in the same

59 way as has been done with the emission of aerosols to close the ozone hole or with the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Perhaps an alternative would be to “break” the internet network into small domains or cells that prevent the simultaneous and generalized transmission of crypto-keys by hackers. It may, however, be a naive solution given the interconnectivity of the telematics world. The most reasonable solution is for governments to efficiently regulate the use of quantum computers. Just as they can be malignant, they can also be highly beneficial. Its application to artificial intelligence, and especially to neural networks, could be crucial to solve pressing problems for humanity and thus advance the well-being of our societies.

Raul Jimenez & Luis Moreno (Agenda Pública)(25Oct2019)

2.3 Coronavirus, Robotize as Much as You Can.

And what does chess have to do with the Coronavirus ...? There is a scientific nexus of knowledge that Leontxo García, a great expert in chess art, has opportunely highlighted on the applicability of knowledge to what could be the infinity of a computer. And with that infinity, help is feasible to find vaccine solutions and therapies to combat the Covid-19, whose global impact has changed our world.

Who could deny living these days with a more robotized world and with a minimum income for all citizens? Economic production would

60 continue to function as before the viral crisis and with the money in the form of TTR (tax-the-robot), that is, with the resources from the payment of taxes of the robots, we would proceed to help sustain the welfare provided by our European social model. And, incidentally, the speculative global capitals will pay for their transactions, and not as happened after the Great Recession of 2007-08, as a result of which global inequalities between rich and poor increased. The reason for this was that with the public monies provided to large corporations, instead of investing in their companies and trickle-down the rescue money to the poorest, they dedicated themselves to buying shares of the same companies, increasing their valuation thus making shareholders even richer. This is what has happened, for example, with airlines, which now complain about not having ‘cash money’, when a few years ago they had historical surpluses that they used to invest in buying their own shares. This was explained in a recent New York Times editorial. Not for nothing has the Democratic controlled Congress stopped short of Trump's rescue plan worth $ 1.5 trillion (billions of billions). They were going to end up in more of the same. In other words, more enriched corporations at the expense of the citizens of the subordinate classes, thus increasing inequality.

There are evil alternatives, as thinkers like Branko Malinovic have reminded us. Let's make Covid-19 inevitably spread across the planet and let our elders go through the morgue smoothing out what some consider to be useless demographics with no future. In other words, a war, not necessarily warlike, but a relaxation of our health standards. Other non-destructive future scenarios should respect the intrinsic nature of the human being and his social dignity.

Meanwhile quantum computers would already be working frantically to discover the molecular structure of the new virus (what in technical jargon is known as folding). These computers are "supreme" (quantum supremacy) to carry out operations in parallel, looking for patterns in

61 a system that is what is needed to develop a vaccine or antiviral. It aims at quantifying how the virus molecule has been "folded”. From the point of view of social organization, it would also help --and not a little-- if the (robotic) drones that distribute tests and therapies diligently distribute the shipments established by our health systems to the places of residence, avoiding collapses. lethal in hospitals and emergency care centers. Fortunately, many schools have taken the opportunity to establish, in a simple and routine way, network connections that allow the continuity of classes online for students at home.What just succinctly described does not belong to an Orwellian fictional world, or to a utopian dystopia of a indeterminate future. It is a possible, probable and desirable context. Much of what is stated is perfectly feasible today.

Covid-19 has caught the world off its feet. No one expected the infection to turn malevolently lethal and worldwide in such a short space of time. Previous cases such as the Ebola virus or SARS had been contained with "traditional" measures of isolation from the main focus. It is true that the fact in those cases has helped that the virus was very aggressive and therefore quickly killed its carrier, in such a way that the virus could not be transmitted to more than one person, the so-called exponential growth. Covid-19 seems to be "smart" since it takes about 3-4 weeks to kill its carrier, and not always, so it can be transmitted to many other healthy people, more than two with which exponential growth occurs. . In the cases of Ebola and SARS, although fear increased, for example to travel, no one stopped doing it overnight. With Covid-19 everything has been different. From the first warnings in early January from Wuhan until today, just two months have passed and transport has been paralyzed globally. And economic activity as well. Even the US has had to stop the productive machinery and demand the confinement of its citizens (shelter-in-place). The scenes of Manhattan with all its shops closed are more like a futuristic Hollywood movie based on a novel by the clairvoyant Philip K. Dick.

62 None of this would be necessary if we had properly used the current technology at our disposal. The clearest example is South Korea. As Emilio Muñoz (ex-president of the CSIC, Spanish National Research Council) indicated, there the pandemic has been contained with state- of-the-art means, which in the end resulted in massive amounts of information and the will of citizens to totally lose their privacy (something that Edward Snowden has reminded us inescapably). Through massive analysis to find out who was contaminated and who was not; and through mandatory geolocation through mobile phones, South Korea has avoided entirely stopping its economic production by only restricting the mobility and life of those infected. The technology could have been used in Wuhan, something which was not done immediately.

Let your readers think of a reality that already exists. When a patient sees the doctor, all his data is recorded in a central medical record. Such data is constantly being analyzed by quantum computers looking for infection patterns. As soon as it is detected, the focus is located and the patients are isolated at the same time that the search for the vaccine is investigated. This carries a counterpoint, of course. It means in simple words that we lose our privacy. The alternative, as Covid-19 has shown, is to be locked up at home for months with a shattered economy.

It is difficult to fail to sufficiently honor the extraordinary figure of Alan Turing and highlight his pioneering research that has led us to develop today's computerized and 'robotic' world. Without them, society as we know it would not be as it is now, and as it will be more so in the immediate future. If any reader has the opportunity to do so in these days of confinement, we recommend that they watch the first episode of the "Connections" series by British popularizer James Burke (it can be found for free at the link https://archive.org/details/

63 ConnectionsByJamesBurke). It describes the event of the blackout that paralyzed New York City in the 1960s.

The most interesting thing about Alan Turing's life, in the moments in which we live, is that his development of the computer was crucial to winning the war against the United States. fascisms that deny human dignity. The war, in large part, was won by the Allies from the Bletchley Park laboratories where Alan Turing and his group managed, using technology, to decipher the messages encrypted by the Nazis in the Enigma machines. And it is that science and technology are very useful for the existence of human beings on the Earth plant.

The new revolution is already happening, and it will develop quantum computing. This owes its origin to many pioneers (origins of quantum computing) and thanks to these ideas, at the beginning of pure abstract thinking and without any obvious application, they are the ones that can allow us to save ourselves from the next pandemic without losing our parents and grandparents. and without having to be home for months at a time.

In this chess game against Covid-19, countries such as Italy and Spain with their particular cultural and civilizational forms have had to take very drastic forms of struggle that, we hope and wish, will bear fruit, although in a slow and painful way. There is no other. The strategy of his chess games against the Coronavirus has been the recourse to the proverbial Ruy López, or Spanish opening, which is a determined and proactive start of the game. The evil king of the virus remains castled and removed from our positions. With the help of science and technology we can check… mate.

Raul Jimenez & Luis Moreno (Público)(CatalunyaPress)(25March2020)

64 2.4 Indeed, Artificial Intelligence Could Have Stopped Covid-19.

Influencers are virtual people (entelechies in some cases) who claim to have credibility on specific topics, and on which they claim to know a lot. Their 'advice' shapes the opinions of his followers and believers. The greater the number of followers on their twitter accounts, the greater notoriety in the networks and, supposedly, in our telematic social life. As a result, they exert a great influence in shaping what people think. Supposedly.

Some uninhibited ‘influencers’ have even gone as far as to assert that artificial intelligence (AI) had promised so much, but it has not served to stop Covid-19. Ergo, AI is a scam and a hoax. As a matter of fact it is quite the opposite: if we had used artificial intelligence we would have stopped the pandemic. No question about it. The key for achieving such an aim would have been the efficient use of semantic language recognition in massive analyses of communications between patients and physicians.

Interpreting written and spoken language in any language has been a challenge in computer science since the beginning of computer use by the pioneer Alan Turing. The challenge of being able to translate one language into another falls within the so-called “natural language processing-NLP”, or natural language processing. The great English scientist, who was biologically castrated by his ‘homosexual deviationism’, advanced the idea that a computer could be able to understand a written or spoken text, and, therefore, it could interpret the semantic content of the text and, thus, the information content of the message. Let us illustrate it with an example. In the phrase "the car hit the old man" a simple interpretation by key words will only tell us that there was a car, an old man and a hit, but we do not know if the

65 old man hit the car or vice versa. With the help of semantic interpretation we know that the car hit the old man.

If these tools had been used to analyze the messages exchanged between patients, doctors and social networks in Wuhan, and if NLP semantic analysis had been used in real time, it would have been consistently understood that what was happening was not a simple outbreak of pneumonia, but a new menacing pandemic. Of course, there would have been a ‘privacy violation’, but that action would have minimized the exponential expansion of the contagion. Not only Trump, but increasingly other governments such as those of Germany or France have underlined the irresponsibility of the Chinese authorities in 'hiding' the truth (at least partially) for political reasons or to preserve the 'prestige' of Chinese communist capitalism, which would have resulted in serious damage.

According to the MIT Technology Review, an open access neural network called COVID-Net, made public a few days ago, could have helped researchers around the world in a joint effort to develop an AI tool that could have screened people for detection of Covid-19.

In the meantime, the news has tiptoed across the media and social networks. The Radiodiagnosis service of the San Cecilio Clinical University Hospital and the Andalusian Institute for Research in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence of the University of Granada (UGR) are committed to the development of an automatic AI system to detect the pulmonary involvement that it produces. Covid-19 through chest X-rays of patients. The X-ray plates of a thousand patients who have contributed to training and perfecting the model called deep learning are analyzed. Once the first phase of the investigation has been completed, such a tool would allow specialists to know if a patient has lung damage from coronavirus, by reading his lung x-ray, in an average

66 time less than the time it takes to know the result of the PCR (Reaction in Polymerase Chain). The test is most validated to detect the presence of Covid-19 infection. It is an example of a useful use of AI in Spain. . Let's go to a second level. The pandemic has spread rapidly and brutally. The application of artificial intelligence techniques in the diagnosis of pneumonia is already giving encouraging results, beyond what a simple human “glance” could achieve. We would like to highlight the work carried out in developing an intelligent neural network system to analyze X-ray images as we have pointed out previously, and it has been applied in Andalusia, which provides an early detection of Covid-19. One of the co-authors of this article (RJ) helped create the image analysis company Blackford Analysis, which was conceived precisely as a company to develop the power of artificial intelligence to save lives. We already realized then that the use of artificial intelligence methods and the elimination of the “human” component made the location much more efficient. The application of artificial intelligence to the Covid-19 problem is well addressed in an article where the advantages of artificial intelligence in attacking the virus are clearly and critically detailed by improving image analysis when monitoring a patient, as a result. of which a place of intensive therapy to another affected person.

Artificial intelligence plays a crucial role in modeling how the pandemic spreads and how it can be controlled with a fixed number of tests. The most reputable repository of preprints in the world arXiv has a section dedicated to scientific articles on the Coronavirus and, in particular, on models of the pandemic. There are more than 500 articles, some of them describing how to use artificial intelligence to describe the pandemic. Mathematically modeling the spread of the pandemic and knowing how it is spreading is crucial to stopping it and containing the infected foci.

Finally, we would like to highlight that something as simple as the entire population using a blood oxygen level meter (oximeter), something that costs a few euros and that many smart wrist watches already incorporate, could reduce the effect of the pandemic enormously. As recently commented in a NYT article, the use of these instruments would greatly reduce the severity of the disease since it would allow earlier effective intervention of patients and thus avoid the development of the disease in the ICU intensive therapy phase. If these instruments were connected to an AI protocol that constantly analyzed them and suggested when to start medicating the patient, the results would be even more effective.

It is not necessary to believe in AI as an act of faith. Its effectiveness has already been demonstrated, as the case of South Korea validates. Clearly medieval measures don't work in the 21st century. What's worse, sacrificing privacy a bit and giving our data to AI analysis, or being confined with a high degree of uncertainty about how future scenarios will play out? Without AI models we are not going to do anything beyond what our Egyptian and Sumerian ancestors already did to fight pestilence 6000 years ago.

Raul Jimenez & Luis Moreno (Público)(Catalunya Press)(Galicia Press) (25April2020)

2.5 Unfinished Crisis: Who Controls the Robot? The robotization of our democracies is unstoppable and irreversible. Can it be doubted ...? In a series of articles that we began after the

68 publication of our essay Robotized Democracies, we have analyzed the importance of fully robotizing our societies in times of crisis. The criticisms that have been raised against us can be grouped into two different categories: (A) Arguing that robotization is useless since it has not effectively served to prevent the current pandemic; and (B) Robotization, yes, but who controls the robot? Or paraphrasing the famous aporia: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will monitor the guards? In this second approach, since the robot (computer) is programmed by humans, the tension between democracy and autocracy always emerges. The final derivation of both criticisms is that robotization can be useless, if not evil. A perspective far too far from reality.

Allow us to display our inherent Socratism and to refresh the basic idea of how a 'robot' works. We can illustrate it with the example of the Tesla car. In reality, the robot is nothing more than a set of algorithms that solve a problem which humans intend to solve or to optimize more functionally. The robot that controls the autopilot program of a Tesla electric car, for instance, is nothing more than a series of algorithms which concentrate on finding an appropriate road, just as our brain would automatically do. Once the road is found, it is ensured that the car stays on it, within the regulated speed limits and without causing any accident, taking the traveler from point A to B. The reason why the algorithms today are capable of solving an unthinkable problem only 20 years ago (the reader remembers the endless laughter caused by the images of robotic cars in the desert in the “DARPA challenge” race, it is worth watching the videos from 2005 about this event and his initial attempts to build a robotic vehicle). In 2020, not only are Tesla vehicles driving automatically with their artificial intelligence computer, but their performance is continually improving as the car's software is automatically updated through the wireless interconnection of Tesla electronic devices.

Artificial intelligence algorithms are mostly based on advanced neural networks and Bayesian inference. Advanced neural networks are nothing more than a series of algorithms, which, in part by mimicking how a neuron works in the brain, use initial learning models to infer patterns in the data they analyze. In conjunction with Bayesian model inference, they basically provide the engine of artificial intelligence today. The interested reader can experience for himself what artificial intelligence is on the Amazon website on AI. For a simple description, without technical terms, of what a neural network is, the reader can consult the excellent website towards data science and in particular its description on machine learning. The reader interested in understanding the technical details of artificial intelligence can follow the documents in these two courses: Carnegie and EMSE. On the “towards data science” website, those most interested will find codes written in the Python language to build their own intelligent neural network system.

With the advent of the quantum computing revolution, these pattern- finding algorithms are going to be even more capable, indeed 'supremely' capable of finding patterns. And this will facilitate the management and resolution of problems that until now were very difficult to face. This revolution of quantum supremacy will allow us to manage and look for patterns in practically all the data that humanity generates. This ability will allow us to analyze all the variables of society.

We would like to give another example of how artificial intelligence is changing the world we live in. Our colleague Rabih Zbib, director of artificial intelligence at the technology company Avature, commented how the new artificial intelligence systems that the company is developing to automate hiring are far superior to finding candidates

70 with the capacity for the job far beyond what a being human can do. This is achieved thanks to the ability to look for patterns and exploit them tion by the neural network of semantic relations. Something, the semantic analysis, that if it had been used to analyze the messages of the doctors in Wuhan, it would have made it easier to stop the pandemic. Of course the great danger is the amount of biases (racial, gender, status, age ...) that such a robotic system could imply. But it turns out that the robot is more equal and equitable than any human being. This is possible and feasible, of course, if the rules of the game are programmed with the necessary ethical parameters.

After these technical introductory remarks, let's return to the central theme of our article, which is: who controls the robot? Who controls the artificial neural network? Who gives you the guidelines to follow in case of conflict? The case of Tesla's autopilot is exemplary in this regard, as an example of a moral and ethical dilemma. The problem is usually stated as follows: the car on autopilot is carrying a mother and her 8-year-old daughter. On the road, an 8-year-old boy is suddenly crossing the street behind the soccer ball. The autopilot has two options: run over the boy with the ball and save her mother and daughter in the car. Or he swings, skids, crashes into a wall and only kills the daughter in the car, the mother survives. The question is: what should the human programmer have programmed into the neural network of the Tesla computer?

To answer this question it is useful to go back to the beginning. Let's imagine that the Tesla is driven by the mother, and there is no computer on board, what should the mother do? Save her daughter, or sacrifice her and kill the boy who crosses the street? The answer is that there is no answer; it is an ethical question without solution. In reality, the programmer should not program anything to the Tesla's neural network but rather implement ethical rules, like the ones we humans

71 follow: do not kill except in special circumstances, such as self-defense, let's say. The point is that the neural network can learn itself based on the examples that are presented. It is not necessary for the programmer to decide for each explicit case whether there is already an ethical system, code of conduct or troubleshooting installed in the computer.

It is useful to go back to the fact that, as artificial intelligence is designed right now, it is nothing more than a pattern-finding system. Given an initial data set, a learning set, that the same neural network can be generated as it learns, it finds patterns in the new data. Human beings function in a very similar way: given an initial set of data, our education, or even self-taught, we act according to these rules given a cost function.

Let us illustrate our issue with another “political” example. The long- lived American democratic system with its checks and balances forged the constitution of the first major democratic republic in modern times. In short, it was intended that there would be a system of initial rules (the initial training set in the case of the neural network) in such a way that there would be no abuses, or they would neutralize each other. Subsequent history has put things right, showing that the system was not foolproof. The abuses of large corporations have been mainly due to the fact that the cost function of the system was skewed towards the enrichment of the few and the social polarization of inequality, not to the improvement of human society as a whole; or the achievement of what which in the Anglo-Saxon imaginary is known as the 'good society'. In reality, the problem that we are currently facing, and that the Coronavirus crisis has only worsened, has been that the rules of the game have been broken, that the system has been reprogrammed in the middle of the play (moving the goalposts) .

72 Another highly topical political issue is the possible introduction and picaresque. An effective robotic system can be crucial to avoid perverse effects in implementation of the program. In our robotic democracies, money digitization allows us to continue to function as if nothing had happened during confinement due to the pandemic. With the implementation of 5G on our smartphones it will be possible, also in rural areas, to carry out all kinds of transactions without the need for physical support, not even ATMs. With the unstoppable development of quantum computing and artificial intelligence in the search for patterns, it is increasingly easy to stop thefts tracking monetary transactions in search of embezzlement or misuse.

If all transactions were digital, there would be no picaresque capacity with the minimum income of citizens. Or it would be reduced to the minimum of the unsuspected fantasy in a country of ‘rogues’ as has sometimes been described of Spain. Thus, the obligation of vulnerable citizens who receive the minimum income benefit to make their annual income statement would be something simple to comply with (they would also receive their draft as it is now happening for common taxpayers, ready to sign and send telematically). Think of another benign effect, which is the practical paralysis of the ‘underground’ economy so widespread in European countries such as Spain or Italy, the hardest hit by the Coronavirus in recent weeks. Of course, this represents a loss of privacy, since if all transactions were to be digitized, it would be perfectly clear what one has done, what one buys, where it goes and where it decides. But it seems to us that it is the only way to avoid the picaresque and fraud and, therefore, the delegitimization of a necessary and timely policy.

Some readers will ‘rend their clothes’ for the implications that this scenario implies for the lack of privacy. But that debate has already been written off and it is not wanted to be assumed. As we have already

73 exposed previously, what the whistleblower Edward Snowden, whose bonhomie and honesty would not be sufficiently acknowledged, privacy has ceased to exist.

The great capacity to pervert the current human social system has reached a point of saturation with COVID 19 pandemic. Inequality has grown so perversely in the last century (see, for example, the works of Milanovic or Piketty), that it would make us think if the time has not come to also robotize the decision chain that affects people's well- being, in order to obtain more logical and consistent decisions with the ethics that we would decide the neural network to have. They should not be mediated by the shortsighted interests of some partisan representatives who only aim to preserve their positions of power and influence. Daniel Kahneman in his book "Think Fast, Think Slow" has described how it is much more rational and logical to think slowly and with an algorithm than to do it 'intuitively'. Wouldn't it be fairer to think about what is being done without making decisions burdened by the urges of random situations? Wouldn't it be more efficient to equip robots with ethical rules as the means to propose the best solutions for a cost function that maximizes the happiness and well-being of citizens?

Raul Jimenez & Luis Moreno (Agenda Pública)(27April2020)

2.6 Serfdom in Times of Robotization.

In a recent study, the renowned anthropologist Wade Davis magnificently portrays the impact of how the Covid-19 pandemic is

74 accentuating the decline of the American empire. It highlights the growing inequality that exists within North American society and how brutal capitalism has exacerbated the division between the haves and the have-nots; This process is cracking North American society. There are, however, two pieces of information in Davis's study that deserve special attention: the three richest people --Jeff Bezos (amazon.com), Bill Gates (microsoft.com) and Mark Zuckerberg (facebook.com)-- possess as much wealth as the 160 million poorer Americans, that is, half the US population. The other piece of data is that 36% of the ‘colored people’ ( black “African Americans”) have nothing, or only have debts. In short, they have not improved their standard of living beyond their enslaved predecessors from the economic point of view, although they obviously enjoy their individual freedom. There are other pearls in Wade Davis' analysis, such as the fact that the biggest cause of death among Americans under 50 years of age is not car accidents, but opioid use due to depression of losing their job or changes in their lifestyles.

The most enlightening point is to understand how the North American country, which has dominated the 20th century, and part of the 21st, as the great technological empire, and the world's policeman ( “pax americana”), has reached this twilight point, and what it could mean as an example for the future of our society in which robotization will substantially change our lives. While initially, and especially after the end of the Second World War, a middle class developed that could achieve the ‘American dream’, from the 1980s onwards, the maintenance of North American power has been based on having as its main support a highly unequal society where living conditions for a large part of its citizens as dispossessed widened. It is in this context that our societies are heading for an irreversible robotization, and therefore it will be crucial to define how the essential rights of citizens

75 are going to be preserved. The evolution of North American society can be very illustrative.

Since the end of the Second World War, economic progress and scientific advancement has undoubtedly been led by the US . It is interesting to focus on scientific and technological achievements. Until a couple of decades ago the global public governmental research budget was dominated by that of the US. Without going any further, and as a more recent example of the US dominance, the reader should be aware that Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Apple ... are all North American companies. Only very recently Asian companies like AliBaBa, Huawei, Samsung ... have entered and taken a share of this global market. Could the reader of this article mention any European technology company that has a relevant position at the level of innovation and penetration in such a global environment? [ some ‘green shoots’ can be detected as, for instance, most tablets and smartphone processors are based on designs developed by the British ARM. This is to say that the processors that control our robotized lives are designed in the Old Continent].Those big companies (New Feudal Technological Lords) are on their way to dominate the current robotization of our societies and to control our data and privacy or, rather, lack of it.

For this to happen a high price has been paid. In Western societies, and especially in the American one since the 1950s, work has become the center of people's social life . Any recreational, family activity or simply ludic wasting time has been sacrificed for being productive (there is a widely used expression in English called "to be on your toes" , something like being always alert, which would imply that wasting time is not good and you have to be always engaged in working activities). Work has become the central part of their lives. All daily activities are centred around work in such a way that interaction with

76 the family is reduced to the bare minimum. It is in this way that productivity has increased dramatically in the US economy. In the last 40 years it has increased by 2% annually, that is, it has multiplied by a factor of 2 in these 40 years. But the human cost has been important to achieve this.

The Covid-19 pandemic has also exacerbated and brought into the limelight fundamental changes in our lives through forced confinement. In this way, work has become actively and passively our whole life and has taken over our homes. With the need to work online, work has crept into our homes. It is interesting to put this fact in context; In the era of automation and robotization that we are living through, the disappearance of communal life has taken place. There is no need to go shopping at the market or the store since everything is available online, mainly by virtue of the existence of the technological giant Amazon. There is also no need to go to the theater, cinema or concert since both Amazon and Netflix provide us with this service, basically free (10 EUR per month). If work is now also carried out at home, this has robbed us of the last link of direct social interaction with other human beings. Are we at the beginning of a dystopia as predicted in numerous science fiction novels? Shall we be purely virtual beings?

If the exchange is within households, someone could argue that telecommuting will allow more time for people to spend time with their family. Instead, we can contrast with broader social structures that modern work replaced, such as the extended family, the neighborhood, the village. This was a process of "deterritorialization". In this sense, the modern factory, and later the office, replace the ‘old’ social domain. The push towards remote work would result in another “deterritorialization.” It would further dissolve the social structure that

77 focuses on work and pushes us further to become virtual 'subjects' (in the philosophical sense).

This social change has more implications, both economic and political, that are potentially far-reaching. The 'virtualization' of work will make organized work and unionization even more difficult. It will also further drive inequality. The ‘old’ working class' will be replaced by this new virtual workforce, but much smaller in number due to the effect of automation and robotization. This privileged class induced by the New Technological Lords will be the one that has the influence and power to make decisions in the robotic society. The result is that a large part of the population will be forgotten and they will turn into a "surplus" with no place in the system, other than becoming passive consumers.

However, one should avoid becoming too cynical. Despite all the buts, tech companies are making our lives easier. For very little money we have access to movies, operas, musical shows that we could not otherwise allow ourselves to enjoy (a ticket to the opera in Milan or New York is available to the very few.) Large technological companies also provide us with access to information (Google), or images from around the world (Google Earth) or all the world's products (AliBaba, Amazon) or keep us in touch with our loved ones and friends (Skype, Zoom , Facebook). However, all the gratuity is paid with the control of our privacy.

In the same way that the arrival of the railroad in the 19th century created a revolution in transport, reducing carriage travel times by a factor of ten, new technologies and robotization are changing the way we communicate and work. It is interesting to look at the first industrial revolution as a model of what our society can be without regulation. At that time the great social transformation was the need

78 for labor, which provided wage employment for the hitherto serfs. This brought about the genesis of the later widespread middle classes. But it was very important to effectively regulate work. It took a long time to reduce the working day to only 40 hours a week, or to introduce a minimum wage for workers, so that living conditions would improve. They could have more free and leisure time.

Currently we are in a crucial phase which faces similarities almost similar to the first industrial revolution of the 19th century. As mentioned above, we find ourselves in a society where work ‘monopolizes’ our lives and social interaction is being reduced to virtual interaction. Not only are we at risk of working all day (the famous 24/7 expression in the Anglo-Saxon world), but we are also being forced to relocate, that is, abandon our families and loved ones to find work where we can be more productive. The latter is a very widespread phenomenon in the US. Workers continually move around the country looking for a better-paid job without any regard for family roots; this uprooting causes the loss of the social network provided by the family.

It is not about whether robotization is going to happen, because it is happening. What we must develop is a scheme that prevents us from being simple servants of the New Feudal Technological Lords. It is useful to note that due to robotization, most jobs will eventually become redundant and there will be a very large part of the population that will be irrelevant in productive terms. Note that the situation is much more dramatic than that of, for example, slaves on tobacco and cotton plantations in the 19th century; they were necessary in order to reap the harvest. The new class of citizens replaced by robotization will be "irrelevant" and mere consumer servants of the New Feudal Technological Lords. In short, society will be divided into those who

79 do not have a job and those who have to work all day in order to program the robot.

How can we build a society that is not totally focused on work and superfluous entertainment? We describe at the beginning of this article how American society has been socially fractured due to rampant inequality among its citizens. This inequality and the need to work 24/7 could be leading to its collapse as Wade Davis argues. The Romans already knew that to maintain a highly unequal society something had to be done. In his case the expression Panem et circenses is well known. In other words, there is no need to provide citizens with anything useful in their lives other than food and entertainment to keep them happy: does that sound familiar nowadays?

A way ahead may be found in a very strict regulation like the one that emerged from the first industrial revolution, and which allowed the advent of the middle classes. It was only in the 20th century, both in the US with President Roosevelt's incipient "New Deal" and the full establishment of the welfare state in Europe, that a situation of regulation was reached such that the middle classes flourished with a good balance between life and work. Only during the rule of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did the deregulation of the welfare state begin. With the technological revolution of massive robotization, we should introduce timely regulation so that our lives are those of human beings and not that of useless subjects. Perhaps in this way we can save not only the middle classes, but also parliamentary democracy of the Western world as we have experienced it until now.

Raul Jimenez & Rabih Zbib (Agenda Pública) (26Sept2020)

80 2.7 Digitalize Me, Please.

In the European Union there exists a society virtually digitalized . This is the case of the Republic of Estonia. The 'small' Baltic country (1.4 million inhabitants) gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Some readers who do not know its peculiarity might think that it is a backward country compared to its European peers. Big mistake. In 1997, the Estonian authorities decided that the future of their social welfare and the technological progress of the country demanded the digitalisation of the democratic interaction between citizenship and public administration.

The platform e-Estonia provides citizens of Estonia with the possibility of making administrative procedures telematically in a simple and efficient manner, including the use of smartphones. Operationally registering a company, obtaining a birth certificate, or voting in elections, are some examples of this private-public digitalisation. The reader has read correctly. In Estonia you can vote without having to go to the polling station to cast your vote in the ballot box. It is important to note that all digital transactions and private data are protected by blockchain technology. Citizens involved do not have to go personally to the concerned administrative building to comply with the 'official' procedure, or to deal with any ‘street level bureaucrat’, which is the case in other non-digitalized societies. An Euronews article wonders why Estonia's example has not been followed by other EU countries. Digitalization has allowed the Baltic country to keep on running its public administration without any drawbacks during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Unfortunately, the difficulties of digitalisation in Spain are due to the traditional approach of the fudge, or ability to get by without sorting

81 out properly those matters dealt with. In theory there are digitized procedures in operation to allow the interaction between citizens and public administration, as is the case of the identity card DNIe or the authentication system of cl@ve, whose real effectiveness can be largely improved. Tasks which should be trivial to carry out, such as to request retirement status of a pensioner, for instance, still requires the person concerned to come personally to the social insurance office or to write and to subsequently send a written demand by registered mail. The alternative is ‘administrative silence’. The situation or n is more disheartening concerning the system, public scientific research, within which we carry out our duties. But let us leave it as the topic for another article.

There are other sectors , however, such as the banking sector, which have been digitally comprehensively in Spain. Many argue that the reason for that is that money and tangible profits are involved in such digitalization process, although little is argued on how digital banking transactions can facilitate the life of the citizen. Now, for example, you can buy a loaf of bread costing 60 cents using just a smartphone. Certainly, the number of bank branches have been halved in the last ten years. With bak digitalisation waiting lines for routine and banal bank transactions will be avoided.

Wasting time. This is the key factor to ponder concerning digitalisation and public governance in Spain. But other arguments on how to promote socioeconomic well-being in our robotized democracies are high in the political agenda. In Estonia, and by law, the robot system cannot (e-Estonia) cannot request more than a piece of data, if such information has been previously entered by some other administrative body. For example, if you had been requested to provide your birth of date to the tax authorities to comply with a tax income statement, the same information is to be available for other administrative purposes

82 (e.g. getting a fishing license), as the robot will be retrieved it in the blockchain and, thus, avoiding citizens to waste their times facilities data already stored by the public administration. .

Undoubtedly, some trade unions are reluctant to face a scenario in which, surely, 'fixed posts' bureaucratic positions will disappear as their routine tasks will be managed by new digital technologies. The traditional trade-union argument to preserve jobs --above any other consideration-- is very debatable. Digitalisation is an unstoppable process that is taking place at an accelerated pace. The loss of jobs is real. Is it sensible to look back to follow the example of the Luddites who, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, proposed to break machines to carry on with manual work and ‘preserve’ obsolete jobs? The effects of the covid-19 pandemic have accelerade all these changes in the industrial relations.

Those citizens without the proper digital education to access civil service will have to confront the dilemma of achieving greater and better qualifications and skills. Indeed, digitalization will mean the disappearance of old, useless bureaucratic activities that are harmful to preserve the common good of our societies as a whole. In the end, if they were left without their 'fixed position', the unprepared civil servants could always resort to the perception of the minimum vital income, assuming that this program could be well managed digitally and telematically. Let's promote 'getting the hang of it' and use our time playfully and creatively for the benefit of all . The alternative is to move backwards, as most crabs do… Remember?

Raul Jimenez & Luis Moreno (Público)(CatalunyaPress)(06Nov2020)

83 2.8 Should We Let Artificial Intelligence Optimize Society? Maybe Yes, but with Controls. The great transformative innovation of the 21st century has been the advent of “big data” and deep machine learning, i.e. Artificial Intelligence (AI). Could anyone have imagined in 1990 that a computer would defeat any human in chess or Go? The popular book The Emperor's New Mind from the same year by the famous mathematician and this year's Nobel Prize winner Roger Penrose argued vigorously against this possibility. Or that whoever, with a smartphone, could translate basically any language on the go? This revolution has two components: First: the availability of vast amounts of data on all aspects of our society; our location, the frequency of our banking transactions or our preferences when we watch movies online, etc ... Second: the ability of the AI to make "sense" of this data.

To understand the power of AI, imagine having a model for a phenomenon; then, if the model is accurate, predictions can be made with it. For example, consider Einstein's physical theory of general relativity. If we want to build a GPS network we need to apply this theory to develop such a device. However, consider the reader phenomena for which we don't have an effective model, like social interactions or language. Until the 21st century it was believed that without a model nothing could be predicted. However, the neural network solves this by looking for and using patterns and correlations in the data. Namely: we don't have a clear idea of what language is, but we have almost perfect algorithms for translating languages, like Google translate.alson't We do have a theory about people's moviegoer tastes, but Netflix advises us on movies that we might like.

84 Given AI's ability to manage and make sense of basically any amount of data: why don't we let AI optimize society? Sound heresy? Specific case: The global management of the Covid-19 pandemic has not been optimal by the governments of the world. While almost everyone recognizes the paramount importance of scientific data, and some have tried to use it in the most efficient way, others simply have not been able to digest what the data said. Even the most successful country in vaccinating its citizens, Israel, has been plagued by massive mismanagement and mishandling of the pandemic. Other countries have erratic or populist vaccination campaigns; none have been able to optimize their strategy. We are playing with human lives. Could AI have managed it better?

The way that AI learns the patterns and takes advantage of the correlations found in massive amounts of data is by minimizing one set of aspects and quantities and maximizing others (in technical parlance, optimizing a "cost function"). For example, in the case of a bank, AI provides the optimal way to maximize return on profits. But no country has tried to use AI, to decide who should get vaccinated and when? maybe we should have done it? The use of algorithms does not necessarily imply better decision making. A poorly designed algorithm will always give bad results.

The next step would be to argue that perhaps AI should not only optimize society's responses to pandemics, but other aspects of our lives as well. Why not? After all, in most cases, politicians are trying to optimize their options: How many roads to build? How much to pay in the national health or pension system? How many wars to fight? How to make the economy greener? It could be argued that these are political decisions in which "quantitative" and concrete data and facts play no role. In reality, these decisions are made by maximizing a cost function that will inevitably be skewed by human factors and interests

85 such as the enrichment of the politician and his constituents (eg, the "pork barrel" politics).

Ideally, in a democracy (even robotized), the cost function should optimize the welfare of the society and all its members. An advantage of algorithms is that they can remove human biases from the decision- making process. So why not give algorithms the ability to manage and "digest" data, proposing optimal solutions from an objective point of view? With one important reservation: biases and biases can be embedded in the algorithm itself. Hiding behind AI does not guarantee ethical and egalitarian decision making - ethics have to be built into the algorithm.

Can we come to think that the whole process of optimizing society can be done, much more efficiently, by an algorithm? Is it possible to build an ethical AI, and how? Who controls the algorithms and the cost function? In what cases and under what conditions could humans completely leave decision-making to algorithms? And when should humans intervene?

These are the key questions facing contemporary society.

Raul Jimenez, Licia Verde & Rabih Zbib (The Conversation) (4th May 2021)

86 3. Life-Styles, Bureaucracy and the Online World.

3.1 MGTOW, Men Going Their Own Way.

With the acronym MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) it is intended to mean a social phenomenon originating in Anglo-Saxon societies that promote personal commodification. It is referred to a type of generally heterosexual men connected to their telematic cord and who have chosen a philosophy and lifestyle that avoids romantic relationships and legal commitments of convivence with a partner. MGTOW embrace the idea that they themselves are the ones who have to set their life goals individually and autonomously. And, of course, such purposes must be formulated without external feminine interference in the name of an emancipatory and self-sufficient liberalism. Regarding their personal relationships, self-interest prevails over any other consideration as an instrumental norm of coexistence.

Traditional misogyny has manifested itself at various times and in various modes. Common to all of them has been his dislike of women. Now the emulation effects of these Anglo-Saxon MGTOWs are spreading everywhere promoting a culture of achieving individualistic success based upon the idea of the 'mirage of wealth'. Automation and digitization processes that are adjusting our civilizational forms intervene in this phenomenon. The new self-centered consumers maximize all kinds of new instruments of digital (dis)communication by deploying their life-style strategies.

In the world of the MGTOW youth, their first and foremost concern is the "I" in the household environment, generally their parents' house.

87 In a broader dimension it is called the "Manosphere”. Mandatory for them is the availability at all times of a smartphone, an artifact that gives meaning to their autonomous needs as social beings. They are young, often young adults, and often aim at remaining as grown-up emulations of the legendary Peter Pan. They shy away from “sly” women because they think the latter just want to take advantage of them and, ultimately, to control them (whether with or without marriage). In this world of perennial infantility, MGTOWs entrench themselves with virtual breastplates not only against those they fear as sibylline coaxers, but, by extension, regarding everything that makes their ‘dream’ of personal autarky impossible.

‘I’m enough with myself’ is his untouchable onanistic illusion. Faced with disturbing feminism, the MGTOW philosophy claims to go back to the example of men like Schopenhauer, Galileo, and even Jesus Christ himself. His supporters rely on the judgment of great men, such as Nikola Tesla (1856-1943): “I do not think that great inventions developed by married men can be mentioned. Being alone with yourself is the great secret of invention. In solitude is where creative ideas arise ”.

In spite of their wishes, the MGTOWs must come out of their voluntary existential shell from time to time. They have no alternative but to move spatially in our cities and even talk to women in offices, factories or universities. In addition, by making use of the services made possible by the community as a whole, they use, for example, public transport. And this is where, more and more visibly, another phenomenon which has been coined as “manspreading” takes place.

Readers of this newspaper will have experienced, or at least they will have witnessed when sitting in buses or Metro wagons, how some men spread their legs “thoughtlessly”, taking over with their posturing more

88 than one of the seats available. They are new predators of the territory that, through their prepotence, build the yardsticks of their traveling existence. There is another generalized behavior of some young men - and also young women - of setting new “running records” when entering the means of transport. They speed to get any available seat without wondering about the needs of other people (it was called “good manners” in not-too-distant past times). Such abusive exercise of those who have longer legs is now coupled with the disregard about who sits next to them.

Not long ago stickers were put on some buses of the Municipal Transport Company of Madrid (EMT) indicating that manspreading should not be done. The author of this article, and more than one of the readers of this article, have witnessed the unfortunate spectacle of watching how some people do not pay attention to the notice about manspreading and how they engage in loud arguments with those who protest about their manners. The EMT in its pre-sticker campaign statement called for preserving civic behavior of the users, something that increasingly sounds like an antediluvian proclamation. Now with the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic these manifestations of manspreading have been dramatically reduced, because of the prolonged periods of household confinement. Perhaps an encouraging unintended effect of the pandemic had been a more caring regard for those moving around with us in public transport.

MGTOW selfish behavior has little to do with a social model --such as the European one-- based upon a sharing of policies and services. For an “asocial” life project, no greater citizen commitments are needed in common life and manspreading individuals aspire to manage their relational resources according to their sole benefit. As a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic, and despite an increased life-style and

89 telecommuting behind closed doors, many of them will have to come to terms with the “life of others”.

Luis Moreno (Público)(Catalunya Press)(Press Digital)(Galicia Press)(20March2018)

3.2 With ‘Traditional’ Bureaucracy There Is No Science.

The state of scientific and research activity in Spain is hampered by an inappropriate administrative management. A bureaucratic cobweb has become a real obstacle to optimizing public monies which, in Spain, accounted in 2012 for 87.2% of total spending on R&D& i (Research, Development and innovation). With 5% of the aggregate of research funding, the private contribution of Spanish companies was meager compared to other comparable countries in the EU. The rest of the research funding came from sources outside Spain (see Xifré & Kasperskaya, 2016).

It should be noted that it is the scientists themselves who obtain most of the funding to carry out research activities as external fund raisers. In a desirable competitive and meritocratic context, these tasks imply an increasing use of the time available to research. Although it is not part of its academic activity stricto sensu, the dedication to obtain external funds is essential for them they want to investigate in the present conjuncture of science in Spain. The alternative is just not to complicate your life and maintain a low ‘civil servant’ profile in the workplace, clocking in at your workplace in the morning (NB. telecommuting after the spread of the pandemic since 2020) while waiting for the monthly bank transfer of the corresponding salary.

You have read the above comment that correctly: some career researchers are required to clock in and out of the workday applying a mentality of office workers with a sleeve and a visor, something which is at odds, at least, with innovation. And even if they did not publish the scientific findings of their research activity, they would continue to receive their stipend monthly. The situation is not comparable with that of university professors who, at least, must comply with their face- to-face teaching in classrooms (NB. or online with the arrival of Covid- 19). However, some universities continue to “control” lazy teachers much in the same way.

In order to raise external funds, researchers and teachers must spend time --a lot of time-- beyond the theoretical 37.5 hours per week required for working hours. The incentive, it will be thought, is to eventually have a budget to incorporate human and material resources in carrying out research projects (scholarship holders, contractors or experimental resources, to name a few). It is an incentive that, like the principle of diminishing marginal utility, reduces the satisfaction of the researcher. In fact, in recent times it has become a disincentive considering the overwhelming number of documents and bureaucratic requirements to be complied with. These are situations that require permanent administrative attention from scientists in order to be able to present their requests in a timely manner and comply with a myriad of formalities and ever growing normative dispositions. Let's analyze in foreshortening some factors that condition this unwanted situation:

1.- An anachronistic mentality of the old Napoleonic administration code is maintained, if perhaps renovated in recent times with circumstantial contributions from state lawyers, civil administration technicians or officials of various origins, who have reached the intermediate levels of command after long years of internal

91 promotions. Not a few of the latter began their promotional journeys as research assistants or as support personnel in such tasks. Their abilities to speed up or slow down administrative procedures are decisive in administrative itineraries.

Any organizational and management design for future public employees must assume that public servants are first and foremost public servants. As such, they must put the interests of citizen participation and efficiency of the Public Administration before their own personal interests as workers whose salaries are paid by all taxpayers.

2.- It would be fallacious to speak of a monolithic bureaucratic mentality regarding the bad practices that occur in the public administration of science. Some departments of the central hierarchical bodies of universities and public research organizations (OPIs) are aware of the increase in bureaucratic burden in recent times, especially in relation to the requirements for project justifications and subsequent audits. Paradoxically, some proposals to overcome these imponderables involve the creation of new monthly control instruments in which researchers, for example, have to count how many hours they dedicate to each project and thus be able to be prepared for subsequent audits. Researchers are even advised to keep time sheets to avoid surprises, such as those derived from losing funds that had already been audited years ago, but which now do not comply with the new control standards. Another perverse effect is to make unnecessary last minute expenses before the budget expiration date.

3.- The control of research activity often reflects an inquisitorial mentality deeply rooted in a certain Spanish idiosyncrasy, guided by the general assumption that something is wrong when initiating a procedimental iter. This attitude is complemented by the secular

92 practice of asking for favors to unblock bureaucratic wrongs. To the bizarre demand that researchers must provide the intervention and auditing public bodies with all kinds of invoices to justify, for example, business trips even if they have been invited by the host institution with all expenses covered. It is worth adding a couple illustrative examples.

A colleague let me know that he obtained funding from the European Research Council (ERC) of up to 2.5 million euros, being the most competitive public source for fund-raising in Europe. He had to wait a year to purchase a computer through the administration of your university. Two members of her research team were involved in her acquisition and no less than a hundred emails were exchanged to accomplish such a buy.

In order to hire an Australian researcher, he was advised that the researcher should come to Spain 15 days in advance before the commencement of his contract and that he would bear himself the living costs during such a period. This was assuming that the researcher had previously been able to obtain the Foreigner Identification Number (NIE), if possible in a Spanish consulate, management not always easy or available in all consular representations. Alternatively, the researcher could pay out of his own pocket to a private agency to obtain the highly valued NIE, necessary in any formal procedure related to his research activity in Spain.

4.- The robotization process of our industrially advanced societies is in a process of rapid acceleration. If just a few years ago it was industrial robots who helped workers, now we see that it is the latter who help the former. The roles of the productive agents have been exchanged. But this happens not only in the private for-profit sector, but also in the public and institutional sectors. Let us return to another illustrative

93 example of the optimization of administrative procedures in the justification of the expenses generated during the development of scientific research activities.

Another fellow researcher, a regular visitor to the Simons Foundation in New York, and specifically to the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute, tells me that on a recent occasion he was invited to dinner at a restaurant in Manhattan after making a seminar presentation. When paying the bill, his host took a picture of it with his mobile phone. He was informed that the Foundation uses a computer program (robot) that, with the photo of the invoice transmitted through a smartphone application to the processing center of the Foundation, an expense control program instantly evaluates the compliance of the charge for the cost of the meal and automatically reimburses the invoice to the researcher who paid it. My colleague commented that he had had to invite a foreign colleague out of the funds of a project he collected himself, and controlled by the public auditors and payment services in Spain, it could have taken weeks and even months for reimbursement after unpredictable checks of the “relevance” of the expenditure made.

In general terms, and in line with the experiences reported and contrasted by my peers, it can be calculated that researchers spend around 60% -70% of their useful working time on administrative “paperwork'”. It can be inferred that for each hour of genuine research work, two others of a bureaucratic and administrative nature are to be carried out. This implies that the salary of the scientist includes 2/3 of a bureaucratic time that does not add any value to research activities. Let the readers ponder. For the author of this article, with bureaucracy there is no science and without science there is no future.

Luis Moreno (Agenda Pública) (16 Nov2018)

3.3 Online and Classroom University.

A return to a new normality is anticipated when the long lasting home confinement due to the Covid-19 pandemic is over. As concerns university education, will it be a return to the old face-to-face normality or a reinforcement of the “new” virtual normality?

In reality, distance university instruction is not new. It has already been done since the middle of the last century. The British Open University and the Spanish National Distance Education University (UNED) were pioneers in developing an effective higher education system capable of offering instruction equivalent to that of face-to-face universities, as well as in granting degrees of equal university value. Spanish UNED is a notable example of non-face-to-face higher education. It is not an 'open' university, as is the case of the British Open University. Formal entry requirements and qualifications are required such as other Spanish face-to-face universities do. Most of the instruction at the UNED is at distance learning and facilitates the awarding of university degrees for students who for reasons of distance or incompatibility of schedules cannot attend face-to-face courses . While in its beginnings (1972) it was based on a teaching system “by mail” and with support by television and radio, today it has advanced computer media equipment.

Likewise, the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) began its activities in the 1995-96 academic year with 200 students registered for the official Psychopedagogy and Business degrees. Currently, and according to its corporate telematics information, more than 200,000 people are part of the UOC university community. Manuel Castells ,

95 one of our three most internationally renowned Spanish sociologists in recent decades (the late Juan Linz and Salvador Giner complete this triad of sociological excellence), is a professor at this university , as he has been at other leading universities such as Berkeley. Paris, Oxford, Cambridge or MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) .

Now Castells, as Minister of Universities in the coalition Government of Pedro Sánchez, has sponsored a debate on higher education and the need to transform the Spanish university into a mixed model that includes remote education, which will acquire greater prominence in the future using more advanced technological means, together with traditional face-to-face teaching, when necessary. Not a few teachers and university administration and services personnel (PAS), as well as influencers of all kinds, have protested. Members of the CRUE (Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities), principal organ of dialogue between universities and the central government, and institutional body to channel university autonomy recognized in the Spanish 1978 Constitution of 1978, are expecting eventual changes in the not-too-distant future. Isabel Celaá, Castells's colleague in the Sánchez Cabinet as Minister of Education, has been more explicit: “Face-to- face education is irreplaceable. So resounding”.

It should be noted that both the 'face-to-face' universities, as well as the 'virtual' ones, and especially the business management schools -of great expansion in recent times in Spain- offer telematic master courses, partially or in its entirety. In fact, these business schools have developed remarkably and some of them have achieved a wide international reputation. In this specific sector of postgraduate higher education, telematic means have become essential for teachers and students. Undoubtedly, their future will be affected by the socioeconomic impact of the pandemic, which augurs a long-lasting economic shock.

These effects have made us reflect on the advisability of optimizing the robotisation underway in order to improve our quality of life and citizens’ well-being of our democracies. An argument crucial to deepening robotization, which is liberating us of little routines as it has evidenced our confined life at home, is the availability to engage in recreational and productive work as well as to study and to follow online education. The personal computer, and especially the smartphone, have provided an instantaneous and permanent window to the outside world from the most intimate and home environment. Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, a pioneer in conceptualizing global versus statist analysis and parochial countries, stressed the importance of households in shaping socioeconomic relations and as basic units of the future global system. The confinement has unquestionably rendered evident the communicational optimization of all kinds of educational, economic and entertainment activities. What would we have done (do) without our mobile phones?

Is it convenient to promote distance education based on virtual technologies? Our answer is an unequivocal yes. No one seems to assess a more efficient way of teaching to address an audience of more than 300 students with a megaphone from a practically invisible blackboard for those students farthest from the teacher's podium. The Anglo-Saxon model, with which the authors of this article are more familiarized with, provides cases of “good practices” at many of its universities, promoting syllabus with a small number of face-to-face classes. A standard semester typically includes 15-20 hours of instruction. The rest of the teaching is organized "remotely" by the student himself through telematic interaction to carry out coursework and writing essays. In addition, the so-called tutorials favor the operation of small groups of students who can concentrate on solving problems on the syllabus. Although in many cases the students reside

97 on the university campus, and therefore the education is not remote per se , the effective hours of face-to-face contact with the professor are not necessarily many.

One problem with the Anglo-Saxon system that we have succinctly described is that the ratio of students to teachers is very low. So low that its extension in countries like Spain to the entire university student population would make it impractical. The way to optimize this system is that both information and teaching to be transferred to students could be carried out by computer means. As has already been shown in prestigious universities, such as Harvard or MIT, it is enough to provide the necessary information to students and staff associated with university education anywhere as long as there is an available internet connection. The development of 5G is going to be crucial to interconnect people in any geographical location.

Another great advantage of remote education, and especially in a mixed remote/face-to-face education system, is to prevent teachers from repeating the same subject a useless number of times. Various classes can be recorded for viewing online that students can follow at the most suitable time for them. The second is that the information is always available online permanently. There is no need to spend your face time taking notes. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is that more and more personalized support can be provided to stimulate student involvement.

What technologies do we currently have and which ones would it be advisable to promote further? Confinement has made clear the functionality of distance learning, from primary education to doctoral studies. It has been something done in a practical and natural way without major complications. In the first place, the existence of communication networks highly capable of handling a large increase in

98 communication traffic has been possible, in part, because the technology companies involved have had to increase the bandwidth so that, for example, movies are seen in streaming. An example in the world of technology, where one product has benefited from the massive spread of another product, is the electric car; Electric car batteries have so much autonomy thanks to the research in the development of our mobile phones and the need for increasingly powerful and long-lasting batteries.

We must also mention the existence of virtual collaboration tools like Zoom or Microsoft teams that use technologies of Computation in the cloud. Services and data storage in computers enable efficient communication between many virtual “interactor” nodes (something that recently was not a trivial problem to solve). The generalization of portable devices has further allowed the availability of this intercom ubiquitously.

Recently, the University of Cambridge has announced that all his lectures and teaching classes for the academic year 2020-2021 will be online, the same as in the case of Columbia University in New York. Both institutions indicate an unequivocal direction towards greater use of teaching tools that the Spanish universities would do well to pay attention. In addition to the current technological capabilities of distance learning, it should be noted that there are also new tools on the not too distant horizon that would make remote higher education even more functional.

The first would be the ability to make all data available in the cloud. These data are of various nature, such as, for example, from astronomical observations of the Hubble telescope to statistical data on urban mobility according to the entrance of people in a crisis like the current one, or new original medieval texts or new archaeological

99 images. The ability to use these online tools to analyze data is something that cannot be done in very packed classes with more than 300 students. It seems more appropriate to teach how to handle these tools through highly specialized online seminars and, additionally, to have hours of personal contact to solve doubts.

Another new tool that can help preserve the direct involvement of students in remote teaching is the possibility of using blockchain encryption data to exchange solutions to problems, texts or simply to discuss debates about ideas.

In the same line of argument of Manuel Castells, we believe that the flipped classroom will greatly improve the quality of teaching. Remember that flip the class is an expression that implies that the lessons are done online remotely and that the student has a personal tutorial to discuss and learn telematically individually. The pedagogical model of the 'flipped classroom' will allow, in the first instance, the transfer of learning outside the classroom, although it does not eliminate the convenience of face-to-face teaching time to increase the so-called meaningful learning; that is, the possibility for a student to associate new information with the one already learnt in order to readjust and improve his knowledge and cognitive skills.

These proposals might be received with no little uneasiness by readers refractory with the idea of a “new normality” following the effects of the pandemic of the Covid-19. For them, university life as we have known until now should be linked to the “old normality”. Perhaps time has come to avoid new generational and social gaps as Bob Dylan used to sing (The Times They Are a-changin ' ): “You better start swimming', or you'll sink like a stone. For the times they are a-changin”.

Raul Jimenez & Luis Moreno (Agenda Pública)(30Mayo2020)

100

3.4 Digitalized Civil Servants?

The cuff, or overlapping sleeve garment to preserve your shirts, has long represented the classic image of the office clerk. The famous sentence "come back tomorrow" alluded to by the Spanish writer Mariano José de Larra referred to the always unfinished process of adding a stamp to the document to be processed by the public employee behind a sinister gubernamental window. Now our society faces a dilemma of unavoidable proportions. The alternative is none other than to accentuate the bad practices inherited from the days of the nineteenth-century Napoleonic administration, when Spain declined in the international concert of nations due to its inability to modernize, in addition to suffering from the paralyzing military caudillismo of "command and control."

The Covid-19 crisis calls for the full digitization of our Public Administration to be implemented without further delay. Not a few public employees are desperately clinging to the desire for things to go back to the way they were before 2020. They fear for its inevitability and want to preserve their past jobs. Big mistake. Not only is it an antediluvian and reactionary approach --as opposed to efficient innovation that should be welcomed-- but the effects of which can only cause delegitimization towards the democratic public and to favor privileges towards private interest in the regiment of public affairs.

Law 11/2007, of June 22, on electronic access of citizens to Public Services, intended to regulate citizen interaction with the Public Administration. But until the provisions of this law, with a lukewarm will to be implemented, are fully operative, the telematic workings of

101 the Public Administration will carry on as in the past only until April 2, 2021. Seeing is believing.

It can be argued that the socio-economic upheaval caused by Covid- 19 has disrupted many things in the day-to-day operation of public services. Certainly. But this does not justify the deficiencies in the implementation of public policies such as the Minimum Income for needy citizens. Administrative delays and confusion hamper a program necessary for the material survival of the most precarious families who have requested these vital benefits. The political initiative can be bogged down if its application is not guaranteed and delivered appropriately.

As a scientific tool for participant observation, it is worth the illustration of the telematic and face-to-face silence of the Administration in the processing of the requested retirement pension benefit (as is the case of one of the co-authors of that article). After several frustrating attempts to contact and access the Social Security services electronically --or by "person personally"-- it turned out that the claimant had to use the 'traditional' postal services (but effective as he finally received a reply ) to request by registered mail the legal application of his retirement entitlement.

The implementation of an agile and comprehensive digitization of the Public Administration collides with some frustrating traditional mentality. In 2006 the electronic DNI was introduced, with a cost of close to 350 million euros. What percentage of the readers of these lines have used it? According to the economists Miguel Almunia and Pedro Rey, only 0.2% of the procedures with the Administration are carried out today using the DNI-e. Let us remember that, in order to sign electronically, citizens have to go to an office in person to obtain a certificate, at least once every four years.

102

The digital certificate was promoted as an electronic file that links signature verification data to a signer, so that only this signer can confirm his or her identity. It turns out that for its correct use it must be done from the same terminal point of the applicant's computer. Alternatively, a laptop must be purchased. The very last means enabled to identify yourself electronically is with the program cl@ve. Paradoxically, and to make it operational, you have to request a PIN that is received by ‘snail’ postal service.

This latter example highlights the lack of efficiency of the Spanish multilevel Public Administration. As we will show below, there are countries with very capable e-civil service systems, which do not need archaic measures such as the "keys" mentioned above. How is it possible that all kinds of banking operations --including investments in financial funds or in European or Spanish stock exchanges-- can be carried out with a self-generated password and the online system of the Public Administration remains in the Pleistocene of telematic communication?

Our experience as researchers --with our salaries being paid by taxpayer public money-- is that the increase in bureaucracy threatens the normal development of our scientific activity. In many cases, it even makes it impossible. And it is that administrative filters are continuously established which become disincentives to obtain funds in competitive calls. To these the researchers themselves must apply in order to obtain funds which they need to carry out their studies and scientific activities. It is neither logical nor functional that for the purchase, say, of a computer more than three months of tedious and administrative procedures should be devoted unnecessarily. It is then reminded that the established norms must be complied with, which constitute the great instrument of control and power of those

103 traditional officials with cuffs who, before any other consideration, fear for their professional future with obsolete skills not suitable with the digitization actively promoted by the EU.

In her last State of the Union address, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, referred to the Digital Decade. She pointed out that of the 750,000 million euros of the recovery plan, 20% should be directed to actions in the digital field, among which 5G connectivity should be highlighted. The Commission encourages removing unnecessary administrative obstacles and increasing the speed of the deployment of very high capacity networks. This historic opportunity represented by the European recovery fund faces the challenge that Spain could not be capable of processing the amount of money that has been made available to it on time.

Scientific research can and should help make such ambitious goals possible. We are very much afraid, however, that with the assistance of a part of the managers of our Public Administration (state attorneys and traditional civil servants), who have spent years preparing memoristically public competitions as authentic 'parrots' of recitation in the most Napoleonic procedural tradition, the goal of digital modernization appears little more than a 'mission impossible'. With this type of bureaucracy there is no science advancement.

It would be of little use to make the effort proposed by the economist Andreu Mas-Colell: “In 10 years we could incorporate 7,000 researchers. This can change a country”. In light of what the empirical evidence shows us, if we do not digitize the management of science, having more researchers can only feedback on the bad practices of demanding more delayed and even useless procedures for efficient research activity. "It is paradoxical, but it costs the Administration a lot of resources to spend its own money," pointed out in a recent article

104 José Amérigo, a partner at PwC Tax & Legal, who warned that administrative bottlenecks are inevitable if funds are not properly channeled. In short, he aims for officials to replace their usual "defensive criteria" with a more "audacious" vision.

As Víctor Lapuente rightly stated in his article on “Slaves of the Law”, the primary interest of the public employee is not to do something good, but to avoid doing something wrong. His claim that the ever- growing procedural rules are met, also hides a mentality that is primarily concerned with avoiding problems with his hierarchical civil servant bosses. According to Lapuente, if an official invented an algorithm to process the minimum income scheme in a record time, he/she could face problems for skipping the established procedures and he/she would not be rewarded for his creativity and efficiency. This approach limits the ability to innovate in Spain. The hundreds of thousands of people working with these procedures in the Spanish Public Administration may be as efficient as, say, their Dutch colleagues, but they are afraid of the consequences of their innovation.

Sometimes the comparisons are odious. In other cases they can be illuminating. We refer below to the case of Estonia as the most advanced country in the world regarding e-Estonia digital robotization of its government and governance. Close to 99% of government services can be done digitally on the internet. The officials of “flesh and blood” have been replaced by a conversational bot (chatbot) that addresses the person to solve their doubts. In Estonia, you can vote online, you can also renew your passport telematically, and you can even electronically incorporate a birth in the civil registry. Actually, these steps can be carried out from the apps on mobile phones. Other procedures include, for example, applying for unemployment benefits or applying for “face-to-face” assistance for a disabled relative or friend, which is highly advisable in times of pandemic confinement.

105 Estonians have not had to go in person to any physical office of the Public Administration in the last 20 years. Can the reader imagine the situation of not seeing the face of the human public official? In fact, in Estonia it is forbidden by law to request data more than once. That is, if the data was ever already entered, it is on the blockchain, and therefore the Artificial Intelligence program will already find it if it is necessary for another management, even if it dates back 100 years.

In the Baltic country they care a lot about digital security and that is why the government uses the blockchain to preserve the privacy of the citizens. This is KSI technology developed by the Estonians themselves. All the government departments are digitally connected and their databases intertwined. Education and healthcare services are highly digitized and available 24 hours a day with no physical points of contact or waiting lines. Everything can be done from the mobile phone. Estonia began as early as the 1990s to lay the foundations for a digital government without the direct presence of human officials. Remember that Estonia is the country where Skype was invented.

Do we want in Spain to continue increasing the offer of public employment for civil servants without basic instruction to make the progressive digitization of our Public Administration operational? Those citizens without the proper education to pass outdated processes of selection are to confront the dilemma of achieving a greater and better increase in digital preparation and individual human capital. Digitization will mean the disappearance of old, useless jobs that are harmful to preserve the well-being and common good of our societies. Ultimately, if they were left without a position as civil servants “for life”, they could always resort to the perception of the minimum income benefit, if this program were to be well managed digitally and electronically. Needless to say.

106 Luis Moreno & Raul Jimenez (Agenda Pública)(16Nov2020)

3.5 Endemic Pandemics and Global Households.

"Man is a neighborhood animal" Francisco Murillo

And when the Coronavirus ends, what? Will we go back to the previous situation? The conviction that the pandemic will pass into the trunk of memories is widespread among people. A trunk of bad memories for its harshness and socioeconomic effects. But will social processes really resume their ‘normal’ course as before 2020? Our prediction is a resounding "no". The impact of the crisis is so profound that few processes will return to their previous routines. Confinement will have changed people's attitude towards almost everything, and will have affected the territorial dimension of social life very especially. Even when home confinement ceases after the various de-escalation phases that are announced, our existential ‘chip’ will have to adjust to the new realities.

And it is that as Francisco Murillo, our ill-fated political scientist teacher, and whose quote is reproduced at the beginning of this article, the citizen in his condition of 'neighborhood animal' has had an easy, direct access in the immediacy of his home and fast to endless information and products generated from the four planetary cardinal points. The personal computer, and especially the smartphone, have provided an instant and permanent window to the outside world from the most intimate and home environment. Immanuel Wallerstein

107 himself, a pioneer in the global conceptualization in the face of statist and parochial analyses of the countries, has already highlighted the importance of households in the future configuration of socioeconomic relations and as basic units of the world system. The confinement has shown in an unappealable way the communicational optimization of all kinds of cultural, economic and entertainment activities. What would we have done (do) without our mobiles?

Undoubtedly, the most far-reaching socio economic consequence of the unfinished Covid-19 crisis is teleworking. It seems implausible that things will go back to the way they were before, once the vaccine has been developed, which we trust will be as soon as possible although it cannot be guaranteed, as has been the case with AIDS. In this article we emphasize the eventual development and optimization of city networks, a proposal that has been advanced for years, but which is gaining renewed interest in conjunction with the progressive digitization and robotization of our democracies.

Traditionally, the comparative advantage of cities as agglomeration economies has been stressed. With the extension, and intensification, of global communication on the Internet (World Wide Web), cities can optimize cybernetic resources, which in turn can largely determine a municipal urban planning with a 'human face' with the optimization of network economies. SOHOs (Small office / home office) are small businesses managed by home teleworking with potential benefits for family conciliation, the perverse effects of traveling by car, the type of home to be promoted, or the facilitation of cultural exchange online, let's say by case.

As has been reiterated with respect to the ‘universal laws’ of cities, the interaction between urban dwellers induces greater growth in wealth and information in contrast to the rural world. The argument is simple:

108 the more the network of connections develops, the easier it is to generate knowledge and wealth. This has traditionally been associated with urban population growth. In other words, jobs increase in cities and decrease in the ‘empty’ territory of the countries.

It also happens that the Covid-19 pandemic has questioned the vision of dense cities, since they are related to the dangers of the exponential expansion of diseases. Unlike what has happened in large cities such as Edinburgh - for years the city of residence of the authors of this article - and an example of urban 'good practice' and very conducive to the development of the aforementioned SOHOs, there are other hyperdensified metropolises such as Hong-Kong, New York- Manhattan or L'Hospitalet de Llobregat (with a population density 10 times greater than the city of Edinburgh), where pandemics and other perverse effects of the latest global capitalist development can become endemic (if not are already). Faced with such a scenario, the obvious alternative is to promote teleworking for those activities that spatially allow it. A recent example is offered by the technological company Twitter that has placed its employees to work 'remotely' for life, if the nature of their activity allows it (approximately 80% of its workforce). The big benefit for these employees is that they can leave California's congested and super expensive Silicon Valley and reside in less densely packed locations. The state of Vermont in the US (the equivalent to our Soria or Teruel) offers economic incentives to those people who become residents of the state and from there work remotely.

In a less densified city, with homes and occupations in a network, a good part of the economic and cultural activities of a family nature can be carried out at a distance. This benefits, for example, the reduction of pollution generated by the combustion of fossil fuels and is an incentive for greater effective gender equality with a more equitable distribution of household tasks. Therefore, it is desirable to have a

109 great impulse of technological development that allows the ‘virtualization’ of all that work that does not require physical presence outside the global home. Banking services are now practically ‘remote’, a process that should be completed to eliminate the need to travel to the branches of financial entities. In this regard, it is stimulating to see the effort of technological innovation and digitization of one of the leading Spanish entities. Serve as an example applicable to a variety of activities such as administrative procedures, official procedures before the public administration, travel or postgraduate higher education, to name a few of them.

The generation of networks must remain active and to achieve this it is necessary to continue researching in technology and innovation. This will improve virtual connections between the most delocalized and ‘empty’ populations and hyper densified population centers. As paradoxical as it may seem, this will be a benign consequence of the emergence of the malignant Coronavirus. And, as the old adage goes, there is no harm that does not come.

Luis Moreno & Raul Jimenez (Catalunya Press) (16th May 2021)

3.6 How is it Possible that Longer Working Days are the Norm in Times of Robotization than Before the Pandemic?

The dissemination of an internal survey among employees of the investment and securities bank Goldman Sachs has flown over the

110 social networks, but it does not seem to have attracted great reactions among the public.

Brussels promises to achieve immunization in the EU by mid-July, and it is understood that after vaccination everything will go back to the way it was before 2020. Actually, they want it to be as before. Big mistake.

A percentage of our work and leisure activities have already inexorably changed. Some changes are here to stay, such as teaching and academic conferences. It is a cry of helplessness to ignore in what percentage of change we are willing to fully assume the new normal.

In their first year at the investment bank Goldman Sachs, junior analysts work an average of 95 hours a week. That is, almost 14 hours a day. They sleep about 5 hours and there is no more time available for other tasks. They do weekly sessions of 80 hours. In Europe, a 32-hour one is requested in four days. The disparity of these work models is obvious.

In a previous study we had already highlighted the serious danger of serfdom that our robotized democracies are in. In this case, we point to the growing inequality that the new technological feudal lords are generating by exponentially accumulating wealth, power and influence in the majority of the governments of developed countries. What about

111 those who are perpetually "developing"? Remember how Facebook and Twitter decided to suspend Donald Trump's accounts, without the former president or any judge being able to do anything to prevent it.

3.6.1 The empire of investment funds How is it possible that in these times of inevitable robotization it is possible to work more than before the pandemic? Paradoxically, these new normalities occur in a sector where artificial intelligence permeates almost everything.

For example, there are highly automated investment tools such as Betterment that are offered to Spanish banks, and where the robot is much more efficient than the human to obtain benefits from investments in the stock market.

Another example is the investment conglomerate Renaissance Technologies, with its star the Medallion fund, of the famous mathematician Jim Simons.

The standard answer across the Atlantic to why you work so hard is, "Oh, but if they make so much money, what can they complain about?" For the new intelligent industrial revolution 4.0, exploitation is a privilege. The world turned upside down or more accelerated in the relations between feudal lords and new servants of the gleba?

3.6.2 Rudimentary algorithms Robotization carries the potential to free us from unwanted, repetitive and routine work. But how much does it cost to write the algorithms that tell the robot what to do? So-called computer programs are something extremely efficient and manual. They depend heavily on the

112 ability of the programmer to know the tricks. In many respects it is still a goldsmith's work.

Just a misplaced comma in the command of a line of computer code can cause the entire algorithm to collapse (a typographical error paralyzed the internet in 2017).

Programming languages are extremely rudimentary and require a great deal of manual work. Especially generalist and low-level programming languages that give direct instructions to the computer, such as the language C.

It is true that the task of programming is easier with high-level languages like Python, but it is still a painstaking and highly intensive process. The computer must know what to do.

It is true that there have been rudimentary advances such as the language wolframalpha where you can write in language normal what you want the algorithm to do. If this language were more powerful, the need for analysts working 100 hours a week would be unnecessary.

Our European social model requires that robotization is adapted to our objectives of a more ethical and just society, and that it moves away from the old practices of exploitation and inequality. This requires comprehensive and active legislation that preserves our social rights and the Welfare State.

Raul Jimenez & Luis Moreno (The Conversation)(AEAC) (07Abril2021)

113 3.7 Where is the Agora in the Virtualized Society?

In these times of isolation and social distancing, it is difficult to ignore the fact that Humans are social beings with an indispensable need for interaction with other people. The ongoing pandemic has put this aspect of human existence into renewed focus. It is not an accident that great political scholars have devoted their lives’ work to thinking about how society should be organised in order to keep “social peace”. Two political-philosophical treatises are worth mentioning in this context: Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes and The Prince by Nicolo’ Machiavelli. They are both important in that they establish how society should be organized hierarchically in order to remain functional. But as important is the ‘horizontal organization’: the venues and mechanisms through which citizens interact among themselves, and the common time they spend together. The Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the way we interact socially “di persona personalmente” as the character Catarella in the famous Sicilian-based novels Detective Montalbano liked to say. But underneath this sudden dramatic change a shift in the nature of social interaction had been already under way.

Historically, the temple and the marketplace as public spaces are as old as human settlement itself. But both of these had a primarily utilitarian rather than a political purpose. As Hannah Arendt remarks in The Human Condition,

The hallmark of these non-political communities was that their public place was not a meeting place of citizens, but a marketplace where craftsmen could show and exchange their products.

114 The Agora of Ancient Greece, by contrast, had a different purpose. At least in its ideal form, it was a place where citizens met not to trade and do business, but to discuss public affairs. It was the place where the political expression of the community took place, to the frustration of aspiring tyrants. To quote Hannah Arendt again:

“In Greece, moreover, it was the ever-frustrated ambition of all tyrants to discourage the citizens from worrying about public affairs, from idling their time away in unproductive ago-reuein (speaking openly) and politeuesthai (living as a citizen, and to transform the agora into an assemblage of shops like the bazaars of oriental despotism” (Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition).

The places of reunion kept evolving over the centuries. One dramatic development regarding meeting points is the appearance of cafes in Europe, beginning in the city of Venice in the 17th century. While coffee houses had existed before in the Ottoman world and it is to that culture that they owe their origin, they were to play an important social and political role over the next 400 years, coinciding with the ascendance of the urban Bourgeoisie in Europe. More than just a place to pass idle time, they functioned as a locus of germination for cultural and political change (There is no need to retell here the role of famous Parisian, Viennese, and Berlin cafes as centers of meeting points of intellectuals, artists and journalists in the 19th and early 20th centuries). A recent article already pointed to the role that cafes and restaurants play in contemporary society.

With the rush to the suburbs that occurred in the mid-20th century, especially in the USA, a new place for social gathering developed: The Shopping Mall. This new “Agora” became the place to gather, to see and be seen on weekends and, until very recently, was one of the few venues for social encounter in the suburbs, along with coffee shop

115 chains like Starbucks. But the spread of online shopping has pushed shopping malls in America towards disappearance. The consolidation of streaming services like Netflix has also meant the demise of cinemas, further reducing the possibilities of social interaction.

With the incessant shrinking of public spaces, modern life at the beginning of the 21st century remains focused on two pillars: The home and the workplace. The typical modern workplace is not a public space in the strict sense, and it is governed through hierarchical structures of power. However, it still serves as one of the few spaces of encounter outside of the domestic setting - the home of the nuclear family. The present Covid-19 pandemic has obviously transformed our working places drastically; but more than a sudden revolution, this has been the acceleration of a process that was already under way, enabled by technological advancements. The availability of high-speed internet connection has facilitated remote work. This was not possible 20 years ago when most internet connections were dial-in. Online collaboration tools have made it possible for teams to work efficiently from anywhere on earth. GitHub, a tool developed by the inventor of Linux, Linus Torvald, allows programmers to collaborate on writing computer code remotely, and video-conferencing tools like Zoom eliminate the need for face-to-face meetings. Google Docs, the tool we are using to write this very essay, not only allows for remote collaboration, but “intelligently” suggests spelling and grammar corrections. AI-based translation technology mediates collaboration across language barriers.

The virtualization of the workplace, which had been a slow and steady process, became the modus operandi for companies and institutions all over the world virtually overnight with the Covid-19 pandemic. Remote work became a necessity and also a convenience for those whose jobs allowed them to. Almost immediately after this shift,

116 Human Resources in large corporations started contemplating the “new workplace” post-COVID. Corporate Executives discovered that this is a cost effective way to run a company: No more paying for extremely expensive office real estate in Manhattan, London, Zurich, or Silicon Valley. Businesses still face important questions about the effectiveness of distributed teams in the long run, about workers' morals, team cohesion and corporate loyalty. But we leave those questions about the “New Work” to the management consultants. The goal of this article is to raise the questions about the ramifications of this new mode of work on the individual, and on their extrapolation to the larger society.

But what is not to like about working remotely? Forever would be gone: the awful commutes that waste precious hours from our days, the windowless offices with artificial lighting, and the annoying coworkers. It is difficult not to be lured to this nicer vision of life. Indeed, many localities are aiming to attract remote workers. The state of Vermont offers nice economic incentives to those who move to live there and work remotely. One can easily imagine the glory of living in a reasonably large house in Vermont and instead of commuting using that time for long walks in the woods or for skiing in winter. In Europe, the Greek government is also providing incentives for remote workers. Clearly, many people would love this dream situation of living and working in a remote Greek island, like the poet Leonard Cohen did in his youth. Except that by losing the physical workplace we will be losing one of the few remaining venues for social interaction with all that it entails in loss of social connections.

The Internet held the promise of being the ultimate Agora: A global space that expands the scope of encounter and dialogue without boundaries. In its early days the Web was indeed close to that ideal: Initially a platform to facilitate collaboration among scientists that

117 expanded to connecting other groups with common interests. But since then the massive process of consolidation and monetization has reshaped it substantially. The “virtual Agoras'' that emerged — Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms — are paradoxically both as open as ever (truly global), but also fertile ground for polarization and antagonism. It is important to mention the role of AI here in further increasing this polarization and alienation as a side effect of the automation of decisions about who interacts with whom and how. The biggest caveat of these “agoras”, of course, is that they are not public, but owned by private corporations, and controlled by a small number of “techno-tyrants” — an obvious fact that is easy to forget. A good example is the decision by Facebook and Twitter to disable the accounts of former President Trump accounts. Angela Merkel voiced concern about this and pointed out that a single person can decide about which voices are permitted in the e-Agora (regardless of their merit) and which are not, without any judicial involvement.

Underneath the virtualization of public spaces --the online marketplace, the digital workplace or the “cyber-agoras” of social media-- lies an implicit assumption that this process constitutes a superficial change in the modality of the encounter whose consequences, if any, are to increase the reach and efficiency of the encounters. But what is given up (often silently) is the face-to-face encounter. It is relevant here to invoke the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas for whom the encounter with the face of the Other establishes the basis of ethics:

“Firstly there is the straightness of the face, its directness, its defencelessness. The skin of the face is at its most naked and defenceless... The face is exposed, vulnerable, as if inviting an act of violence. At the same time, the face is what prohibits us from killing”.

118 Before being a category: a member of a certain race, religion or political affiliation, the Other whose face we encounter is irreducibly specific, irreducibly individual. Quoting Levinas again:

“(…) The face is meaning, and a meaning without context. I want to say that the Other, within the rectitude of the face, is not an individual in a context.”

Following Levinas’ thought, the virtual (faceless) encounter constitutes a new kind of experience, a new phenomenology, one where it is not clear what to ground ethics upon. One can see the increased polarization of the political discourse, and the resistance to wearing face masks, especially in the US in this light: As a symptom of social corrosion, lack of concern for the Other.

The enormous advantages of the current developments in technology, the convenience of having fast streaming at home, of shopping remotely and specially, being able to work from home or anywhere else, are not in doubt. We are certainly not ones to advocate for the return to the soul-crushing 9-5 office hours with long commutes in the winter days from New Jersey to Manhattan, something that both of us did for decades. But these changes have enormous consequences, and therefore cannot be driven only “from the bottom up”, through what is technically feasible, or economically beneficial. Even the exigencies of the pandemic cannot be left to dictate the permanent shape of the future. We keep hearing of the prophecies of the different world that will transpire at the other end of the pandemic. The question is where will we find the Agora in that world? Where will we encounter the face of the Other once it reappears from behind the mask?

Rabih Zbib & Raul Jimenez (Agenda Pública)(17April2021)

119 4. Technological Lords and Industry 4.0.

4.1 The New Useless Social Class.

Little by little the idea that the robotization of our democracies will make many paid jobs unnecessary is making its way into the collective imagination of the people. It is no longer scornfully rejected. Nor is it considered a futuristic fantasy. At the limit, the members of the "working classes" of the present think that they will not be affected. Big mistake. The Covid 19 pandemic crisis has highlighted the emergence of a new social class on the outskirts of the formal labor market. And it is not simply a question of a group of temporary precarious employees expecting to return to the ‘old normality’ of the workplace, as interpreted by some traditional unions of salaried workers. It is a new class called ‘useless’ by the incisive Israeli thinker, Yuval Noah Harari, and which is made up of superfluous jobs and employees. Let's see.

In 2013, a study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne examined, using innovative research methods, the characteristics of more than 700 jobs in the United States in 2010, which were likely to be automated and robotic in the coming decades . Their calculations and estimates said that up to 47% of jobs would be potentially subject to being replaced by robots or digital applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Big Data. AI provides algorithms without consciousness but which can do almost everything better (more productive) than humans.

120 Naturally, the ‘superfluous’ jobs liable to disappear more rapidly were identified as those low-skilled and routine ones. Only those based on ‘expert thinking’ aimed at solving problems --for which there are no regulated or predetermined solutions-- would be saved and would even be more in demand. But they would also be clearly insufficient to replace those other job surpluses. Would we condemn this new, useless class to ostracism, extreme poverty, and even their physical disappearance as Coronavirus-induced eugenics has so painfully shown us in nursing homes? It is already known that the local and global economic system continues to be made up of dyadic relationships that establish that what is productive is good and what is useless is bad.

The guaranteed minimum income programs (to survive, if at all) have been implemented precisely to avoid the processes described. It is not about public policies that respond sensu stricto to the basic right to life as some ‘idealists’ have been proclaiming for years in associations such as BIEN. But they help to resolve situations of social vulnerability and go in the right direction towards a long-standing aspiration for human dignity.

What would there be left for the new useless class to do? Nothing would prevent its members from their existential development without the requirement of wage labor. Critics will say that it would be the result of a tricky solidarity that would only favor lazy people who want to scrounge off the "public trough" and at the expense of others. However, no one could deny them their status as full citizens. Those who support the dictatorships of the subjects, and which are now euphemistically renamed illiberal democracies, as well as the Taliban of predatory neoliberalism, would fight for the elimination of the very concept of citizenship. For those of a more fundamentalist orientation,

121 the new "useless" even denies the biblical maxim that "you will earn your bread with the sweat of your brow" (Genesis 3:19).

But the data is stubborn and, despite the champions of the paid work ethic, it should not be ignored that there will be less and less paid work for those who want to autonomously take that route in their professional life projects. Furthermore, most of our planet is already patrimonialized by non-human intersubjective entities such as states and, to an increasing extent, corporations. In fact, the use of efficient algorithms to increase productivity and consumption proceed relentlessly in an instrumental way controlling societies and economies. This is the case of neo-feudalism that is expanding globally in an unstoppable way.

In a scenario of neo-feudalism that we are witnessing, the few are determined to control the resources of the new "servants from the glebe'' and of the new useless social class members. Trends in societies as that in the United States, with the ubiquitous presence and influence of the four great feudal lords (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google), point to a new social order. With the disruption of artificial intelligence, algorithms and robotization, and considering the technological change as a whole, the new corporate feudal lords maximize their operational maneuverability. They can not only do marketing analysis and deploy efficient marketing strategies. Its sophisticated studies of social research exceed the capacity of those that can carry out their public organizations. That is why large corporations are becoming more and more powerful and, therefore, untouchable. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckeberg are already talking with Trump as “equal” peers (imagine their relationships with authorities of small national governments). Faced with such a state of affairs, there is little that "sovereign and independent" states can do individually and “freely”.

122 Only a scenario like the one offered by the social rights of the Welfare States and the European Social Model, as a whole, can protect the right to life of subordinate and useless people. The alternative could well be, in the not too distant future, their submission to the vested interests of the great feudal lords. In the end, what we are dealing with concerns the very concept of citizenship. It is precisely the condition of citizens that confers identity and freedom to the people in the Old Continent. Alternatively, Anglo-American neoliberalism does not give up in seeking a neo -feudal future of control while maintaining --if not increasing-- the level of their capital gains. Robots can pay their corresponding taxes. Likewise, taxation can be enforced on all financial transactions, a redistributive policy which would facilitate citizens’ well-being and, therefore, would help to achieve a compassionate society as a whole. It is possible, and perhaps probable. Is it also desirable? Readers can make up their minds… .

Luis Moreno (Público)(Catalunya Press)(12Junio2020)

4.2 Google, Neo-Feudalism without Taxation.

The EU is facing a 'moment of truth', the resolution of which can change the course of socio-economic events, not only in the Old Continent but globally. It is a question of verifying if the Google tax will finally be implemented or will remain in a fiscal trigger that dissolves in the impositions of Anglo-American capitalism. The US has refused the possibility of imposing a tax on digital services of tech giants like Google and that they pay in the countries where they do business.

123

As the Treasury Secretariat has made known through letters addressed to countries such as Spain, France or Italy, the application of the Google tax would lead to retaliation by the US administration. For now, the US has withdrawn from the negotiations carried out within the OECD to achieve a common position in order to establish a global tax on the matter. In the case of Spain, a bill is already being processed that would tax 3% of the income that technology multinationals obtain from the exploitation of their users' data, as well as from advertising 'bombardment' and other services online. Simplifying the discussion, it would be a question of the four new digital feudal lords (Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft) paying - still very partially - their tithes to the estates of the countries where they generate and collect their huge profits.

The neo-liberal champions of the unrestricted market consider it anathema that the neo-feudal initiatives that have generated so much business in recent decades are fiscally limited. However, think of those global neo-feudal lords that have returned to their American winter quarters to pay their taxes, taking advantage of President Trump's tax cuts in 2017. Remember that his tax reform - approved by the minimum difference of 51 votes to 49 in the Senate - allowed the US government to expand the public deficit by 1.5 trillion (millions of millions) of dollars in the next few years until 2028. The approved bill included temporary tax cuts for the wealthiest taxpayers, as well as permanent tax cuts for corporations . This translated into a reduction in corporate tax from 35% to 20%, as well as a reduction in the ceiling for the highest incomes (from 39.6 to 35%). According to Trump's proclamations, such tax cuts would stimulate productive activity and promote economic growth. All of this should revert to new investments and prosperity for the whole of society. However, the so- called “trickle down economics'' in the times of the Reagan and Bush

124 presidencies, father and son, in reality already resulted in an increase in inequality and the fiscal deficit, causing, in their turn, inflation, stagnation and less prosperity for all.

Donald Trump did get tax-favored treatment from large corporations like Google or Apple. It is well known that the communication giants had avoided paying taxes for their operations outside the US. Already in May 2016, the EU demanded that Apple ought to pay 13,000 million euros in unpaid taxes to Ireland, considering that the tax pact that Dublin had offered to the multinational should be considered as illegal state aid. Faced with Trump's tax reform, Apple began to consider in early 2018 the “repatriation” of its cash earnings that it had been maintaining in various countries around the world. Up to 94% of the total cash of 269 billion dollars - the amount that it held outside the United States - would be declared as earnings and would pay the US treasury the amount of 38 billion dollars for it (equivalent to a quarter of the annual cost of pensions in Spain. With the new tax regulations, Apple announced that it would contribute to the prosperity of the US economy with the creation of 20,000 new jobs in the period 2018-2022. A decision that aligned with Trump's predictions regarding his famous slogan election of "America first", And it is that shortly after arriving at the White House, Trump's appeals to protectionism understood globalization in an "Anglo" sense, a reinterpretation to which the United Kingdom has chosen after the Brexit referendum of June 2016.

Actually, the US and UK are still interested in globalization, as long as they profit from it. This selfish vision defines not only the economic strategies of both countries, but they are the expression of a certain Anglo-Saxon culture and civilizing values. And it is that the performance of the great champions of Anglo-American neoliberalism has always pursued self-interest. The neoliberal mantra has insisted ad nauseam that the public has always been the problem and, therefore,

125 the market was the solution. However, its aversion to public controls is not at odds with giving its approval to government actions that seek to strengthen its negotiating capabilities for its own benefit, such as the Google tax. In this sense, and as the illustrious social theorist pointed out in the late 1970s Michel Foucault, neoliberalism should be identified with a practice of permanent surveillance and intervention.

After the convulsion caused by the Coronavirus pandemic, the European Social Model suffers the neo feudal onslaught of large global corporate interests that tortuously evade the principles of tax justice so necessary for the maintenance of the Welfare State, guarantor of citizenship rights. As an alternative, submission is offered to the new digital feudal lords. The 'moment of truth' has arrived for the EU, if it is to offer any alternative to the self-serving one-sidedness of Anglo- American capitalism.

Luis Moreno (Público)(Catalunya Press)(Galicia Press)(26June2020)

4.3 New Technological Feudal Lords (NTFL) go to Capitol Hill.

Yes, but don't you think that they went up ‘hand-in-hand’ the famous steps of the emblematic building of the US legislature, next to the headquarters of the Supreme Court. Nor that they took a photo together. It was a question, as it corresponds more and more to our times, of a telematic session. The bosses of Amazon (Jeff Bezos), Apple (Tim Cook), Google (Sundar Pichai) and Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg) responded to be 'accountable' for their business practices to the American parliamentarians. The issues were 'low profile'

126 referring to his alleged anti-competitive practices and dominant position in the markets, and criticism for his anti-conservative political positions (anti-Trump, it should be specified, by influential media owned by some of the feudal lords). The New York Times itself described them as “withering questions’” meaning how stale and outdated they are in a world that has already changed its epochal era.

In reality it was rather a session to render parliamentary courtesy on the part of the New Technological Feudal Lords (NTFL). They know well that their power and influence are already untouchable. Regarding money, the figures may seem dizzying but it is convenient to give some contrasting data so that the reader can understand its aggregate value in the socioeconomic life of the times. When the economies of the most industrialized countries collapsed, the NTFL companies registered in a single day (July 28, the day of the parliamentary hearing) latent capital gains of more than 16 billion euros. This amount is equivalent to more than six times the annual cost of the recently implemented minimum vital program in Spain. This basic income scheme is expected to reach around 850,000 Spanish households in situations of vulnerability and poverty (the amount ranges between €460 euros per adult and €1015 euros for a family of five members).

If you prefer an alternative comparison, consider that these capital gains generated in a single day reached a figure equivalent to the payment of one eighth of the total pensions in Spain, the amount of which represents the largest outlay of the Spanish welfare state (around 12% of the GDP, as it was before the collapse of economic production as a result of the pandemic). The crisis caused by the Coronavirus clearly delimits the borders of those who win and lose. Unequivocally, the New Technological Feudal Lords (NTFL) win, and much, and the nation states lose, also much.

127 The truth of the matter is that after the takeoff of the so-called fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), the renewed socioeconomic structuring has enhanced the autonomy of corporations and has reinforced the power of the technostructure. Thus, an oligopolistic situation has been consolidated in which the public powers are accepted in their subsidiary role that allows the activity of the new corporate feudal lords without major obstacles or shocks (helping, for example, through the obsessive neoliberal control of inflation and accepting the philosophy of unlimited economic growth). In reality, the private governance of the economy seeks to impose ways of life and fiscal expectations on citizens according to their own cultural and organizational parameters.

The corporate power of the NTFL is also achieved in their ability to take advantage of the public sector in their own interest. The new feudal lords who are members of the economic elites increasingly have the resources and channels of influence to maximize their income statements through rewards provided by the taxpayers’ own money through fiscal aid and subventions. As early as 1995, it was estimated in 8,5 billions the public money that corporations and plutocrats received from the US government through all sorts of subsidies, handouts, deductions and tax loopholes, or simply tricks (ripoffs) and frauds (scams). The increasing destination of high income (more in financial capital, and less of salaried work) goes to the hands of the same people, who take advantage of their influence capacities and who shamelessly practice corporate homogamy.

With their legislative lobbying activities, through the action of powerful lobbies, the NTFL get the approval of laws that even eliminate competition between corporations and exacerbate the oligopolization process that has already reached global proportions. The ideological persuasiveness of the elites tends to pave the

128 fulfillment of their objectives. This was the case with financial deregulation during Alan Greenspan's years at the head of the US Federal Reserve (1987-2006), which facilitated a type of growth where greedy enrichment prevailed over any other consideration, whether it was the creation of 'decent' employment. or the reduction of social inequalities.

With the increasing robotization of our democracies, the management of large packages of big data is accumulated by the large monopolies and the NTFL. By using such information, the new corporate feudal lords can not only do marketing analysis and marketing strategies. Its sophisticated social research studies exceed the capacity in many cases of what can be carried out by public bodies. That is why large corporations are becoming more and more powerful and untouchable. Faced with such a state of affairs, there is little that nation states can do, as we have known them until now. The phenomenon of populisms must be seen as a desperate consequence to slow the hands of the clock and rescue the Westphalian nation-state from past history. These attempts are a vain task in a globalized world where transversality inevitably conditions the individual options of the countries. Certainly the NTFL have not bowed to the power represented by the Capitol in their recent telematic chat.

In the meantime, one might wonder about Europe and the NTFL. With no little naïvity, there is talk about technological sovereignty in the Old Continent to face the corporate interests and actions of the large US parent technology companies. They have already consolidated their power and influence in the North American country and are increasingly doing so in subordinate countries such as the United Kingdom. They will soon increase their oligopolistic presence in Europe. Faced with this, the option is to act increasingly united in

129 defense of the European Social Model, or to confront a scenario in which the EU is engulfed by the new global corporate feudal relations.

Luis Moreno (Público)(Catalunya Press)(06Aug2020)

4.4 The Social Dilemma of Surveillance Capitalism.

Conspiracy theories feed sensationalist news or endless tales of the most varied tones and tastes. Some, however, can materialise in tragic episodes, such as the case of the blast of a motor-home a few days ago in Nashville. Preliminary investigations suggest that the suicide bomber, Anthony Quinn Warner, intended to sabotage a telecommunications substation, which he partially succeeded in doing, leaving the area without landline service. His particular obsession was the new 5G technology to which other 'conspirators' on the web have blamed all sorts of evils, such as the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic itself. Perhaps some readers of this article have come to believe this at face value. The illustration of conspiracy theories touches on the most essential issue of the direction of our societies, particularly as regards the so- called 'advanced' democracies. There is an ominous drift with the spread of so-called surveillance capitalism, based on the massive and permanent use of smartphones (estimated at 2 billion users worldwide), and their exploitation for profit by the New Technological Feudal Lords (NTFL): Amazon (Jeff Bezos), Apple (Tim Cook), Google (Sundar Pichai) and Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg). They are also known as the GAFA group. It should be recalled that on 28 July itself, the day of their parliamentary hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, they generated latent capital gains for their companies of

130 more than 16 billion euros. This amount is equivalent to more than six times the annual cost of the recently implemented scheme of minimum income in Spain. A few years ago, social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff coined the expression ‘surveillance capitalism’ in reference to the commodification of personal data accumulated by the NTFL in exponential quantities. Through the computation and maximisation of new artificial intelligence technologies and efficient digital algorithms and data mining, the traces compiled from users' frantic surfing are utilized for profit. Such information obtained from clicks on our mobile phones is standardised as a commodity to be bought and sold to advertising companies which appear seamlessly on the screens of our telematic devices. We are talking about billions of euros in profits. It is highly advisable to watch the recent documentary, The Social Dilemma, in which, in addition to Zuboff’s arguments on the manipulation of the new business model, thus euphemistically renamed, other former executives, designers and creatives of the companies of the GAFA group, warn us of the pernicious effects of stealthy and permanent practices of obtaining information from citizens. The latter are instrumentalized into profitable consumers through an addiction to incessant scrolling on the networks. In addition to propagating 'amusing' terraplanist narratives, the electoral and political struggle is artfully intervened in with the profusion, for example, of white supremacist positions and fake news, lies and hoaxes so skilfully used by political populists and illustrated during the presidency of Donald Trump (surely he won't be back in 2024?). Somewhat following the commendable example of the great contemporary whistleblower hero, Edward Snowden, the whistleblowers portrayed in The Social Dilemma are like conscientious defectors from companies like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram who explain that the noxious social networks are the feature, not a bug

131 (NYT). The documentary also takes a brief look at the deleterious effects on young people's mental health of the disproportionate use of persuasive psychology practices that shape their market preferences and generate frustrations inducing an increasing suicide rate. The processes of polarisation and subliminal 'brainwashing' are reflected in destructive social processes as exemplified by the Nashville auto- bomber case or the rampant increase in gun sales. For some of the experts of The social dilemma, the future development horizon (no more than 20 years) would lead to civil war, the result of a polarisation fuelled by this technological dystopia. The manipulation of vigilante capitalism is not being met with the necessary regulation in the USA and in countries under the monopolising paradigm of Anglo- American neoliberalism. The EU has devised regulatory measures with the General Data Protection Regulation that can induce effective changes to prevent the ongoing harmful commodification. The dilemma is the well-known collision between a democratic European Social Model based on the Welfare State, its basilar institution, and the unrestrained commercial predation of the New Technological Feudal Lords (NTFL) of Anglo-North American matrix. The Chinese 'neo- slavery' model under the authoritarian Communist Party has, for its part, designed a different digital model, but with similar profitability goals to those of its neoliberal competitors. Beyond mercantile interests and control through the spurious use of the otherwise necessary and inevitable digitalisation, there remains the everlasting existential contrast between individual agency and societal structure. Citizens can always ‘control’ the coming dystopia by refusing to enter the websites and web pages that are constantly offered to us on our mobiles as panaceas of a new Brave New World. For the moment, functional syncretism --which (almost) can do anything-- has taken the lead in the race to maximise the new business model in the networks. Money makes the world go round and round, does it..? Happy New Year.

132

Luis Moreno (Público)(CatalunyaPress)(31Dic2020)

4.5 The Capitalist Class Goes to Paradise.

… or tax haven, to be more precise. It is not the working class to do it, as Elio Petri titled his celebrated film, The Working Class goes to Heaven, Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival in 1972. Certainly it is not achieving its emancipatory nirvana in the everlasting class struggle.

Beyond the conceptual discussion about the scope and effects of historical materialism in people's lives, the last two world crises of the 2007-08 financial quasi-liquidity and the unfinished COVID 19 pandemic have resulted in 'won paradises' by the capitalist class. Whatever the databases are used, it is found that the rich are getting richer and richer as established by the so-called 'Matthew effect', referred to in academic discussions and taken from the biblical New Testament. Thus, “... For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away”(25:29).

The figures may seem dizzying but it is convenient to give some contrasting data so that the reader can understand their value in the socioeconomic life of our times. It turns out that when the economies of the countries were mercilessly suffering the effects of the Covid-19 crisis, the companies of the New Technological Feudal Lords (NTFL), that is to say Amazon (Jeff Bezos), Apple (Tim Cook), Google (Sundar Pichai) and Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg) recorded in a single day (July 28, 2020, the day of their parliamentary hearing at the US Capitol in Washington DC) latent capital gains of more than 16,000 million

133 euros. This amount is equivalent to more than six times the annual cost of the approved -and painstakingly implemented-- scheme of minimum income in Spain. This basic income is expected to reach around 850,000 households in situations of vulnerability and poverty (the monthly payment ranges between €460 euros per adult and €1,015 euros for a family of five members).

As an alternative comparison, the reader may consider that these capital gains generated in a single day reached a figure equivalent to the payment of one eighth of the total annual pensions in Spain, the amount of which represents the largest expenditure of the Spanish welfare state (around 12% of GDP before the pandemic). The crisis caused by Covid-19 clearly delimits the borders of those who win and those who lose. Unequivocally, the NTFL) win, and a lot, and the nation states also lose a lot. More do the poor and disinherited.

And meanwhile the capitalist class carries on its fiscal pilgrimage to tax havens, where few, very little taxes are paid. Also, why invest in economic activity that creates jobs? Too cumbersome and facing uncertain profitability these days. Although it was not always like that. Continuing in the American context, it should be remembered that during Bill Clinton's first term (1993-1997), when the very rich paid almost double taxes, 11,5 million jobs were created in the United States, which contrasted with the fall in employment during George W. Bush's 'tax holidays' period. Unemployment doubled in the period from the end of the Clinton presidency (2001) to the end of the Bush presidency (2009), reaching 8% of the labor force.

The growing inequality in countries like the USA is so shamefully produced that even some billionaire captains of the industry (Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, for example) cry out about the fiscal injustice that makes them win --without even pressing the corresponding

134 telematic button-- huge amounts of money to enhance their corporate accounts.

The neo-liberal champions of the unrestricted market consider it anathema that the neo-feudal initiatives that have generated so much business in recent decades are to be fiscally limited. They keep quiet, however, about global multinationals which have returned to their American winter quarters to pay their taxes there, taking advantage of the tax cuts approved by President Trump in 2017. All this should translate --it is argued-- in new investments and in prosperity for all (in the US?). However, the so-called “trickle down economics” in the times of the Reagan and Bush presidencies, father and son, actually triggered an increase in inequality and the fiscal deficit, causing in turn inflation, stagnation and a lower increase in income for all, particularly for the working poor. This was not the case for the 1% of the super-rich.

The tax reform sponsored by Trump allows the public deficit to expand by 1,5 trillion (millions of millions) of dollars until 2028. The program includes tax cuts for the wealthiest taxpayers, as well as permanent tax cuts for corporations. This has been reflected in reductions in the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20%, as well as a reduction in the ceiling for the highest incomes (from 40% to 35%).

In February 2018, the billionaire Warren Buffett informed the shareholders of his multinational conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway that, following Trump’s tax cuts, he had obtained extra income in his 2017 income statement worth about 27 billion dollars, an amount that accounted for almost half of the group's net profits. Since the pandemic began, American 'super millionaires' have made a trillion- dollar profit.

135 In the paradise of the plutocrats, there are hardly any places left for worshipping the new ‘golden calves’. In the meantime, salaried workers (and those unsalaried) in Spain wait for the funds of the European Recovery Fund to be effectively invested in new projects to promote economic activity and for the creation of jobs, or at least to provide for social protection programs that would enable them to exercise their legitimate citizenship rights and entitlements.

Without collecting taxes and avoiding tax evasion, it is difficult to govern for all and to meet social demands. Surprisingly as it may seem, not long ago some Spanish social-democratic politicians were of the opinion that lowering taxes was a genuine left-wing policy. Seeing is believing …

Luis Moreno (Público)(CatalunyaPress)(04March2021)

4.6 Cryptomoney: Is China Taking the Lead?

The news had already circulated in the inner circles of the technologists during the last year. It has only gained interest in the 'general public' in recent weeks. The Chinese government has begun migrating the Renminbi, its legal tender (also known as Yuan in the West), to a cryptocurrency platform. This means that the Chinese currency does not have hardware support and will move into the virtual world of blockchain, i.e. in a database that can not be changed. No other country or international entity has carried out this type of operation. Facebook (one of the New Technological Feudal Lords (NTFL)), tried to create its own cryptocurrency Libra, an initiative

136 neutralized by the US government. That was a wise decision by the US government, from our point of view, as we argue in this article.

Remember the 'physical' strength already acquired by the Renminbi / Yuan in the world of international finance. Just look at the data on US debt, which in 2020 reached $ 27 trillion. Of this outrageous amount, China holds almost 15% of the total bonds and obligations issued by the US Treasury. Some financial analysts believe that, in the medium-long term, China intends for the Renminbi / Yuan to replace the dollar as global currency. Now, it seems to be the turn of its intervention in the world of crypto money. This would be part of his strategy to regain an economic leadership that it shared and that was later taken from China by Western colonial rule throughout the world. It should be remembered that China generated a quarter of the world's gross domestic product from the 1st to the 19th century; at that point the European Industrial Revolution relegated China from its leading role.

The best known virtual currency, bitcoin, uses peer-to-peer technology and, in particular, the blockchain to operate. And it does so without the backing of a central or banking authority. The management of exchanges and the issuance of bitcoins is carried out collectively by the network in our robotized democracies. Keep in mind that the information through cloud computing in blocks (block) is linked in a chain (chain) for later use. Each block is encrypted in such a way that only the owners can decrypt the information when it is required to make, for example, a financial transaction. The fact that the blocks are distributed throughout the cloud makes it impossible to intervene or remove them simply by shutting down a server. The blocks live in the cloud.

Cryptocurrency relies on a completely virtual and virtualized process to determine its initial value. Its 'appraisal' is arbitrary and is not

137 backed by any asset, material or otherwise. The value of the cryptocurrency is updated depending on the demand and is adjusted by solving encryption keys. The more encryption keys that are resolved to add blocks to the chain, the more money an individual makes. The more individuals who are interested in a certain cryptocurrency, the more value it has. Apparently all this resembles the well-known 'little stamp scam', that is to say a pyramidal scam of which so many have existed in the history of human picaresque.

The origin of cryptocurrency is none other than the need of criminal networks, including drug and arms traffickers, to articulate a mode of monetary transaction that totally escapes the control of democratic governments. Let no one think that the cryptocurrency has a romantic origin to provide another libertarian instrument. It is the macabre complement to the network Tor, which is a similar system that is used, among other things, for the commercialization of illegal drugs, weapons, prostitution and even for organ trafficking (for example, finding organ donors/sellers such as kidneys, livers or corneas).

Cryptocurrency should not be confused with digital operations that we do with our non-virtual currencies, such as the Euro. Due to the pandemic, the process of abandoning physical currency, or banknotes to make payments, has accelerated in the world (by the way, paper money is a Chinese invention). This is illustrated by the possibility of a simple purchase in a bakery or on a trip on a public city bus. You don't even need to pay with a credit or debit card. Through Technology touchless, or near field communication (NFC), we can pay for our purchases with our mobile or smart watch. This process was already underway, but the pandemic has accelerated its adoption to avoid physical contact that involves the use of physical money. Coins are not to be sucked ...! Our elders warned us in past childhood times. Quite a

138 premonition given the lethal development of the Coronavirus, which they have suffered dramatically and differentially with a greater number of deaths.

Such digital transactions are based on money backed by governments that use their assets, whether of prestige or material, to give value to their currency as international financial references. This is the case of the US dollar or the British pound, which are extremely uncomfortable with the global success of the Euro. Its transactions are carried out through the protocol SWIFT (Society for World Interbank and Financial Communications), which in 2018 had more than 11,000 financial entities in 204 countries linked, operating 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

Cryptocurrency is something different. As we have pointed out, it is based on encryption and blockchain technology. The fact that the blocks are distributed throughout the cloud makes it impossible to intervene or remove them simply by shutting down a server. The blocks live in the cloud.

Not only is the blockchain used for virtual economic transactions, it can be used for other purposes. For example, publishing a book or a manifesto that no government can withdraw from circulation. To do this, it would have to completely shut down the global internet network. The blockchain therefore presents a fundamental ethical problem: how to monitor a technology that could allow illicit activities to be carried out with virtually no possibility of control.

139 libertarian or anarchist characters, who do not like the government like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, who have tried to establish their cryptocurrency and thus avoid government controls. Now, the great world power on the rise is the one that has decided to free itself from controls, why? Simply because the cryptocurrency is controlled by the Chinese government in a pyramidal and hierarchical way, as corresponds to the communist capitalist model, or “political” so labelled by Branko Milanovic from dictatorial or authoritarian countries like China, Russia, Singapore or Vietnam.

Thus, it is the Chinese authorities and, ultimately, the hierarchy of the Communist Party of China, the depository of the keys to make transactions in the chain blocks and ultimately control what type of transactions each citizen makes. There is another instrumental reason of great relevance. Consider that if the Renminbi / Yuan becomes a functional cryptocurrency, the possible sanctions or operational controls of North Americans or Europeans would be ineffective, since they do not have inspection mechanisms of that blockchain. It would be of little use for the SWIFT digital money system if transactions are carried out on the blockchain encrypted by the Chinese government.

There are other more disturbing scenarios. Imagine that economic policies resort to an enhancement of 'consumption'. The Chinese authorities could simply impose a period of time on each citizen to use their money, so that they could be forced to spend buying things and thus stimulate the economy. The alternative would be the loss of savings' crypto money. A new type of 'corralito' would be generated in which consumers would be induced to spend and 'heat up' economic growth.

If China decides to transfer its economic operations to cryptocurrency, the possible sanctions to try to pressure the Chinese authorities to

140 respect human rights or limit their levels as the world's absolute greatest polluter would be innocuous. Consider the effects of global warming on the recent news that the level of 420 ppm (particles per million) in CO2 has been exceeded, something highly alarming. We should be very concerned about the environmental impact of transforming what would be, sooner rather than later, the world's largest global economy into crypto money. This, in addition, is highly harmful environmentally.

And it is that crucial for the cryptocurrency are the 'miners'. These are processes developed by people or entities that are continuously verifying the chain and making the blocks consistent so that they can be added to the chain. A block is not incorporated into the chain until it has been properly verified, that is, encrypted, by the 'miners'. As payment for this work, the miners are rewarded with bitcoins (i.e. crypto donors). A miner is nothing more than a computer, or 'farm' of computers, that are continuously processing the encryption of the chain in order to add blocks. Such a process is very costly from the point of view of computational operations, which in turn wastes energy. According to Dutch economist Alex de Vries, the record rise in the price of bitcoin earlier this year "... could lead the network to consume as much energy as all the data centers in the world, with a carbon footprint comparable to that of London".

Ultimately, crypto money can be valued as outright absurdity. Its sole purpose, really, is to create a totally opaque transaction system that no authority outside the chain can regulate. But its implementation can endow those who implement it with considerable resources of power. That is the case that we confront with the embryonic initiatives of the Chinese authorities.

141 Our European Social Model should be on the lookout for the events that have accelerated in recent times in the Far East and that, without the slightest shadow of a doubt, frontally question the survival of its emblematic institution, the democratic Welfare State. Watching the procession of state control go by implies the acceptance of its coming absolute power, as already advanced by Carl Schmitt. But is democracy possible in the cryptomoney dominance as understood from the concept of "total state"?

(Raul Jimenez & Luis Moreno, Agenda Pública, April 2021)

142 5. Individual agency and social life.

5.1 Social Escapists. Glanders corresponds to an existential state prescribed in our societies of compulsive happiness. If you are not happy, you better die. The construction of a world of our own in continuous vital excitement is alpha and omega for the philosophy of life of many people. Those who do not succeed find themselves in frustration tamed by escapism, often pharmacological. In recent years, the consumption of antidepressants and anxiolytics in Spain has grown exponentially. Yet, such consumption patterns pale in comparison to the deleterious plague that is spreading in the United States with the rampant use of painkillers and opiates.

For not a few frustrated American 'losers' --in a society of winners and losers-- the comfort of gorging on medical drugs is enough to get through the days and hours. In 2016, the economist at Princeton University, Alan Krueger, published surprising data regarding the use of painkillers in the North American country. According to their research, almost half of men between the ages of 25 and 54 who were not active at work took medication daily to relieve pain (or the perception of it). Two thirds of them did so with a medical prescription.

The prestigious Brookings Institution issued a report on the opioid epidemic in which the use of opiates was identified as a decisive factor in the reduction of the male workforce, which had fallen in September 2015 to a minimum of 62% of the total of the male population. The White House Council of Economic Advisers itself published another

143 disturbing report in which it estimated losses of almost 3% of US GDP in 2015, as a result of drug abuse. Not only the increase in medical expenses and the number of hours not worked due to pharmacopoeia addiction were taken into account, but also due to deaths caused by overdoses. The cost was half a trillion (million million) dollars, a figure not too far from half of Spain's GDP.

My admired colleague Helena Béjar, essayist and professor of sociology at the Complutense University of Madrid, points out that our individualized society has stimulated zombie ways and conventions, eliminating old certainties such as those provided by marriage and the family, still in deep transformation, which they counteract with unequal fortune the normative chaos of liquid modernity. “Outside of them is the emotional and sexual desert, loneliness, depression and the abyss of suicide. Inside, the economic mattress in times of crisis, the affective lifeline, the emotional energy that others give us and that keeps us as linked beings”, writes the author of Happiness: Modern Salvation.

As social beings, humans count on others for happiness and well- being. Or is it no longer like this? According to the proclamations of possessive individualism, each one is the sole owner of his skills and abilities, and he owes little to his fellow men for this. Asocial individuals are allergic to the Welfare State, and only accept a residual version of it with minimum cost and maximum benefit for them. It is intended to achieve an individualized autonomy that does not necessarily need others. Economic globalization and the spread of the neoliberal Anglo-North American globalization model reduce the forging of self-sufficient individual identities to a purely matter of taste, orphaned from the common effort of citizens and the protection of public institutions.

144 Thus, the risks inherent in social life must be covered, in the first instance, by the individuals themselves. In the words of Margaret Thatcher, “… there are individuals, men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything if it is not through the people, and the people have to take care of themselves, first and foremost. Our duty is to take care of ourselves, and [only] after take care of our neighbor ”. Society is thus reduced to a market society. If anything, and instead of a militancy of hostility towards the social collective, a position of self-sufficiency in a personal key is preferred with an avoidance of social obligations. This does predominate -- however paradoxical it may seem --in highly individualistic societies-- like the Nordic ones, but with a high personal internalization of the duties towards others.

In this type of Nordic social individualism, citizens vicariously summon state welfare institutions to care for those in need of help, perhaps avoiding direct personal involvement. But the high degree of mutual trust and social capital of Scandinavian societies makes possible a great institutional solidarity in a 'society of individuals' willing to pay generously with their taxes, high benefits and social services. Such societies are not, of course, exempt from criticism. For lovers of crime fiction, I highly recommend reading the famous intrigues of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, written between 1965 and 1975, during what became known as the Golden Age of state social welfare. Beyond the police warp developed in each of the novels, the critical gaze of the authors sneaks in --still surreptitiously-- denouncing that not everything was 'gold that glittered' in the prosperous and civilized Swedish society of the 1960s- 70. His steely dissection is of a moral character with respect to the persistence of criminal deviationism and a certain mentality of individualistic withdrawal.

145 To ‘playing Suede', a label as we refer to in Spain of being aloof and distant, is not simply to take refuge in individual project options of a closed and boring nature. The rankings of the countries where people live better in the world insist on positioning the northern Europeans in the first positions. Is it for something, or is it just an exercise of statistical escapism?

Luis Moreno (Público)(Catalunya Press)(Galicia Press) (31Jan2019)

5.2 Let Them Do The Selling. A recent piece of news about the imminent opening of supermarkets by the technological giant Amazon without human cashiers has once again gone unnoticed by a large part of the economic elites in Spain. The reaction of a government in “perpetuum mobile”, moving forwards or backwards, is just non-existent. It is an executive which has been shaken for months with self-inflicted wounds and external wounds produced at will by the diverse political formations of the opposition.

The fact of opening supermarkets without human clerks is perhaps not the most striking thing about the said news. It is the fact that the technology developed by Amazon can report sumptuous profits when sold to other companies that would be willing to apply such an innovative application in their stores, and who would become just subsidiaries of this new technological feudal lord (NTFL). Amazon, in line with other NTFL, continues to strive to robotize most of its commercial operations and, thus, ours are increasingly robotized democracies. The outcome is none other than to eliminate salaried

146 labor as much as possible. In addition, we now know that Amazon also wants to sell the technology and seize a highly profitable market.

The phrase “let them invent” is associated with the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno in the beginning of the 20th century. That was a time when Spain was trying to recover from the so-called disaster of 1898, which had led to the loss of its status as a colonial power and the collapse of a disoriented society and economy. It is not surprising that the phrase was assumed as an expression of a collective attitude in a depressed and disoriented country, after a century of dictators and military caudillos, whose commemorative statues still decorate some of the towns and cities around Spain.

The phrase depicted the unease of a society unable to adapt to the technological development of the time and to favor a knowledge society. Anecdotes are known, some of them apocryphal in tone. As that in reference to the battle of Santiago de Cuba was a mere target shooting exercise given the enormous technological superiority of North American warships during the Spanish-American War. The perception then was that a controlled demolition was taking place and was induced by a Spanish Government regarding colonies that sooner or later were going to be lost. In parallel, the clientelist regime of the Restoration (1874-1931) could be preserved in the metropolis. The technological superiority was reflected in the assessment that just one US warship would have sufficed to sink the entire Spanish Navy.

One hundred and twenty years have passed since Spain ceased to be a relevant country in the international concert of nations. Now, it is in the second world division of the states and it approaches the project of Europeanization to hide its deficiencies. Let's review some numbers that illustrate the situation of helplessness regarding

147 technology and innovation in Spain, an issue that concentrates the main interest in this analysis.

The technology giant Amazon invests annually US23,000 billion in R&D&i (Research, Development and innovation). By comparison, the Telefónica company invested close to 1 billion last year, an amount that barely reaches 4% of what Amazon does. The Spanish national budget in R&D&i is about US$7 billion(rounded up, to be positive), that is, 30% of Amazon's budget. Actually, since half of this money is made up of credits, which are almost never taken up in full; only half is actually spent. In short, Spain spends just 15% on research of what Amazon does.

As pointed out, around half of the Spanish Government's science budget consists of credits for companies to do research. But these credits must be returned. So if the idea or innovation doesn't work commercially, it costs the company money.

The situation contrasts with the idea of the high-risk investor, mostly in the Anglo-North American world. In the well-known start-up system, the investor invests assuming that the money can be lost in its entirety. It happens that, probabilistically, some of these start-ups work and give a very positive return to the investor. What is not understood about the Spanish system is why, if the credits do not work, they are still considered as part of the national budget. Weird, or simply the fruit of rampant incompetence? Let's say it is a condescending way of playing with the numbers to bring them closer to the much desired 2% nominal expenditure on R&D&i. An exercise of “I want, but I cannot”.

The interested reader can consult the excellent Cosce Report on how R&D&i national budgets are used in Spain, how their money is spent

148 and the relevant comparisons with other countries. Keep in mind that we have made our comparative reference between the entirety of a country (Spain) and the particularity of a single company (Amazon). If we added the other three NTFL (Google, Apple and Facebook), the joint exercise of commensurability would be embarrassing. For these technological Lords, the equation to be solved is simple and linear: the research reports innovation and highly beneficial applications –and, not a trivial thing, it is tax-deductible–, all of which facilitate advantageous positions in global markets and, at the same time, it sponsors social control.

Amazon has a service called AWS which is an intelligent cloud computing system in which it sells computing hours to any user who wants to buy them. Not only hours of calculation, but also data storage or organization of the database, for instance. In fact, it is much more convenient for many companies and research centers to purchase these computing cores than to buy their cloud computing themselves. But Amazon's investment goes far beyond hardware. They also invest, for example, in the development of artificial intelligence and computing technologies with neural networks.

The recent announcement of quantum supremacy by Google is another example of how the NTFL invest. The enormous research effort that Amazon makes affects a technological domain that it can not only impose it functionally, but also it can gain a position of market dominance and sell it monopolistically everywhere. It is not just about inventing, but also about selling, which exemplifies the pilot experience of its supermarket AmazonGo.

And in the meantime, R&D&i in Spain languishes. The situation faces its particular disaster similar to that of 1898, without having a national budget up to the task, nor a modern and functional Ministry

149 of Science, as denounced in a recent article in the newspaper El País. In this same newspaper there is a section dedicated to the crisis in Spanish Science. And neither there are any visible green shoots in which to place any hope.

Perhaps it is due circumstantially to the lack of an adequate budget or to the endless interim of a government in office. What is undeniable is that no plan has been carried out to guide Spanish science into the future. The bureaucratic procedures to carry out any investigation procedure have multiplied in an exaggerated and even ridiculous way. Contracting a researcher (with resources fund-raised by the scientists themselves) is often a daunting added effort to genuine R&D&i activities. Proceeding to buy a computer or go to a conference have become degrading and excruciatingly inefficient.

The investment situation in basic research at the public level is quite painful, but it is especially so at the private level. We have companies that invest close to nothing in R&D&i or do so in a token way. The case of Telefónica has been mentioned, but what is surprising is that it is the best case of investment in research among private companies. Spain ranks 32nd out of a list of 91 countries in R&D&i investment as a percentage of GDP, taking into account government and private resources together. It is a position not far from countries like Ukraine, demographically comparable to Spain (with a population of 43 million) and which has a part of its territory occupied by Russia and is immersed in a situation of internal war.

Let us situate Spain at the head of the “second world”, or at the tail of the “first”. Some optimistic Panglosians persist in seeing that the glass is half full. We do not believe that this buoyancy is justified when considering that the sum of Spanish public and private spending on R&D&i barely reaches US$19,000 billions; that is, 4,000

150 million less than what Amazon allocates to such tasks, basically in the field of artificial intelligence and robotization.

The comparison becomes even more acute if we take into account the amounts of investment made in R&D&i by the private sector in Spain. There is no Spanish company among the top 100 worldwide and only eight among the top 1,000. As a country, Spanish public spending would be approximately 60th on that list.

As Miguel de Unamuno suggested, the option continues to be to take advantage of our sun, beaches and good gastronomy and buy technology from other countries. Paradoxically, and although we are a profitable country of waiters, they will not even be necessary in a robotic future like the one that Amazon proposes. Its strong investment in R&D&i will restructure our buoyant service sector, including tourism.

It is convenient to insist on the strategic importance of investing both public and private moneys, however meager they may be, in basic research. Suffice it to recall the example of the silicon transistor around which all present digital life revolves and which was invented by a private American telephone company at the end of the 1940s. Talent exists in Spain but it goes away. The research director of the technology giant IBM, Darío Gil, is Spanish. Also, the new director of Science Europe, Lidia Borrell-Damián. It does not seem, therefore, that we are a country only of decadent dilettantes and whose most international word is fiesta.

It is not only about facing the scenario to let them invent, but to sell ourselves to the smartest of the class.

Raul Jimenez & Luis Moreno (Agenda Pública)(4Dec2019)

151

5.3 The Rich are Smarter.

The news has appeared muffled in the media. As if hidden among the avalanche of information almost monopolized by the macro-election day of April 28, or by the profusion of curiosities and gossip from popular characters. The latter are the growing protagonists of the pages of newspapers and digital networks, both in the sensationalists and in the serious ones, as was previously distinguished. But its social significance could not be more revealing in the times we live in, when we continue to witness, undaunted, the pernicious effects of a type of Anglo-North American capitalism that permeates and conditions everything (and not only in the Western Hemisphere).

It turns out that some famous rich people --again the glamor and fascinating charm of show business --used tricky shortcuts to get young members of their progeny to agree to study at prestigious American universities, such as Yale, Stanford, or Georgetown, all of them highly respectable academic institutions not only in the US but internationally. Among the more than 50 celebrities who used the dishonest means of an 'achiever' to be admitted to the university centers involved, there are dazzling actresses such as Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, with whom the talented writer of these lines confesses not being familiar.

It turns out that the wealthy characters who required the service of William Singer, administrator of a college preparatory company aptly named The Key , avoided passing tough college admissions checks through a sophisticated system of deception and bribery of those

152 responsible for the exams that came to perceive amounts between 15,000 and 75,000 dollars. Sometimes the scoundrels in charge of ensuring the purity of the exams allowed other experts to impersonate the aspiring students or simply gave them the correct answers beforehand. Even after the tests had been materially carried out, the answers were sometimes modified so that they exceeded the scores established for admission.

To add credibility to the practices and bribes cited above, some of the wealthy parents made their payments through a spurious system of charitable donations to a foundation, which ended up in the pockets of the test managers. Remember that these are widely used standardized tests for American college admission (Scholastic Aptitude Test-SAT and American College Testing-ACT). At this point, perhaps some readers may wonder why there is so much interest in accessing these prestigious universities. It is convenient to bring up some considerations made a few months ago in an opinion article such as this one, in which they underlined the importance for young Americans of the decision to choose to pursue university studies in one of the more than 4,500 higher education centers of the North American country.

Young Americans know well that a college degree from a reputable university is often the springboard to get into the best conditions in a highly competitive job market. The general --and generalizable --rule is that a better grade obtained in college at university corresponds to an improvement in the professional expectations of students and a higher future salary. For those who are not rich and have-nots, the money to pay for their university education is very high and they need to go into debt to get it.

153 According to data at the end of 2017, more than four million indebted students had not made the repayment of their payments for at least nine months. The figures were worrying when one takes into account that the total of credits that were in a situation of non-payment amounted to 140,000 million US dollars. Even the central bank (Federal Reserve) itself has recently made its voice heard after it became known that the debts of families had increased in the first quarter of 2018 to exceed 13 trillion dollars (millions of millions, or trillions in the American financial jargon). The chapter with the highest indebtedness corresponded precisely to that of student loans.

The cost of university fees in Spain is very low compared to the US. The registration fee at the Complutense University of Madrid serves as a reference to carry out, for example, undergraduate studies in Journalism or Audiovisual Communication. The student must complete 60 credits and pay fees of just over 1,300 euros per year for an estimated period of four years. In New York, in a center associated with CUNY (City University of New York) the student aspiring to carry out a similar career must complete 54 credits, and despite being a higher education center subsidized by public authorities, must pay an amount of around 28,000 euros per year.

The parable of the case of the indebted American students invites us to reflect on our situation on this side of the Atlantic. The news discussed in this article collides with our own idea of meritocracy. That is, with the idea that those who strive for better grades will be rewarded fair and square. It will be said that in clientelistic --and even feudalistic- - systems such as those that still prevail in our public universities, the song of meritocracy is like a toast to the sun. This is not the case for students. As for the teaching staff, and although not as much as would be desired, things have changed for the better in terms of university competitions and promotions. Certainly, much remains to be done to

154 redirect the perverse effects and misappropriations exposed by the well-known 'Matthew effect', through which those already benefited. In our social Europe the moral imperative to make it possible for the disadvantaged of the middle and subordinate classes to aspire to educational equality is crucial to legitimize the Welfare State, the emblematic institution of our European social model.

Javier Marías was full of reason in his latest journalistic disquisitions when he asserted that the papanatism of Spaniards towards the American is painful and that it would not be long without us ending up eating turkey on Thanksgivings Day, the American national holiday par excellence. It is also worth warning of the danger of importing predatory behavior against meritocracy in the whole of the Old Continent. That's the game that rich-and-smart 'casino capitalism' advocates. Play gentlemen, play ... Rien ne va plus

Luis Moreno (Público)(Catalunya Press)(Galicia Press)(17March2019)

5.4 Encrypted Privacy.

In our progressively robotized society some are surprised by what is considered an irremediable submission of our privacy. Views are expressed everywhere, whether in the ‘serious’ or in sensationalist social networks, that our robotized democracies we are to follow dictates of the New Technological Feudal Lords (NTFL), such as those of GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, or Microsoft). Note that all of them have their capitalist matrix and their commercial headquarters in the US.

155 It is argued that if we want such cybernetic gentlemen to make our lives easy with their patterned search engines and their artificial intelligence functions --such as driving an electric car autonomously or monitoring our health in such a way that a pandemic such as Covid-19 could have been stopped at an early stage-- we must give up our privacy and provide our personal data online.

In Spain, robotization has contributed to the implementation in Spain of a type of basic income in the form of a scheme of citizens' minimum income. It could be further optimized with the complete digitization of its provision to beneficiaries that would avoid criticism that it is just an incentive to sponging off public resources by those who do not want to work. Nature, the journal with the highest scientific impact factor, has recently echoed this public policy milestone in Spain in an extensive article in English (NB. Readers without sufficient knowledge of Shakespeare's language need not worry. The Google translator allows the translation of documents online, something feasible thanks to advances in robotization and, in particular, artificial intelligence. Ten years ago this possibility did not exist).

Artificial intelligence engines need our personal data to be effective and efficient. Consider, however, that such data can be completely anonymous. In recent months, ads have appeared in the streets of our cities about the browser DuckDuckGo, which works by anonymizing user data and not collecting it for commercial purposes with ads like Google does. As the whistleblower Edward Snowden warned us, governments in combination with the NTFL, have surreptitiously taken over our private data. Result? They know everything about us. But this should not be ‘fatal’. Other than liberating ourselves from routine and ineffective work, the same ‘invading’ computer technology could allow us to preserve our privacy.

156 Companies of the NTFL use algorithms to perform their tasks, such as internet searches. The best known Google search system is the so- called PageRank, based on the original work of the economist Wassily Leontief, a Nobel laureate in 1941. In reality, the idea was made operational by the algorithm developed by the Italian mathematician Massimo Marchiori. Another Italian mathematician, Silvio Micali, is leading the theoretical foundations of the science of cryptography and of new methods for the effective control of mathematical proofs in the theory of computational complexity. The goal is to preserve our privacy in a robotic society. The key technology is the so-called blockchain.

The blockchain consists of the distribution of information in the cloud through blocks (blocks) that are then chained (chain) for later use. Each block is encrypted in such a way that only the owners can decrypt the information when it is required to make, for example, a financial transaction. The fact that the blocks are distributed throughout the cloud makes it impossible to intervene or remove them simply by shutting down a server. The blocks live in the cloud. In addition to economic transactions, the blockchain can be used for many other purposes. For example, publishing a book or a manifesto that no government can withdraw from circulation to prevent its dissemination. In doing so, it would have to completely and completely turn off the global internet network beforehand. Therefore, the blockchain presents a fundamental ethical problem but also a possibility: that of monitoring a technology that could allow illicit activities to be carried out with virtually no possibility of control. This happens in a way with the Thor network, which is a system similar to the blockchain where information is distributed throughout the network (peer-to-peer) and is used, among other things, for the commercialization of illegal drugs, weapons, prostitution and even for organ trafficking (e.g. finding donors/sellers of vital body organs). For some visionaries of the North American libertarian variant of

157 classic European anarchism, blockchain technology would allow life in a society without governments, and where only self-regulation, or more likely the law of the fittest, would govern the fates of human and inhuman lives.

The key for preserving the blockchain in the private domain lies in cryptography, that is, in keeping the data encrypted in such a way that those useful parts of the data are used without revealing all our personal characteristics. Or simply keeping private those data that we do not want to reveal or share. The crucial importance of encrypting is something that Snowden describes in his book Permanent Record as crucial for preserving privacy. The technical aspect of encryption should be explored, even briefly.

The blockchain is simply a system for recording transactions in a perpetual, public and decentralized way, which are its three defining characteristics. The most used analogy to describe a blockchain is that of a town. In this imaginary town there is no money, but the inhabitants exchange materials or goods. Each exchange is registered in a brick that is deposited in the central square of the town with cement to gradually build a wall. One person exchanges, for instance, her 3 loaves of bread for a bicycle. This transaction is written on a brick and is cemented to the wall in the town square. Now everyone knows that Teresa no longer has her 3 loaves, so she cannot resell them again. The next transaction between other inhabitants will be notified in another brick and will be cemented to the previous one. And so on. A blockchain works the same way, but in our digital age we use the computers, electricity, and cryptography that make up our virtual world.

The wall is what is called the "registry", where all the transactions made and added. Once a transaction is added it can never be changed (it is “glued in place”). In order to add a transaction, a cryptography

158 problem must be solved, which is the key to preserving privacy. Normally it is about finding the factors of a number that, in turn, is the product of two prime numbers. Only those who have the key to the wall can see the transactions in the “bricks” and be able to add more “bricks”. It's like doing a puzzle, but only looking at the pieces in reverse, not knowing what is in each individual image. Only the one who has the key to access can reveal the image of the puzzle. And this is how privacy can be preserved.

You can study many characteristics of the puzzle such as the number of pieces, their extension, their shape. But only the image it represents will be known using the encrypted keys, available only to users. The potentially beneficial examples for our societies are manifold. Data chains are well known in the use of virtual money (bitcoin and the like). Facebook is still interested in launching its own virtual currency (pound), which would facilitate the independence of the NTFL from governments and international organizations such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. Furthermore, it would make the citizens of the Westphalian nation-state dependent subjects; that is to say, new servants of the gleba in the networks of the big technological feudal lords. A process with such negative externalities should be regulated.

But there are other more ‘positive’ and useful applications of blockchains. In the world of virtual education to which the Covid-19 crisis has impelled us to use, the blockchain can play a very useful role in ensuring the privacy of teacher-student interactions. It can also serve as a tool for the distribution of books in a community of buyers and readers, as well as to record administrative data of citizens. All this can guarantee that the owner of the data is the one who has the control over them and not someone, or some entity to whom we entrust --often “innocently”-- our data.

159 There is a very illustrative example of how dangerous it would be to entrust our data to entities that we believe are ethical, or with legitimate codes of ethics. Imagine the reader a hypothetical region in the European Union that decides to organize a referendum, against the current legislation. To carry out the popular consultation you need the electoral census, but this is kept by the municipalities, which can only use it for cases strictly regulated by law. Well, the region could make use and abuse of the information of the census without the control of the interested parties. Such a violation of privacy rights could have been avoided if our data had been on the blockchain encrypted with the guidelines suggested by our whistleblower hero Snowden.

At the time of writing this article, the President of the Parliament of Catalonia was enraged because his mobile phone had been tapped. Much fuss was also caused by the lledged tapping of the mobile handy-phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel by the NSA during the Obama administration . Spying on an ally was unexpected and immoral. How can these "bad practices" be avoided? As Snowden suggests, high-power encryption is the solution to these problems. This means, in practice, that data can be encrypted with numbers no computer can decipher. The problem with Chancellor Merkel's handy-phone was that the encryption was very weak. If Merkel had had her cell phone encrypted with very large prime numbers, the tapping would have been futile. Hackers and intelligence governmental agencies do not use “brute force” to break encryption, but clever mathematical techniques such as pattern matching, or search by chance (at random).But in reality, there are mathematical encryption models that are virtually impossible to crack into.

Following the outcomes of the aforementioned cases of tapping, it would be advisable that our private data is not held by an entity that may, one undetermined day, use it for political purposes. We are the

160 only ones who could unravel the pieces of the puzzle, an entitlement coupled with the implementation of strict regulation to avoid access to, say, criminals or terrorists. Some countries such as Canada, Dubai or Estonia, are implementing the blockchain to manage the data that their governments handle. The European Commission itself has encouraged six initiatives that use blockchain technology to ensure social well-being and underpin our European Social Model.

We would like to conclude by sharing the statement of the Commissioner for the Digital Economy of the European Union, the Bulgarian Mariya Gabriel: “Blockchain is a great opportunity for Europe and the Member States to reconsider their information systems, to promote users’ trust and the protection of personal data, to help create new business opportunities and to establish new areas of leadership, which benefit citizens, public services and companies ”. Perhaps it is time that we begin to preserve our privacy sensibly and at the pace that this epochal change calls for.

Raul Jimenez & Luis Moreno (Agenda Pública)(29July2020)

5.5 Snowden, Deserved Honour to the Whistleblower. In the complex dilemma between security and freedom (‘no domination’, as the last theoreticians of the republican idea assert), the former has prevailed. Six years have passed since Edward Snowden exposed to the world the global surveillance network sponsored by the Anglo-NorthAmerican intelligence services. Six years later we find ourselves more under surveillance than ever. In reality, there is no niche of information in our biographical holdings that is opaque to the eyes of what George Orwell fictionalized as Big Brother.

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An outlaw and exile in Moscow, Edward Snowden, was the great inducer of the convulsion of computer espionage, cybersecurity and the distortion of privacy. Remember that Snowden, a technician from a company subcontracted by the US Security Agency (NSA), and with ties to the CIA, denounced in 2013 US surveillance and computer tracking programs on a global scale with the active cooperation of large private companies telecommunication. He became the great whistleblower who alerted the public about practices that were opaque to the human eye.

Few citizens would question the development of sophisticated cybersecurity activities to prevent terrorist attacks. Our societies are targeted by groups of mass and selective destruction. Implicitly, therefore, it is accepted that sensitive information services need broad maneuverability to detect and neutralize potential criminal acts of international terrorism, which benefits from the democratization brought about by global information technologies. But like almost everything in the ongoing social existence of humans, there is another side of the coin which is dark and potentially dissolving. And that it has taken control of our lives.

Can you imagine living today without the bodily appendix of the mobile or smartphone? How many of those who read this article can affirm that they do not own one of them? Perhaps for the 'elderly’ users of these devices the percentage is not as high as that of the young millennials who type compulsive messages all the time and which will not be very far from 100%. Through these devices our fingerprints are the ‘the life of others’.

The progress of our consumer societies and the model of triumphant (surveillance) capitalism require information to sell more and to fully

162 commercialize people's lives. Because the acceptance of not having a trunk of personal and non-transferable memories because of the fight against terrorism and evil people is the price to be paid. It is paid with the molding of our consumer profiles, increasingly determined by the interests of the NTFL (Apple, Amazon, Facebook or Google).

A few days ago, Edward Snowden gave some interviews on occasion of the publication of his memoirs book, Permanent Record. The US government has already filed a civil lawsuit to ensure that any profits that the whistleblower could make from the book's sales are confiscated. Scarce will be his existential earnings despite living in "freedom" in Moscow, a city where, as he himself has pointed out, could be the subject of a summary execution by the US secret services. This modern Judas Iscariot will not even have the payment of the thirty coins, and he will not be able to buy his plot in the potter's field (Matthew, 27, 3-10).

Incidentally, it should be noted that when the author of these lines bought the Snowden ebook edition of the book through one of the companies mentioned above (Amazon), the system registered the request but advised that "the transaction required a payment verification" - something that hadn't happened to him just two days before when he made another e-book purchase. It may well be thought that this opinioner's paranoid fantasies lead him to suspect spurious practices and ‘blacklists’ of book purchases. He has no doubt that he is already on a list of buyers of the book of the 'traitor' Snowden, be it black or of another color. On a personal level, however, he hopes that the US immigration authorities will not put him in trouble the next time, God willing, he goes to visit his children and grandchildren residing in the Washington DC area.

163 The official position of Trump and his government is that Edward Snowden is an unpatriotic and a traitor. It could be argued that this has been the case at the jurisdictional level of the USA. But as the 'traitor' paradoxically claims, the USA themselves were born from a betrayal. The latter is a concept at least circumstantial subject to personal or social effects. It seems unquestionable that the whistleblower of secrets acted thinking of the social group and not of his own personal benefit.

Regarding cybersecurity in Spain, and according to the General Council of the Judiciary, cases of political corruption in Spain are around 2000 causes, with more than 500 accused or under investigation. Note that only 20 of them have been convicted and have entered prison. Recently, state public auditors have expressed their discomfort at being overwhelmed and lacking enough staff to collaborate with the Spanish courts fighting corruption. Impunity is another wrongdoing that only citizens, ultimately, can undo by electorally punishing corrupt and cheats. But let's not be naive in thinking that our cyber watchers are ignorant about these malpractices. It’s always better to be honest citizens and to be willing to denounce bad practices that could violate the dignity and rights of people.

For the powerful people of the world, Edward Snowden epitomizes the figure of the ‘traitor’ who should be eliminated without further ado. For many other citizens, the whistleblower now resident next to the Moskva River ought to be credited with international recognition for his courage and bonhomie in warning us that the true ‘traitors’ have been those who claimed to protect us for the sake of public safety.

Much honor to the whistleblower

Luis Moreno (Público)(Catalunya Press)(23Sept2020)

164 5.6 Does the Chafing Bothers You? Just Take an Opioid.

It is now the centenary of the birth of the great Spanish filmmaker Luis García Berlanga. In a scene from The executioner (‘El verdugo’)', based on a story and script written by Rafael Azcona, the character of the tailor interpreted by José Luis López Vázquez asks the character interpreted by Nino Manfredi (the would-be executioner) if he is to fix the chafing in the the armhole after trying on a cassock; “Does it bother you..?”. The intonation of the demand for him to make the gesture of the request is part of the anthology of contemporary Spanish cinema.

According to the Spanish 'official’ dictionary, there is another meaning of the word ‘sisa’ (chafing) that refers to removing a part of the whole that the recipient of a benefit expects to receive. This is what precarious citizens experience, for example, who do not get everything what the triumphant neoliberal capitalism promised. They immediately engage in a spiral to control the psychosomatic pain generated by their 'loser' conditions. In general terms, precariousness should be considered as the absence of vital opportunities that impede the integral and participatory development of the citizens who suffer it more or less severely. The case of the opioid 'epidemic' in the US is illustrative of the kind of frustrations that drive people into unhealthy dependency situations and eventually to death.

A few weeks ago the US Department of Justice itself sued Walmart, the retail distribution giant, for its role in the opioid crisis. It happens that most of its more than 5,000 stores, most of which have pharmacy outlets, have turned a blind eye to accepting prescriptions for 'suspicious' drugs, thus causing hundreds of thousands of deaths

165 because of addiction and overdoses. It is worth mentioning the use of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times more potent than heroin. Already in 2017 in Ohio, where it was marketed, the death rate was 40 per 100,000 inhabitants, almost three times higher than the national average.

Economist Alan Krueger published surprising data on pain reliever use in 2016. According to their research, almost half of the men between the ages of 25 and 54 who were not active at work took medication daily to ease the pain of their passivity. Two-thirds of them --around 2 million- did it daily with a prescription.

In October 2020, Purdue Pharma, the pharmaceutical company that developed the most widely used opioid, OxyContin, pleaded guilty to the charges of marketing and distribution. As a consequence, they reached a civil settlement with the Department of Justice to avoid more onerous damages and while filing bankruptcy escaping further legal and financial responsibilities.

It also happens that opiates can not only fulfill the function of alleviating pain but also favor escapism by providing a state of sensitive satisfaction to their users. Likewise, these are ‘high’ using them as a recreational 'hobby' and not as a proper pain reliever. Both situations point to explain a type of behavior of those who expected resources to fulfill their material ambitions. Now Without internal group or community help, and without resources to get out of this dependency, the panorama appears with tints of tragedy on a national scale. There does not seem to be a solution in sight, given the absence of effective actions on the part of public authorities and public institutions.

In the US, the working class itself is sometimes redefined as the middle class, in an exercise of ideological manipulation characteristic of

166 societies of opportunities where the free will to achieve success is measured according to the individual rule of "so much you earn, so much you are worth." The claims of poor wage earners are seen more as a hindrance to economic growth than as the needs of precarious citizens credited with the solidarity of their social group or community to which they belong.

According to Branko Malinovic, considering the middle class as composed of citizens with income in an interval of 25% around the median income of the United States, this population segment had decreased from a third in 1979 to just over a quarter of the population. in 2000. The middle class of the North American country had gone from representing 26% in 1979 to 21% of total income. A large part of the American middle social class (white Caucasians), where the electoral force of Trumpism has drawn most electoral support, have seen the jobs that were provided by manufacturing industries and local service companies disappear. As a result, their life expectancy has fallen dramatically and the death rate from the use of all types of drugs and alcoholic beverages, as well as the level of suicides has increased significantly.

In Europe, for its part, the big question to be resolved is whether their societies will preserve their social rights and their legitimate Welfare States or will be shaken by the global practices of the “downward spiral” (race to the bottom) economic policies. This announces the increase of chafing in their social rights and existential expectations. With the development of the modern state, citizenship was protected as a status of equality in dignity, that is, through formal guarantees in the exercise of not only civil and political rights, but also social rights. It is precisely the social resources that enable in most cases and circumstances the effective exercise of civic participation by citizens.

167 If the Covid-19 pandemic is teaching us anything, it is that we need to strengthen our European Social Model against private interests that promote despair and escapism in other societies such as Anglo-Saxon ones.

Luis Moreno (Público)(Catalunya Press) (29Jan2021)

5.7 Minimum Income Support and Picaresque.

Who disputes it...? The most evident and unquestionable effect of the Coronavirus crisis has been the intensification in the use of telematic means. It is difficult to imagine how the environmental stress at home (cabin fever) would have been tamed without the help of our mobile personal communication devices (computers, smartphones or tablets). From now on, our world of communication, telework and entertainment will have inexorably changed. It does not turn back. We are already in another dimension altogether. Some people think that returning to 'normality' will re-establish the social relationships of the past. Big mistake.

The new policy that is announced in Spain with the implementation of the minimum citizen income program (whatever the final denomination is finally adopted) offers an example of the irreversibility of the changes and the futility of the return to the past in its operational administration. Living these days in a more robotized world, who could deny the desirability of a citizens’ minimum income? Economic production would continue to function as before the viral crisis and with the money in the form of TTR (tax-the-robot), that is, with the

168 resources from the payment of taxes of the robots, we would proceed to keep the welfare provided in our European social model. And, incidentally, we would make the speculative pilgrim capitals to pay for their transactions, and not as happened after the Great Recession of 2007-08, when global inequalities between rich and poor increased.

Some ‘old-fashioned’ sections of the trade unions may think that traditional procedures and formalities should be used to carry on the implementation of the minimum income proga; this would involve the collection, evaluation and operationalization in the granting of the service. It is argued that this ‘return’ to the old administrative procedures would create more jobs. Rubbish, we would add. Such an approach would endanger the effectiveness, legitimacy and functionality of the new public policy. And it would provide a tool of criticism highly manipulable by the belligerent right claiming that the program generates dependent beneficiaries.

In the implementation of public policies it is more important to assess in advance the unwanted effects and the undue appropriations of the returns of the them, and not so much the pompously stated objectives that are intended to be achieved. The practices of picaresque and clientelism that scholars of social assistance and the provision of welfare benefits, through targeting and income verification (means- tested), and which have been researched at length, yield uncertain results. With the implementation of a minimum income of citizens we run the risk of throwing the baby with the bathwater.

As pointed out in a previous article (II.2), everything possible should be robotized to face the effects of COVID 19. We have been in confinement for almost 5 weeks and some collateral benefits of robotization are palpable. The most obvious case is that of the banks. Almost three-quarters of its public offices are closed, but transactions

169 continue to function. Fewer and fewer users go to the street branches to deal with their daily errands. Even cash payments are reduced so as to avoid contangions. The use of electronic money is the order of the day in supermarkets or pharmacies, let's say. Payroll is paid by transfer and online purchases by just clicking on the corresponding button on the supplier's website. Purchases are being made with electronic money, in fact through the bank's app on our mobiles. You don't even need a credit or debit card. In Sweden, for instance, cash money has practically disappeared.

In our robotized democracies, monetary digitization allows us to continue working as if nothing had happened. With the implementation of 5G in our smartphones it will be possible, also in rural Spain, to carry out all kinds of transactions without the need for physical support, not even ATMs. With the unstoppable development of quantum computing and artificial intelligence in the search for patterns, it is increasingly easy for robots to track monetary transactions in search of embezzlement or misuse.

If all transactions were digital, there would be no picaresque capacity to thwart the citizens’ minimum income scheme. Or it would be reduced to the minimum in a country like Spain where picaresque practices flourished during its imperial past. Thus, the obligation of vulnerable citizens who receive the minimum income benefit to make their annual income statement would be something simple to comply with (they would also receive their draft as is now the case for common taxpayers, ready to sign and send electronically). Think of another benign effect, which is the practical paralysis of the 'underground' economy so widespread in European countries such as Spain or Italy, the hardest hit by the Coronavirus in recent weeks. Of course, this course of action would represent a loss of privacy, since if all transactions were digitized, it would be perfectly traceable what one

170 has done, what one buys, where it goes and where it decides. We believe that this is the most effective way to avoid the picaresque and, therefore, the delegitimization of a necessary and timely implemented policy.

Some readers would be outraged for the implications that this carries for the lack of privacy. But that debate has already been written off but it is refused to take on board. As we have already exposed previously, what the whistleblower Edward Snowden --whose bonhomie will hardly be recognized in its due measure-- has ascertained is that privacy has ceased to exist. The only alternative is the ‘hermit’s option’, i.e. to leave society and like Talibans stop carrying any metal item. Forget the mobile universally used by everyone and confine yourself permanently to the isolated cave (NB. Robotic technology would allow us to detect the heat of a rabbit on the moon, if they were to exist in our satellite). So the only option for total privacy would be just to hide.

The political far right fights to de-legitimize the implementation of the citizens’ minimum income scheme. For us there is no alternative to this program. Even in a sector as 'humanized' as that of personal care and the fight against vulnerability, it is necessary to digitize and robotize everything possible. Time is running short.

Luis Moreno & Raul Jimenez (Público)(Catalunya Press) (19April2020)

171 6. Recovery and Global Readaptation in a Climate of Uncertainty.

6.1 Me-Myself-I and Climate Change.

“If I keep myself warm, who cares what people think"

(Luis de Góngora y Argote, 1581)

The satirical words of the classical poet of the Spanish Golden Age (XV-XVI centuries) does not concern the ongoing dangers of planetary overheating. In reality, the proverb usually means the prevalence of self-interest over what happens to others. A mode of conduct that is reflected, in the best of cases, in the selfish escapism of some people and, in the worst of situations, in the helpless fatalism of those who think that little or nothing can be done in the face of what is difficult or complicated... Nothing to do, therefore, even with the efforts of universal Quixotes.

Citizens seem to become increasingly aware of the threat of climate change, especially those corresponding to younger generations. The militant Greta Thunberg has put in the spotlight the deleterious effects of the uncontrolled and harmful growth of the poisoning of our planet Earth. The 16-year-old advocate for the presentation of our plante developed her concern about the consequences of climate change after the series of fires that devastated 120,000 hectares in Sweden in 2018.

172 Since then, the environmentalist Joan of Arc has stubbornly led an international awareness crusade to protest against climate change and to demand compliance with the Paris Accords of 2015 about climate change.

The reader should remember that with the Paris resolutions, the United Nations sponsored the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions with the purpose of achieving their full applicability by 2020. The European Union took the lead in the negotiations that passed critical moments of disagreement among some of the 174 participating countries. And it didn't take long for President Donald Trump to announce the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. His decision was to facilitate unfettered US industrial protectionism. The "America First" approach prevailed upon the wishes of the great majority of signatory countries.

It is hardly surprising that the Old Continent has taken initiatives to contain the inevitable march towards the destruction of our beloved mother Gaia. It is precisely in Europe of the various industrial revolutions where the "collateral" effects of unbridled growth have manifested themselves in pollution with a negative impact on our environment. Some European countries have swiftly taken measures to contain the deterioration of our airs, waters and lands.

Consider, for example, that in Sweden, the country of Greta Thunberg, less than 1% of household garbage ends up in dumping landfills thanks to its so-called “energy waste” system, which converts garbage into energy (the so-called Waste-to-Energy centers). But what is really striking about the success of this program is that now it needs to import garbage from the United Kingdom, Italy, Norway or Ireland to keep the 32 WTE centers that are operational in the Scandinavian country.

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European self-indulgence is not recommended, however laudable are some of the individual initiatives of some countries. A few days ago a piece of news appeared in the Spanish media to which little relevance has been given. The inauguration last December of a coal-fired electricity generation plant in Safi (Morocco) seems to have had an impact on the balance of the Spanish electricity system. Since then, Spain has imported cheaper energy from the neighboring country, whose companies do not have to bear the costs for emitting CO2 set by the European Emissions Trading System (ETS). In other words, the collateral effects of limited and polluting emissions in the Old Continent are passed on to our African southern neighbors, in order to improve the profits statements of the Spanish energy companies. Business is business.

A similar argument concerns the case of Germany, the country with the biggest economy in Europe, and also the biggest polluter of the continental environment in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Its per capita emissions (11.4 tons per year in 2016) are one and a half times higher than those of France or Italy. The reason is simply the use of coal as an energy generator. The coalfields of the former East Germany together with those of North Rhine-Westphalia area concentrate the largest sector of lignite mining and electricity generated in coal-fired power plants in all of Europe.

It is true that the production of renewable energy in Germany has increased six-fold since 2000. However, if the EU really wants to meet the objectives of the Paris Agreements and the objectives set by the European institutions to free itself from the electricity generated by coal in the year 2030, all member states and, especially, Germany, will have to make a considerable effort.

174 It is unthinkable to “put doors to the countryside”, because the environment knows no borders and affects all European countries and the world as a whole. The younger generations, to whom we wish a long life and better health, are the first who should be mobilized so that they can enjoy a healthy and livable environment in the future. The Green Party, a true champion of the environmental cause, has seen its electoral support increase exponentially in the last European consultation in Germany. Other parties would do well to take note.

Luis Moreno (Press Digital)(Catalunya Press)(Galicia Press)(11June2019)

6.2 Climate and Virus, It All Makes Sense.

It would be daring and unscientific to establish a causal link between one thing and the other. The virus is not a linear consequence of climate change. But 'intuition' as a scientific method also informs us that concomitants pay for the binary relationship between the two. And people are willing to believe it. And they do well. The 'butterfly effect' has unquestionably been incorporated into people's epistemological imagination. What happened in Wuhan and with the makeshift morgue of the sports Ice Palace in Madrid does not seem to be a simple epiphenomic coincidence.

That the butterfly was a cave-dwelling vampire eaten by another animal, be it a pangolin or another species, and transferred to one or more human beings in a remote part of the world is plausible. Its effects have reached us all. It is rational to consider it. We have learned that the beginning of the viral outbreak of Covid-19 was the central Chinese province of Hubei, which is highly interconnected, globalized,

175 with an intense communication infrastructure that includes the extensive use of 5G, skyscrapers, many cars and a level of air pollution among the highest in the world. His city of Wuhan has been hyper- urbanized in recent times and its inhabitants are people from the rural world who have untimely been 'globalized' causing conurbations of high population density.

As early as 2012, the American science thinker /scientist David Quammen, described very vividly in Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic; the aforementioned conditions of globalized urbanization and demographic congestion as the ideal breeding ground for the explosion of a devastating and brutal epidemic outbreak such as the coronavirus. According to Quammen, spillover (effect) is a process during which a pathogen of one species moves to another species, a mutation that can cause a lethal outbreak. (See also his books, The Chimp and the River: How AIDS Emerged from an African Forest and The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life).

Where did the coronavirus come from? A team of researchers from several countries analyzed the evolution of the virus genome and categorically excluded that it could have been derived from an elaboration in a laboratory in vitro, and it has also been able to verify its animal origin. Other interpretations have resorted to conspiracy theories that the malevolent responsible for its global expansion could have been the United States and even China itself, while others accuse Russia. It does seem unquestionable that such fake news comes from this last country (empire) that is identified as the main vector of global disinformation.

There is little doubt that the main effect of the very rapid spread of the virus is its global nature, as it could have been the spread of the Black Death in the 14th century. Its causes are directly attributable to the

176 prevailing neoliberal madness of recent decades. Yet the world that will emerge from the ruins of the free market utopia is not going to be less interconnected. It will probably be even more woven. And it is that 'social distancing' has caused an exponential increase in online communication. As we all remain isolated in our houses and rooms, at the same time we are more united than ever by artificial devices such as smartphones, processors, tablets, etc. Furthermore, the temporary (or sometimes definitive) registrations of workers in various sectors and their replacement by nonhuman / non-anthropomorphic services have provided a historic opportunity to accelerate entry into a radically more robotized world, as have observed Jiménez & Moreno. It is also a tragedy faced by workers from multiple sectors who, with the subsequent greater or lesser economic crisis, will be affected by the new labor reality and will irretrievably lose their jobs forever. The introduction of the minimum vital income accessible to all citizens in need is unavoidable.

The welfare state and the European Social Model are inherent to the maintenance of our human dignity and the ability to live decently in the Old Continent. It cannot be said that economic well-being will be a fundamental aspect of governance, if the very concept of economy is not changed, seeking its communion with that of ecology. That implies a greater balance between man and nature, or as pointed out by Bruno Latour, in eliminating the arbitrary modernist distinction between man and nature, conferring social agency on nature as human affairs are shaped by natural manifestations, and vice versa.

Beyond the Coronavirus and the enormous economic and social crisis produced by the pandemic, climate change remains the greatest threat to all living beings on the planet. In reality, global warming could potentially be much more destructive and dangerous than the pandemic we are experiencing. As George Monbiot reminds us, the

177 crisis puts into question the entire economic model that has pushed us towards a radical alteration of the relations between human societies and their natural environment. Long before the virus was detected, other more radical threats were already emerging: the decline of biodiversity and the sixth mass extinction, with millions of species of animals and plants disappeared forever; soil erosion due to the preponderance of intensive agriculture; the invasión of the sea by plastic and microplastic (Conversi and Moreno); and a myriad of other threats associated with so-called neoliberal economic development.

Consider that the immune system of Covid-19 victims was already weakened by air pollution before the global viral outbreak. Some technological Panglossians believe that we are witnessing a mere stochastic inflection in a stationary regression statistic. It happens that the last nonlinear evolution that we live in could well cause a contingent change of radical trend in what we uncritically assume with 'human progress'. The butterfly keeps flapping ...

Daniele Conversi & Luis Moreno (Público)(Catalunya Press)(29Mar2020)

6.3 EU, the Hard Birth Job was Accomplished.

Following Aesop's fable, it might be added that childbirth has not been a simple mouse. It has been a milestone in the process of Europeanization despite the endless contractions of birth delivery. For those of us who feel unrepentant Europeanists, the agreement of the

178 27 member states is a moment of joy. Restrained and without fuss. But pregnant with hope for the idea of a Europe at peace with itself and worthy of the culture of human rights. Institutionally, those of us who eagerly support Europeanisation are conscious that we will not see a fully-fledged functioning European Union. But we are satisfied --and very much-- with the Old Continent continuing to take steps in its process of unity in diversity.

The figures and digits involved in the agreement reached by the 27 will make rivers of ink flow. National leaders will take credit by asserting that their positions are those that have prevailed. Well ... The dichotomous game of "blame avoidance" and "claiming credit" involves bragging about what has been achieved and walking away from failure. But in the reality of things, the winners in this financial tour de force are the European citizens of the countries that make up the EU. And on this occasion, following the pattern of other EU summits, such as that of the Treaty of Nice in 2000, a very significant advance has been worked out. For the first time in its journey since the signing of the Rome Treaties in 1997, the EU agreed to borrow to finance an economic contribution of 390,000 million euros in subsidies and 360,000 million in credits. Therefore, the principle of mutualization of common risks is assumed. Quite a step forward ...

It will be recalled, on the occasion of the Treaty of Nice, that the negotiations also lasted for four long days. The 'practical' result was not trivial. The balance of power between France and Germany was adjusted as both countries arranged after the 2004 enlargement the same number of votes (29) in the voting of the Council of Ministers of the EU (NB. However, Germany could block any decision supported only by two countries). In hindsight, the deal was fair on just a demographic basis (there are currently 83 million Germans versus 67 million French).

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The added value of the community decision for the establishment of the Recovery Fund to face the economic damages generated by the Coronavirus pandemic is that of the unanimity of all the countries involved. No one will be able to deny that Germany and France are decisive countries for any political negotiation in the European Council. But it is good to remember that even the small and unruly countries have done a lot of work now so as not to hinder the agreement, something that inter-governmentally they might have been tempted to do. Remember that Malta, with a population of half a million inhabitants, sits on the European Council with the same level of formal prerogatives as Germany, France, Italy (60 million) or Spain (47 million).

From the above, a reasonable adjustment for the future follows, which would be that the small Member States that “formally” have an over- representation, and even a comparatively greater capacity and influence, are to adjust their inputs politically to the practice of qualified voting. Remember that when a Commission proposal is approved in the European Council, the qualified majority establishes that it must be done by a majority of Member States (55% of them must vote in favor, 15 out of 27) and the aggregate of citizens they represent must reach 65% of the total population).

Beyond the power adjustments in the community institutions, now the great challenge for the EU is how to use the agreed resources for sustained and sustainable continental development, preserving our European Social Model with the welfare state as the guiding institution. The Reactivation Fund is seen as a new Marshall Plan, although this time the European countries themselves have provided it. After Brexit, neoliberals look with great suspicion at any initiative that consolidates

180 the European option and threatens the supremacy of Anglo-Saxon capitalism.

Once the financial resources have been articulated, now it is about optimizing them in the best way. The Green and Digital proposals are inspired by the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt's, thanks to which the American economy overcame the severe crisis of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression. Now, the proposals would be about investing in basic goods such as food, infrastructure, transport, energy or digitization. From various perspectives, but with a similar diagnosis, it is assessed that most European countries operate below their economic potential. The unwanted result is that the divergences between them increase. To avoid this, integration and solidarity are required. The maintenance of past investments, as well as other essential current expenses for the maintenance of the European Social Model -- again, education, health or dependency, let's say-- should not be systematically financed by public debt. It is equally mistaken to sponsor “austericide” policies to fit relentlessly fiscal consolidation plans, as to think that we can live only and permanently on investment expenditure.

We must invest in new robotization and artificial intelligence technologies to make up for lost time. Let us take advantage of the Reactivation Fund agreement to support such investments without endangering the public health of our societies, or ceasing to support our precarious fellow citizens. Now that we have the financial resources, inaction must be avoided. Eppur si muove...

Luis Moreno (Catalunya Press)(Press Digital)(21July2020)

181 6.4 After Covid-19, All Centenarians? Life expectancy for humans averaged around 35 years until the end of the 19th century. Since then, it has more than doubled, especially in Mediterranean countries where it now reaches almost 85 years. According to the World Economic Forum, in 2040 Spain would be the country with the highest life expectancy in the world (85.8 years) and Italy would rank fifth (84.5 years). The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic will affect these predictions as both countries have had an excess of deaths during 2020. However, both countries exemplify the increase of life expectancy during the last 120 years.

The main factor promoting this increase in life expectancy is the development of antibiotics and vaccines that resulted in a marked decrease in bacterial and viral diseases that plagued our species throughout history. The current leading causes of death in the Western world, and especially in Europe, are dominated by coronary heart disease and cancer-related conditions. That is, diseases related to old age and poor eating habits in advanced societies. Nevertheless, infectious diseases are far from being eliminated as a threat, since bacteria and viruses continue to evolve and circumvent both natural and artificial barriers to infection.

The current global pandemic of Covid-19 has reminded us how exposed we are to infectious diseases. In the 21st century, we have been surprised by a virus, with a relatively simple molecular structure, for which we have no cure, so far. The announcement of the development of an effective vaccine which could be deployed in the next weeks --or even days--, has finally raised great expectations as to whether we are finally defeating the Coronavirus. However, the best efforts for the development and deployment of the vaccine have exceeded the one-year mark since the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak.

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In our progressively robotized democracies, where an autonomous car is almost a reality, it is surprising that current technologies of artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing are not being fully exploited to promote more rapid and dynamic antiviral strategies. In the shadow of the pandemic and the prospect of being locked up most of the time, one would hope for an incentive to promote technology to finally deploy rapid solutions to infectious diseases. Let us remind the reader that between the US and Europe, more than 2 trillion US dollars have been spent on research to cure all kinds of diseases. And yet, Covid-19 has hit humanity in every aspect. In addition, Covid-19 has overshadowed viral diseases that still claim millions of lives worldwide such as HIV and seasonal flu. The lethal Ebola virus outbreak in the past decade provides another striking example.

The fundamental problem in finding generic cures for viral infections lies in the amazing ability of these entities to mutate and evolve their infectious strategies. It is this variability that makes it extremely difficult to design an effective cure. To beat the virus at its own game, we need to leverage technologies that draw on rapid predictions of potential mutations and to design an arsenal of therapies that are ready to be deployed in the case of new outbreaks.

New technologies for quantum computing and pattern finding have allowed momentous developments that were unthinkable just 10 years ago. A notable example is language translators, such as Google's. This example is particularly relevant since we do not have a model of how human language works. Translation is achieved by trial and error of AI patterns searching algorithms and using a small learning set. That is, we can explore many possibilities in a very efficient way and find the right pattern. All of this will be even more efficient, by many orders of magnitude, with quantum computers.

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Current technology to manufacture vaccines consists of developing, for each specific virus, an innocuous mimic that trains the human immune system to generate a response against the virus. This is not the place to give a technical description of current methods of creating vaccines, but an excellent description can be found here. In brief, vaccination is nothing more than using our defence system, which has been developed through evolution, to fight invasion by foreign agents. Our evolutionary system works by trial and error or in other words on the basis of brute force; it is in a constant mode of learning.

The development of a vaccine against Covid-19 illustrates the possibilities and efficacy of current technologies. Advances in genomic sequencing and DNA and RNA synthesis techniques --which relied on advances in both experimental as well as computational methods-- had allowed a record time in developing several effective vaccine candidates. Nevertheless, our fastest response required almost a year in development. Can we afford a new outbreak with all the toll it takes on lives and the global economy? Would it be possible to develop a generic or quasi-generic approach that would help reduce the devastating effect of viruses on society?

Although vaccines had provided the “classical” effective solutions against viral diseases, the bottleneck for this approach lies in the lengthy clinical trials that are required for testing every individual vaccine in a “one bug, one drug” strategy. Therefore, more generic solutions are a pressing need. For instance, one approach for targeting viral diseases consists of small molecules --inserted in a pill-- that would provide a chemical compound targeting and inhibiting the function of viral components. An example of this approach is the HIV triple cocktail therapy and the Hepatitis C virus (HCV) direct-acting antiviral tablets. The development of such compounds had so far relied

184 on visualizing the interaction between the drug and the viral target using structural biology techniques such as x-ray crystallography and electron microscopy.

However, advances in deep machine learning have allowed the prediction of molecular structures to a level of accuracy that matches those of experimental data up to 95% accuracy. Advances in computational modelling can allow us to predict mutations in the viral proteins that may allow it to jump species to humans or become more virulent. Furthermore, it would also allow the exploration of a large space of design of small molecules that target these potential changes. In other words, we have the ability to predict evolutionary scenarios that a virus or family of viruses may undergo and be ready with the appropriate molecules to counteract it. In an ideal scenario, these algorithms may also allow us to identify patterns that are common among viruses that belong to the same families and to design compounds that target these conserved patterns. For instance, SARS- CoV-1, SARS-CoV-2, and MERS (which has a mortality rate of around 30%) all belong to the same family and share similar strategies for replication. The identification of the most conserved patterns may allow the design of Pan-viral molecules that inhibit all current and more importantly future members of this family.

A coordinated effort can be forestalled, as was done to decode the human genome. The use of AI intelligence and quantum computing can facilitate the unfolding of quasi-infinite simulations that allow the preparation of a repertoire of compounds that is ready to circumvent potential virus outbreaks. The combination of experimental and AI strategies in developing cures for viral diseases is just one example that could be applied to a plethora of diseases that affect our longevity including cancer and a multitude of genetic diseases. But they have economic implications. For instance, the HCV direct-acting antiviral

185 tablets cure entails a very high cost of tens of thousands of US dollars per individual. Here, it is worth bringing up the role of welfare states, as is the case of those of the European Social Model, providing the funding for these efforts as well as equal access to these therapies.

In EU countries the existence of national health systems (and other social protection institutions) minimizes the social impacts of genetic diagnosis and the costs of universal therapies for all citizens. This is obvious in the case of health insurance, but is also true for labor contracts. Let us recall that one of the main motivations for some employers to demand access to genetic test results of their employees is related to their need to take out insurance policies with private companies which calculate the cost from previous experiences with the company in question. Can genetic information also be redefined in the terms in which social contracts, such as national health systems of universal coverage and the very existence of welfare states, are established? Genetic diagnosis and therapies can help achieve higher social well-being, but the possibility of discrimination, in particular against centenarians, can do away with the faith put into this human genetic engineering technologies.

In the light of such ongoing and potential developments, our life expectancy could well increase up to more than 100 years in the foreseeable future. What until recently seemed like a dream is now a real possibility. By the end of the XXI century, demographers such as James Vaupel argue that the longevity of people could reach 150 years. It can be counter argued that such is the type of projection which social scientists denote as “self-fulfilling prophecies”. In other words, they are extrapolations towards the future that, although they may be “false” or without robust data, arouse an interest in the people and actors involved, causing them to behave in such a way that they become 'true'. The sociologist Robert Merton used to emphasize the

186 force that implies that things are going to happen so that, finally, they happen.

Given the fact that we could live for more than 100 years and robots are going to occupy half or more of the jobs, how can we articulate a productive, social and egalitarian society where “entrepreneurship” and welfare can be fostered to all? The Covid-19 pandemic has caused an acceleration in the use of robots. After all, they do not get sick and are not susceptible to being infected. A recent study by the world economic fund indicates that in about 5 years half of the jobs will be carried out by robots. TTR (“tax the robot”) provides a good policy to be implemented and, in so doing, makes possible the extension of basic income and citizens’ well-being. This is more than ever necessary given the increasing degree of inequality that has accelerated by the impact of the Covid-19. Today, the 50 richest US Americans hold as much wealth as their 165 million poorest compatriots. Figures speak for themselves. Living longer could end up as a self-defeating strategy that may drift into the eugenics of eliminating centenarians in poverty. That may be the aim of policies which seek the discrimination --and even elimination-- of those who are already in weak social positions, as the elderly frail.

Luis Moreno, Amal Rahmeh & Raul Jimenez (Agenda Pública)(16Dec2020)

6.5 Gaia Earth, Green I Want you Green.

If God is good then God Be Cruel Take back the world you've granted to fools

187 Salvage the land that is best without man and all his grief . Gino Vannelli, Summers of my life, 1976

The effects of the pandemic do not advise us thinking of a return to how the world was just over a year ago. The latest non-linear evolution we are experiencing could well cause a contingent change in trend in what we uncritically assume with 'human progress'. We seem to be bent on denying the evidence of the merciless destruction of our beloved Gaia.

It turns out that the Earth is not so loved by the savage and destructive capitalism (creative, we are told, of new opportunities) of our environment and natural resources. It is an illustration that speaks for itself that of Jim Ratcliffe, a British billionaire whose businesses in hydraulic fracturing and other chemical applications have brought him profits that have raised his personal fortune to 21 billion pounds sterling. His petrochemical company Ineos (now a sponsor of the popular professional cycling team, perhaps in a ‘face wash’ strategy) is at the forefront in fracking activities, and in recent years it has exponentially increased its market value. Ratcliffe owned 60% of Ineos in 2018, which employed more than 18,000 workers, and was part of the exclusive club of 1,000 British millionaires whose fortunes total 724 billion pounds, an equivalent amount --just for comparative purposes-- seven times the annual cost of pensions in Spain.

As is known, fracking is an unconventional technique for the exploitation of hydrocarbons, mainly natural gas, which are 'trapped' in the subsoil between layers of shale. To this end, water, sand and various chemical products are often injected at enormous pressure through shale wells to fracture the bedrock in which the hydrocarbons are housed, at a depth of about two kilometers, and thus be able to

188 extract them. It goes without saying that its effects can be (are) deleterious to the environment, and its economic damage can also considerably affect the houses located in the vicinity of the extraction sites.

In the UK, and in the Anglo-Nort American capitalist world as a whole, the super-rich have embraced the cause of Brexit. They hope that US Wall Street and the City of London will maintain their position of world financial leadership. In this model of globalization, the EU is an uncomfortable guest due to its legitimate and democratic efforts to regulate and monitor activities such as fracking. The welfare state and the Social Model are inherent to the maintenance in Europe of civilizing values of human existence with dignity and care for the environment. Naturally, it would be inappropriate to assert that economic well-being is not a fundamental aspect of governance, but the very concept of economy should be readapted, seeking its communion with that of ecology.

Welcome is the Recovery Fund promoted by the EU, which will allow a strong injection of money to make up for the 'time lost' due to the pandemic. However, and as recalled by Paul Krugman, the panacea of money-making should limit its good use to not foolishly transferring reimbursement of it to future generations. That is, to make things easier for the living of today without making impossible a decent life for future generations on Gaia Earth. Let us therefore not return to environmental cruelty and invest with the money from debt investment projects for a green-friendly Europe.

The New Green Pact has been formulated in a simple way by some proponents such as Yanis Varoufakis (“Varoufuck”, as he has been renamed the ‘prey dogs’ of neoliberal capitalism). Let the 'excess' of liquidity made possible by the Recovery Fund, together with the

189 measures adopted by the European Central Bank that has just announced 500,000 million money (and that would last until March 2022 guaranteeing a total volume of 1,85 trillion euros), allows the implementation of the Green New Deal. This would favor citizens having the right of access in their countries of residence to basic goods such as food, infrastructure, transport or energy. In parallel, the right to salaried work would be preserved and basic income for citizens would be provided, ensuring the provision of quality housing, education and health in a sustainable and environmentally friendly environment.

The maintenance of past investments, as well as other essential current expenses related to the maintenance of the European Social Model and our welfare state --education, health or dependency, for example- should not be systematically financed through public debt and increasing current expenditure. It is so wrong to sponsor "austericide" policies to fit the fiscal consolidation plans in the wild, as to think that we can live only with the ordinary disbursement of money destined for investments. Besides, it will cost so much (if they can) to be reimbursed by future generations. Morally, we already know the 'causal narrative' that asserts that “in a hundred years we’d all kicked the bucket”. Why bother now if, after all, the predatory inhabitants of Gaia will no longer be here to continue to lacerate her mercilessly? That is a cynical and perverse narrative.

Luis Moreno (Público)(Catalunya Press)(14Dic2020)

190 6.6 Imminent Dangers: Where to Go from Here...?

"This the end Beautiful friend This is the end My only friend, the end” (The Doors)

When faced with non-imminent danger, the lack of worrying is perhaps the most telling sign that we are products of Darwinian evolution. It is common to observe that human beings rarely put the effort to solve situations that do not present a clear and imminent danger. The capacity of delay reward is a truly human gift, totally absent in the case of apes, our closest ancestors. This is very important in view of the new measurement of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere of 420 ppm (parts per million). While some governments are very alarmed, most of the citizens do not see the problem. Our colleague Ann-Christine (Tina) Duhaime, Professor of Neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School, recounts in this talk that the real problem we face as a society to solve global warming might be the lack of a clear and imminent danger.

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that when faced with a real and imminent danger the human race reacts immediately and with immense efficiency. Indeed, the development of the BioNTech vaccine in a few weeks with mRNA technology has been a feat, never seen before in humankind history. A similar feat was the agreement in the past century by world governments to close the ozone hole in the atmosphere caused by chemical made materials, especially CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons). Life that depends on photosynthesis, like ours, cannot survive on Earth without an ozone protecting layer. The reason

191 is that ultraviolet radiation from the Sun will destroy proteins in our DNA. The ozone layer protects us from this radiation. Not only us, but plants and plankton are also protected. Without ozone, the food chain on Earth would collapse as all surface living organisms would develop cancer at an exponential rate. In this respect the Covid-19 pandemic looks mild…

As damaging as the lack of ozone is global warming. It does not take rocket science to understand why putting CO2 and methane (CH4) in the atmosphere causes warming. It is not difficult to understand. It is just simple physics: these molecules absorb light and re-radiate it in the infrared, i.e. heat! So why are world governments not coming fast to agree like they did for the ozone hole? Well… lack of immediate and clear danger. Unlike ozone that depletes in years, global warming takes place in centuries. In these cases we revert to our monkey brain and “pass the ball”.

Our colleague and friend Lord Martin Rees, one of the most acclaimed astrophysicists, decided to devote the last stretch of his distinguished academic career to prevent the collapse of humanity creating the Center for the Study of Existential Risk to prevent humanity destruction. Perhaps it is a long shot to speak of the destruction of our beloved Gaia Earth, some will tell. Negationists of all kinds refuse to consider a future without life, or even the disappearance of the only hosting planet of intelligent life in the universe, as we dare to state according to the evidence so far available.

One of the main themes that Martin Rees has emphasized is that “there is no planet B” and that human space exploration is futile. Space exploration is the perfect place for robots and telescopes. Robots can explore space. It is robots who are perfectly adapted to explore space. We totally agree. Humans are not built, by evolution, to be in zero

192 gravity conditions in space. Even going to Mars is an unsolved problem as radiation will kill the astronauts in the approximately 9 months of one way trip. There is no doubt that any trip to Mars will be a one way trip. Further, why desire to live in a tin can (spaceship) when we can enjoy the beauty of open spaces on Earth? It sounds really like monkey thinking. This is like the new promises by the NTFL (New Technological Feudal Lords) to terraform Mars. It is more like a bait to make us buy their products here on Earth than anything else; pure marketing of (technological) carpet sellers.

Even more futile and illusory is the hope that many have to find extraterrestrial life and “move on” Basically, the thinking is that soon we will contact or be contacted by aliens and they will save us. While this kind of thinking is considered ludicrous by the greatest majority of scholars, it is not even given that complex and intelligent life exists. It is true that we now know that a third of stars in our galaxy host a planet (roughly a billion planets, million of millions), but now we are understanding that complex life is, maybe, extremely difficult to happen. It is not only that one needs to be in the right place (goldilocks zone) to have liquid water, the only solvent for organic reaction we know of, but also there is a need to have more than one planet as a coplanar solar system seems to be a strong requirement. Further, cosmic explosions seem to be fatal for life. It really seems like we are a fluke in the vast galaxy. Until we sort this out, we should really think about Earth as the only possible place to sustain intelligent life and global warming is the biggest threat we are facing right now.

The green initiatives by both the US Biden administration and the EU are the right way forward. But remember that as of this year China emits as much CO2 as a half of all other nations on Earth. And more than the US and the EU combined. How can we put limits on a dictatorship like China that is a threat to the whole Earth?

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The reader will by now wonder whether the ‘resolution’ of the pandemic and other imminent dangers are as sufficiently threatening to humankind as to foresee the end of our existence. In any possible, probable and desirable future scenario the need is no other than to take action. This is to be accomplished before time runs out to deal with the most pressing challenges our risk society faces. As sociologist Ulrick Beck simply put it, time has definitely come to deal with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by our own surges of technological rationalization and changes in work and organization. The Covid-19 pandemic has just brought to the fore the inescapable feeling of being on the edge of imminent dangers. Our robotized democracies can, indeed, help to solve the problems related to the global readaptation we are now facing in a climate of uncertainty. We all want to put a break to the ongoing trend towards “the end”, shall we not?. Seeing is believing, unless we were all putting up daisies.

Raul Jimenez & Luis Moreno (CatalunyaPress)(Press Digital)(Galicia Press) (12May2021)

194 Epilogue: Some Future Scenarios in a New Brave World

“It is difficult to make predictions, specially about the future’’ goes the Danish saying first recorded in the autobiography of the Danish politician Karl Kristian Steincke, “Favel og Tak” (a very telling title in itself: Goodbye and Thanks). No doubt that the chapters of this book, if written in 1990, would have been different from what reproduced here. If anything else, we would not have anticipated the machine learning revolution that took place since the turn of the millennium. At that time, machine learning techniques were considered “crack-pot” material by the vast community of computer scientists. What a remarkable turn of events, to say the least. Neither the Simpsons animated sitcom would have predicted that Donald Trump was to become president of the US nearly 12 years ahead of time.

Indeed, more accurate than that of the Simpsons was the ‘forecasting’ of some German electronic music ‘robot pop’ groups from the 70s and 80s, and in particular Kraftwerk. It is timely to listen now to the lyrics of the song “home computer” from the 1981 album Computer World. Those lyrics from the Dusseldorf electronic band did get almost everything right about the role computers would play in our societies and lives. As did Neil Young in his, ‘Computer age’ (1981) , by singing “... we just don’t see the others”. Drawing from those musical visionaries, perhaps it is worth advancing some predictions about how robotization is to change our brave new world.

As we remarked in the last chapter of this book, the biggest threat to humankind is global warming. We are simply running out of time. This should be our biggest worry as a global society. No doubt that

195 robotization will help achieve the goal of reducing CO2 gases in the atmosphere. This will take effect via intelligent power networks that could manage better electricity needs around the world in conjunction with the further enlargement of the electric vehicle fleet. Internal combustion engines will be a curiosity of the past by 2050. But besides the increasing use of renovables in the form of solar, wind and other sources of energy, a targeted use of nuclear power could also contribute to maintaining our standards of living. Put it simply, nobody wants to get rid of the already acquired household comfort. It is nonsensical to hear those who pretend they can live a life without a refrigerator. The different energetic needs are well documented in the work by the late David MacKay. A significant step forward in our power consumption management will be via massive robotization and the availability of storage. Let us not forget that nowadays electricity produced by power plants is wasted if not used as there is no storage for electricity. Whatever a power station produces goes either used or wasted. Indeed, electric cars could function as massive storage units that connected to an intelligent power grid could optimise their usage.

But there is no doubt that much more needs to be done to stop climate change. We already mentioned two fronts: increased power generation and the electrification of the vehicle fleet. When we talk about increasing the power generation besides fossil fuel production: coal, oil and gas, it is worth remembering that not a single source will be enough. While it is desirable to deploy as many solar panels on our roofs and as many offshore wind mills as possible, it is worth noting that physical space on Earth to do so is finite and therefore this source of power generation will not be enough to provide the world with its current energetic needs of nearly 200 PWh (Peta Watts hour; that is a 2 followed by 17! zeros). Our energy consumption has been increasing by 2% a year. Another source of energy that will be crucial and necessary to achieve a zero emission goal --and remember we are

196 already late-- is modern nuclear power generation. Modern means nuclear reactors whose radioactive byproducts do not last more than 100 years and cannot become critical, like Chernobyl, and are thermal breeders, or even better molten salts. Without going into detail on the numbers, it is not difficult to compute (see Mackay’s book above) that solar and wind alone will not help us transition to a zero-emission society. Indeed, even better than Thorium based reactors would be fusion based reactors, like ITER, which have strictly zero emissions and byproducts. But unlike fusion, which is still in the future, Thorium is available right now and could substitute all forms of fossil fuels. We could literally reduce emissions to zero in a decade by switching polluting coal, oil and gas to Thorium based nuclear power generation. Can the reader guess who is building most nuclear power plants, including Thorium ones? Yes, you got it right, it is China... Should we let them take the lead as well in this aspect so in the future we are subjected to their ruling when we buy their energy like it happens now with the oil from the middle east? (N.B. The authors of this compilation are assessing the necessity of contributing with a new book on nuclear power in the not-too-distant future).

These are steps that both the US and EU governments are pursuing very actively. Their goal is to become zero emission economies by 2050, a very welcome objective indeed. But the other front should be achieved through massive development of energy efficiency. It is somewhat comical that to move a human being of about 80 kg we need to use a car that weighs almost two tons. New material and new technology can help to make our lives more energy efficient. One good example is how LED technology decreased by a factor of 100 the energy consumption of the old incandescent light bulb. In fact, one could illuminate a whole apartment with the equivalent of 100 watts in LEDs. We believe new research via quantum computing can provide a new generation of materials that provide a much higher efficiency.

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Concerning pollution, we should keep in mind that the biggest contaminating country in the world is China, a dictatorship with a record of violating human rights. How can China --and also Russia--- be controlled as free-riders players outside our robotized democracies? We have warned in chapter 4.6 about the dangers of China trying to convert its currency into a cryptocurrency to escape the control of the western democracies. Perhaps this is one of the contradictions of robotization: it could facilitate dictatorships and authoritarian regimes to become ‘big brothers’ of citizens' control and to violate their fundamental rights with impunity.

Perhaps, one of the most (somehow) expected industrial by-products of the pandemic has been the increase in robotization in industries around the world. Initially, it was argued that a main factor for the slowing pace of robotization in our societies was the dear initial cost that acquiring robots had. As the cost of robots was so expensive, only the big corporations seem to be able to afford them. With the pandemic it has become clear that the initial investment in robotization pays off, even in the short term.

Let us take as an example the bank sector, and specifically the one in Spain. Ten years ago, this was a sector with the largest number of physical branches per population in the world. Now, a decade has passed and the number of physical branches has halved. Furthermore, in 2021 it has been announced that as many as half of the remaining figure of offices will also disappear. The trend keeps a steady direction. Hardly anyone really needs to go to a physical branch when all the tools are available online, or even better, on the cell phone. Our prediction is that in 10 years there will be no physical bank branches; they will be just a curiosity. Given how visual meeting tools will evolve and the fact that money transactions will be fully digitalized (they are already close

198 to reaching that level), there will be no need for banks to spend money in expensive real estate or attendant clerks when a robot can do the job as well, or even more accurately.

Perhaps it is difficult to still grasp the fact that despite the fact that the pandemic provoked most of the world to be locked-down, money transactions did not stop but grew all around. This was due to robotization and this process will only intensify as time passes by.

Another relevant ‘teaching’ of the pandemic has been that the lockdown has made it possible to work from home to a large number of employees, mostly in the ever-growing service sector of the economy. Indeed, it came as a sort of a surprise that many of us had the tools to work from home. This would have been impossible 20 years ago. Then, the internet was not fast enough to sustain video conferences or to facilitate the transfer of big data at the level needed to allow remote telematic work. But, more significantly, there were no smart algorithms that allowed enough compression of the data to actually handle the increase in traffic due to the increasing number of people working at home. It is curious that one side effect of infrastructure and algorithm improvement to allow people to watch Netflix programs at home, or to shop remotely in Amazon, has patently been that it has allowed the economy to keep functioning at a “cruise speed” during pandemic times.

All things considered, and as we have remarked in Chapter 3.7, the virtual Agora does not so far work satisfactorily. We still need to find “The Other” in a physical space. In the meantime, there is little doubt that our lives will become more and more virtualized. Gone will be the working schedules of 5 days a week at the office. There is no doubt that work in the next decades will be more of a hybrid model where we spend some time at the office during the week, and the rest in the

199 household. In fact, this lack of rigidity may make the visit to the office a pleasant event and an opportunity to socialize with colleagues and other employees. The super packed model of cities like London, New York or Hong Kong with such a high density of office space is a thing of the past. There will be no need to force productive personnel and employees to be in cramped spaces and to do tasks that can be better carried out remotely. This will significantly change the way cities and towns are designed and planned. While it is true that ultra-population density leads to an increase in innovation, it also carries with it large problems of inequality and exponential gentrification. The move toward virtual and remote working will, no doubt, allow for a much more significant physical delocalization of the workforce. After all, the change has already been significant in the way we, as academic researchers, address scientific conferences: most of them are online events to which anybody in the world can join and participate.

Most probably, the biggest innovation in the robotization of our societies will come from the hand of quantum computing when it achieves quantum supremacy. We have referred a lot to it in the pages of this book. It is worth recalling that whenever quantum supremacy is available our capacity to simulate not only nature, but also the complex social web, will bring about a “quantum” leap of new interactions. It will be finally possible to simulate most aspects of our lives. At this point it would not be unthinkable to envision a fully robotized society. Note that most experts think that we will achieve quantum supremacy in 10-30 years.

The expectation is that this intense robotization will make it possible that our working weeks would get significantly reduced. This is not the trend among some of the highly-educated, especially those who serve big investment banks as to create the training sets that computers need to build models; the so-called analysts. We have referred in one of the

200 compiled articles to how they complain about working almost 90 hours a week. The question remains so far on the sidelines: will we be able to reduce(proper) work to 30-35 hours a week? This number around 30 hours seems like an ideal number for most people who aim for a four- day working week. Will extreme robotization finally liberate us from wasting time doing repetitive work?

Perhaps more interesting would be if extreme robotization would fully liberate society of compulsory jobs, help the implementation of a universal income and leave work as a voluntary matter and not a need for survival, as it happens now for more than 90% of human beings. Maybe, after a million years of using our brains to leave the trees, it is time we use them to relieve us from the need to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow, as the biblical cite goes.

Will the New Technological Feudal Lords (NFTL) let this happen? Increasingly they talk more and more like governments; this is ominous. If we allow them to take control, we would witness nearly two centuries of representative democracy go down the drain. Let us candidly acknowledge that this is another major danger under way in our robotized societies.

The hope is that this highly robotized society can solve three of the most important challenges facing mankind: overpopulation, inequality and especially, global warming. Time will tell…

201 Back Cover

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed much of our vision of the world. It has brought about transformations which demand for new worldviews. This book is a compilation of 40 articles published during the period 2019-21. They are grouped in six thematic sections which have experienced deeps impacts produced by the pandemic in our daily life: (1) Fighting the Maligned Covid-19; (2) Digitalization, Artificial Intelligence, Robotization; (3) Life-styles, Bureaucracy and the Online World; (4) Technological Lords and Industry 4.0; (5) Individual Agency and Social Life; and (6) Recovery and Global Readaptation in a Climate of Uncertainty. The authors have been very keen to ponder how the ongoing robotization is changing our societies, and how our robotized democracies can promote a fairer and equal society. Some particular cases and instances relate to situations in Spain, the EU and the Western Hemisphere. In the main, our analyses cut-cross global areas of examination and inquiry. The overall purpose of this book is to encourage readers to think about life changes and to stimulate their assessment of the processes affecting the pandemic world and the prospects for its indeterminate future.

Luis Moreno, sociologist and political scientist is Emeritus Research Professor of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) at the Institute of Public Goods and Policies in Madrid. Raul Jimenez, cosmologist and theoretical astrophysicist is ICREA Research Professor at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Imperial College in London.

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