force

force Russia to bunkerize its nuclear fleet

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In October 1962, in the midst of Missile Crisis of Cuba, the Soviet Union ordered disperse and hide a good part of its nuclear bombers for fear of a surprise attack by the United States. It was one of the few times in history when Moscow assumed that even its most sensitive strategic assets might not be safe at home. More than sixty years later, that old logic of vulnerability has returned. The image that summarizes a change. For decades, Russian strategic bombers were a military rarity: nuclear machines parked in the open, visible from satellite, relying on Russia’s territorial depth and the logic inherited from the Cold War. The Tu-95 and Tu-160 They were part of the most sensitive core of Moscow’s military power, and yet they never needed mass shelters. That is changing, because new satellite images show something unprecedented: Russia is building huge fortified hangars at the air base in Engels Air Base to protect its strategic fleet. It’s not just a work of engineering. It is proof that Ukraine has achieved something that seemed unthinkable just three years ago: forcing Russia to bunkerize one leg of its nuclear triad. Engels: the heart of the Russian nuclear air arm. Engels is not any base. It is one of the nerve centers of Russian strategic aviation and is home to the 22nd Heavy Bomber Division, including the only operational squadron of Tupolev Tu-160s and several Tupolev Tu-95MS. A good part of the cruise missile attacks against Ukraine take off from there. We talk about irreplaceable devices: The Tu-95 has been out of production for decades and the industrial reactivation of the Tu-160 is progressing extremely slowly. Therefore, losing one is not losing a plane, it is losing a central piece of the Russian nuclear balance. That’s also why the fact that they now need to hide them under concrete says a lot about how war has changed. Ukraine has broken strategic depth. The great transformation of this conflict has been psychological before physical. For decades, Russia’s geographic depth was its greatest shield. Engels is almost 500 kilometers from the Ukrainian border. Once, that distance was equivalent to absolute safety, but not anymore. we have been countingUkrainian drones have repeatedly hit fuel depots, arsenals and logistics areas linked to the base. In 2022 there were already attacks. In 2025, massive fires caused by drones They once again demonstrated that even strategic assets could be reached. Perhaps most important is not just the material damage, it is that Ukraine has collapsed the idea of ​​​​the Russian inner sanctum. Image from June 20 shows the massive construction project in the northeast corner of the base From tires to silhouettes painted on concrete. The evolution of Russian defenses tells a story forced adaptation. First they dispersed planes, then they built retaining walls between aircraft to limit explosion damage. And later they appeared almost improvised measures: tires on the wings to confuse sensors, old used planes like lures and painted silhouettes on landing strips to deceive drones and satellites. All of this reflected an uncomfortable reality: Russia had no doctrine to protect strategic bombers against cheap and persistent threats. Now that improvisation gives way to something much more serious: seventeen giant shelters under construction, designed specifically for their nuclear bombers. Satellite view of damage caused by a Ukrainian drone strike on a weapons depot in Engels in March 2025 The Cold War returns, but in reverse. They remembered the TWZ analysts The most striking thing is that this did not even happen during the Cold War. In that period, the nuclear threat was existential, but the logic of deterrence and the practical impossibility of cheap precision attacks made this level of physical protection unnecessary. Today the change comes from below: not so much by intercontinental missiles, but by relatively cheap drones capable of cross hundreds of kilometers. It is a strategic turnaround in the war scenario. Ukraine, without a strategic air force or nuclear capacity, has forced the second atomic power on the planet to physically reconfigure the protection of its nuclear air arm. Nuclear bombers underground. That said, structures do not guarantee immunity. A heavy cruise missile could penetrate them depending on its final design. But that’s possibly not the point. The objective is raise the cost of the attackmake identification difficult and protect against drones, cluster munitions or secondary explosions. In essence, Moscow is accepting that the threat is no longer sporadic, but structural. That changes how you operate, plan and distribute resources. Even if you want too, it’s a symptombecause when a nuclear power begins to build shelters to protect assets that it previously displayed without concern, it is in some way admitting that its strategic environment has worsened. Lesson to the rest. The Russian case is already being closely watched in the United States. There, bases like Barksdale Air Force they maintain bombers like the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress practically exposed, something that has generated a growing debate after recent incidents with drones. The conclusion is uncomfortable and global: the era in which air superiority or distance was enough to protect strategic aircraft is dying. Ukraine has proven it with crudeness. It has taught that modern warfare allows a weaker actor to threaten assets of maximum value with cheap, persistent and difficult-to-intercept tools. The invisible victory in kyiv. Beyond the front, the maps and the kilometers gained or lost, there are other types of victories that are measured in another way. Force Russia to cover with concrete its nuclear fleet is one of them. It is not a visible destruction, nor a territorial advance nor a flag over a conquered city. It is something deeper: changing the strategic behavior of the enemy. The satellite images of Engels teach precisely that. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, Russia is acting as if its nuclear bombers are no longer safe at home. And that simple fact, alone, says a lot about the real scope of the … Read more

The oldest rocks on Earth are in Australia and force us to rethink how the continents were formed

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The Earth works with the mechanics of plate tectonics, that is, tectonic plates move, collide and sink under each other. The question on the table of science is when it started to work like this and the answer is complicated, simply because no rock older than 4,030 million years is preserved that allows us to reconstruct that period (spoiler: It is the Acasta gneiss and is in Canada). The only clue we have are zircons, crystals so resistant that they can almost withstand anything: they survive even when the rock that houses them disappears, so they function as a kind of time capsule. The oldest in the world They are in the hills of Jack Hillsin Western Australia and are up to 4.4 billion years old. The discovery. An international research team led by John W. Valley of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has analyzed the chemical composition of these Australian zircons and compared it with other zircons of approximately the same age found in Barberton, South Africa. What they found was surprising: while the South Africans point to a still and immobile Earth’s crust, the Australians indicate that in that place, one layer was sinking on top of another (subduction). The conclusion they reached is that 4.4 billion years ago different parts of the Earth operated with different tectonic mechanisms at the same time: in some places there was something similar to silver tectonics and in others, the crust remained stagnant, as if it were a rigid lid. Why is it important. Until now, the official history of Earth’s geology tells that the planet went from having a stationary crust to having plate tectonics. around 3.8 billion years and that the change was more or less global and simultaneous. Well nothis study dismantles it: subduction was already happening in some parts 600 million years earlier, which means that the continents began to form much earlier than previously thought. And there were earthquakes back then. This is also important for understanding the origin of life. Subduction produces granite and stable continental crust, which creates land, nourishes the oceans with minerals, and creates the environments where, according to the oldest records available, life began to develop 3,700 – 4,100 million years ago. If subduction dates back to before, those favorable conditions for life were also there before. Context. This debate is not new and in fact, neither is the conclusion. There are studies that hold that plate tectonics began in the early Hadean, others that before the plates began to move, the Earth’s crust was a rigid, immobile layer, like a lid, and the heat from within was released through columns of molten rock rising from the mantle, not through the movement and collision of plates. And be careful, because in both cases they used those same Jack Hills zircons to defend opposing positions, which gives an idea of ​​how difficult it is to interpret them. In fact, already there are previous studies that use Barberton zircons to identify a tectonic regime change around 3.8 billion years ago. What this new work does is add a nuance in the form of complexity: the change was present in Barberton, but in Australia in Jack Hills the story was different and older. How they have done it. With a technique called secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), which makes it possible to measure with high precision some chemical elements present in zircon (scandium, ytterbium, niobium and uranium) because their proportions vary depending on the type of geological environment in which the mineral was formed. A zircon formed in a subduction zone has very different proportions than one formed in a rigid cap zone. In addition, they analyzed the age of the zircons and their hafnium and oxygen isotopes, which indicate both the origin of the mantle or whether water was involved in the process. The complete photo with these four data allows us to reconstruct the geological environment. Yes, but. The big Achilles’ heel of the study is that these zircons are loose grains carried by erosion, not samples of rock in their original place. That is, they could travel thousands of kilometers from their origin. In short: it is not known where they come from. The second major problem is that the method used to identify tectonic environments is calibrated with modern rocksbecause there are no Hadean rocks. This implies assuming that the chemistry then was similar to that of today, something that no one can guarantee. In Xataka | 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history, summarized in a spectacular video map In Xataka | We thought we had an accurate photo of what the Earth was like 4 billion years ago. Zircons are telling a different story Cover | Virtual Museum of Mineralogy and Gemini with AI

Now we know that the Iranian Air Force did to the US what Ukraine could not do to Russia with drones: an abysmal hole

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During the Vietnam War, American commanders discovered that some of their most protected bases they could be hit unexpectedly due to coordinated attacks low costforcing to reinforce defenses that until then were considered sufficient and making it clear that, in war, the feeling of security is usually more fragile than it seems. The blow that no one expected. For decades, the US military architecture in the Middle East relied on in a network of bases designed to surround and contain Iran, a direct heir to the Cold War doctrine and designed to project power quickly. However, a report that came to light this weekend on NBC News has revealed a radical inversion of that logic in the war of 2026: what was supposed to be a shield has become a set of exposed objectives, hit in a coordinated manner by Iranian attacks that hit more than a hundred targets in several countries. We are talking about critical infrastructures such as runways, radars, hangars, command centers or defense systems were damaged or destroyed, and the impact was neither marginal nor symbolic, but structuralaffecting the very functioning of the US deployment in the region. The fence that ended up surrounded. The system of bases in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the Emirates or Saudi Arabia was designed to suffocate Iran, but its ability to attack key logistics nodes turned the equation around. How much? It appears that critical facilities were left disabled or evacuatedincluding the headquarters of the Fifth Fleet in Bahrainwhile multiple bases in Iraq and Kuwait had to be abandoned or rendered inoperative. The pressure was such that even the resupply became problematicleaving the American forces themselves in a position close to the siege they intended to impose. The encirclement strategy, which seemed unquestionable for decades, suddenly showed its fragility in the face of an adversary with saturation capacity through missiles, drones and aviation. The hole that changes war. What is most revealing is not only the extent of the damage, but what they represent for Washington: for the first time in years, a rival has managed to systematically drill US military infrastructure at multiple points at once. Iran not only hit bases, but achieved something that until now seemed beyond the reach of other recent conflicts: opening a deep and sustained hole in the defensive framework of the United States, affecting radarsair defenses and strategic assets. That ability to simultaneously degrade multiple layers of the system is reminiscent of what other actors have tried unsuccessfully in wars like the one in Ukraine, but here it translated in real effects on the ground, altering the operational balance and forcing us to rethink the assumed superiority. From control to operational chaos. The middle counted American that the intensity of the attacks and the speed with which they occurred generated a scenario of disorganization that overwhelmed the usual command and control mechanisms. Bases evacuatedemergency relocated personnel and even improvised situations what do we countsuch as the use of civil infrastructure, reflect the extent to which operational pressure broke the planned patterns. Plus: the inability to anticipate and managing the real scope of the attacks, added to the lack of clear communication about the damage, fueled the perception of an overwhelmed response to a type of more distributed warfaster and harder to contain. A cost beyond money. Although initial estimates speak of billions dollars in repairs (not counting advanced systems or unrecoverable equipment), the true impact possibly transcends the economic. What has been affected is the military deployment model itself: the idea that a network of advanced bases guarantees regional control. In other words, the war has shown that, faced with an adversary capable of to attack in depth with means relatively accessiblethis hitherto untouchable network may become a rather critical vulnerability. The result in the pavement American is not only a balance sheet of damages, but a strategic warning that forces us to give more than one turn to its scheme of how military power is projected in a world where distance is already does not protect the same. Image | x In Xataka | If the war resumes again, the US runs a risk unprecedented in the history of war: that the only one with missiles will be Iran. In Xataka | If the question is why the US attacked an Iranian ship with a weapon unprecedented in 40 years, we already know the answer: a “gift from China”

In November, Spain is supposed to force stores to charge an amount for each bottle and can sold. It is supposed

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Something ticks inside every yellow recycling bin and the noise perfectly reaches newsrooms across the country. Hence the articles, pieces and reports that They say that “starting in November the stores will charge” for each plastic bottle. The good news is that yes, the law says that. The bad news is that where the ticking does not reach is the power centers of Madrid capital. What’s happening? Indeed, the Waste Law of 2022 obliges Spain to have a Deposit, Return and Return System (SDDR) for plastic bottles, cans and beverage bricks operational as of November 22, 2026. And the reason is simple: the country had to recycle 70% of everything introduced into the market by 2023 and we did not achieve it. Faced with this possibility, the legislator was clear: the current system had to be abandoned and the packaging return system adopted (the one that charges a deposit for each container and returns it later). Portugal found itself in a similar situation and just introduced the European system. So? What is the problem? The truth is that we have no shortage of problems. To begin with, measuring how we really recycle. For years, stakeholders claimed that recycling rates were close to 80%; However, in 2024, the General Subdirectorate of Waste prepared a report relating to the calculation of the separate collection of SUP bottles for beverages that lowered that figure to 41.3% (well below the 70% required). The second problem is regulation. Following the Law, in May 2025, four organizations (Ecoembes, AECOC, Procircular and CorePET) They asked the Community of Madrid that authorized them as Collective Systems of Extended Producer Responsibility in charge of managing the SDDR. The Community is the competent one since the organizations have their headquarters there. And then? Then nothing. Madrid legally had six months to resolve the request; but it granted itself an extension of another six months that would end next month. However, the Ministry of the Environment has already explained that they have no intention of doing anything because of the “legal uncertainty (that it entails), since adequate and sufficient regulations have not been developed at the state level.” MITECO, for its part, responds that there is no insecurity and that they are not going to do anything more. Meanwhile, the clock keeps ticking. Nobody knows anything. While the CAM runs out of its extension, there are less than seven months left before we begin to break the Law and all scenarios are on the table: from a quick solution to a blockade that delayed everything two or three more years (most likely). What is out of the question is that there is no political will to implement this and nothing suggests that this will change. If you had to bet and taking into account that Spain is the country with the most cases of infractions for not transposing community regulationsit would be surprising if the SDDR started in November of this year. Image | James Lo In Xataka | Europe decided to regulate how garbage should be disposed of. We will pay it with a new mandatory rate in 2025

Ukraine has turned Russia into a fearsome air force

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In 1991, during the Gulf War, the United States discovered something uncomfortable: despite its total air superiority, it could not prevent Iraq from continuing to launch scud missiles from mobile platforms that appeared and disappeared in the desert. That frustration left a clear lesson For military strategists: in modern warfare, it is not enough to dominate the air, you must constantly adapt to an enemy that also learns. From questioned strength to real threat. During the first stages of the invasion of Ukraine, Russian aviation was perceived like a disappointment unable to achieve air superiority, which led many Western analysts to perhaps hastily underestimate it. However, with the passage of time, that vision has started to change disturbingly, especially in Europe, where aviation security experts have focused on something that is no longer an intuition: that the conflict has not weakened Russia, but rather the has forced to learn. Accumulated experience, system improvements and tactical adaptation have transformed a force that seemed limited into a much more dangerous and credible actor than it was before 2022. War as a laboratory. They remembered on Insider that, far from collapsing, Russian aviation has used Ukraine as a real training environment where pilots and crews have gained experience in high-intensity combat. Although it has lost aircraft, it has retained a large part of its qualified personnel and has compensated for those losses with sustained production of new aircraft, which has allowed it to maintain and even expand its fleet. This process has corrected one of its greatest historical weaknesses, the lack of flight hours, turning its pilots into more prepared fighters for complex scenarios. More reach, less risk. One of the most significant changes has been the evolution of his attack capacitywhich now increasingly relies on long-range weapons and systems that allow you to hit without directly exposing yourself. We are talking about advanced missiles, gliding bombs and remote attacks that have reduced the need to penetrate defended airspace, greatly complicating the enemy response. This way of fighting has not only proven to be effective in Ukraine, but also poses a worrying scenario. for future conflictswhere control of the air no longer depends solely on physically dominating it. Constant pressure from the air. They counted on ukrainian media that, in parallel, Russia has intensified its air campaign with massive and increasingly sophisticated use of drones and missiles, launching thousands of devices and perfecting saturation tactics to overwhelm defenses. Coordinated attacks, changes in flight patterns and the combination of different types of weapons have made it possible to maintain continuous pressure on infrastructure and the civilian population, generating not only material but also psychological wear. This strategy turns air into space permanent threatwhere the defense can never relax. A more complex threat. If you will, the result is a Russian air force that, although it still has structural limitations and does not match NATO in a direct confrontation, has become much scariest and most difficult to counteract. The combination of strengthened air defense, better coordination between systems and a more adaptive doctrine presents a scenario for its enemies in which achieving air superiority will be much more expensive and risky. In other words, a paradox has developed and is beginning to take hold, one where Ukraine has not only resisted Russian aviation, but, by forcing it to evolve, has contributed to turning it into a more sophisticated and persistent threat to the European military balance. Image | Alan Wilsonparfaits In Xataka | If fog was deadly in Ukraine’s winter, spring is offering Russia a key advantage: greenery In Xataka | Ukraine is close to what no one has achieved in a war: shooting down missiles for less than a million dollars

The Earth was going to force us to “erase” a second from our clocks in 2026. Climate change has changed everything

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For decades, the world’s metrologists have had to occasionally add a “leap second” to our clocks on Earth, since traditionally the tendency was for our planet to begin to slow down due to tidal friction caused by the Moon, making our days last a breath longer than the theoretical 86,400 seconds that science has always told us. but this trend has changedand now the Earth has started spinning faster. The consequence. Yes, when our planet was starting to slow down, I had to add one more second to our daily lives; When the opposite effect occurs, what should be done is to delete a second so that Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) does not become desynchronized from astronomical time. Something that will not be noticed, logically, but that has great importance in the causes that have led to this situation. Because? The answer to this temporal enigma was published in Nature where science calculated that the massive melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica has postponed the need for a second negative from 2026 to 2029, due to what is known as the ‘skater effect’ since an ice skater who turns on himself and wants to brake, extends his arms; If you want to speed up, you shrink them against your body. Now, if we take this concept to our own planet, we can see that when the ice at the poles melts, the entire mass of water flows and is redistributed around the equator as if it were ‘opening its arms’, moving mass away from its central axis of rotation. In this way, the law of conservation of angular momentum tells us that this phenomenon causes a slowdown in movement. Then we can affirm that the thaw has counteracted and surpassed the acceleration of the Earth’s core that we had previously detected. Your confirmation. What in 2024 was protection, today is backed by real-time mediations, and this means that if we go to the official data From the IERS, its most recent bulletins show us that the length of the day shows new positive values, so the acceleration has stopped and the Earth slows down slightly again. If we look at the literature, this fits perfectly with research published in recent years, where it is seen that between 2000 and 2020 the days have lengthened at a rate of 1.33 milliseconds per century due to melting ice. And among the reasons they give, the authors are categorical in stating that the redistribution of masses due to climate change currently dominates the Earth’s rotation, even surpassing the historical effect of lunar friction. It’s a race. Adding or subtracting seconds from our watches is not forever, since the International Bureau of Weights and Measures has already made the decision to definitively eliminate this practice starting in 2025. The reason? Current digital infrastructure, such as telecommunications networks, is at risk of collapsing every time time is manipulated. Images | POT In Xataka | A third of Spain will be completely dark for a minute or two: the astronomical event of the century is approaching

It is not necessary to shoot down US fighters, it is enough to force them to take off

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In World War II, the Soviet Union produced more than 100,000 tanksmany of them technically inferior to the Germans, but enough to tip the balance of the conflict. Because sometimes in war, the deciding factor is not sophistication, but how many times you can repeat the same move. Win by forcing take off. The conflict with Iran has exposed an American paradox, another onemost uncomfortable: the largest military power in the world can destroy targets with unprecedented precision and speed, but it has enormous difficulties to support the defense against much simpler and cheaper threats. Because instead of trying to shoot down fighters or directly confront American air superiority, Iran has adopted a different logic, one much closer (or exactly the same) as which Ukraine has perfected in his war: overwhelm the system enemy. Each drone launched does not seek to impact so much as to force a response, to activate radars, to take off fighters, to, in short, consume resources. The key, therefore, is not the individual damage, but the accumulated wear and tear to which it is subjected. The mathematics of combat. It’s as simple as a matter of numbers. The core of this strategy is purely economic. Drones that cost tens of thousands of dollars require the use of million interceptors or to keep in the air airplanes whose operating cost per hour already far exceeds the value of the objective they pursue. The result is an exchange deeply unequal in financial terms, where each defense is a small major economic defeat. The image is crystal clear, because using elite technology to counter low-cost threats is equivalent to spending high-end resources on problems that, first, do not justify it, and second, they create an unsustainable dynamic in the long term, even for an army with the most monstrous budget like that of the Pentagon. The Ukrainian mirror. As we said before, the model does not emerge from nothing, but from experience accumulated in Ukrainewhere the mass production of cheap drones has completely changed the battlefield. There, the quantity has proven to have an own value in the face of technological quality, with thousands of drones operating daily and forcing the adversary to disperse its defense. In addition, constant evolution (with software improvements every few weeks) has turned these systems into increasingly useful tools. more autonomous and difficult to counteract, especially in environments where GPS or traditional communications stop working. A preparation error. It we have counted on other occasions. For years, Western defenses were designed with high-end threats such as ballistic missiles in mind, leaving simpler systems in the background. The result is that drones, smaller, slower and more difficult to detect, have found an unexpected crack. Radars need specific adjustments, fighters have difficulty intercepting them due to their speed and flight profile, and the available solutions are totally inefficient. in terms of cost. In this context, resorting to advanced fighters or missiles does not seem like a structural solution, but more of a patch which aggravates the problem. War of attrition underway. In summary, and although it is impossible to ignore the US budget for stretch a war, Iran has so far not needed to win in the traditional sense to alter the balance of the conflict. A simple one was enough calculation exerciseone based on maintaining the pace while forcing the United States and its allies to continue responding, to consume inventories, to stress their logistics and make a hole in your budget. It is a war that, for the moment, is not decided on the classic battlefield, but on the ability to sustain the effort. And in that field, mathematics plays a decisive role: If each response costs more than the attack, the final result depends not on who has better weapons, but on who can afford to continue using them for longer. The “Ukrainian mathematics” applied in Iran. Image | RawPixel In Xataka | We wonder if it is safe to fly now that there are more drones than Ryanair planes: the answer is an Ockham’s razor In Xataka | The weapon to liberate Hormuz has fled 6,000 km from the war. And that just means the US is preparing for what comes next.

What did Immanuel Kant mean when he argued that patience is not “a force of resistance, but rather one that hopes to make suffering satisfactory?”

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“Patience has generally been considered a virtue, but it has been very difficult to explain why,” said Paul Davies a couple of years ago. And he is right. Not only because we human beings have paid little attention to it, but because patience has something that makes it difficult to understand. After all, patience is too much like passivity, doing nothing, enduring whatever is thrown at us. What can have positive Be patient if the entire modern world has been built around autonomy, personal will and self-determination? Luckily, we have Immanuel Kant to get us out of trouble. An equivocal virtue. As soon as we stop to think about patience, we realize that it has no content of its own: it is always patience “for” something. And, of course, it is difficult to maintain that something is good in itself if it is little more than a psychological ability… Is patience for evil also a virtue? And Kant’s response is… admit it. For him, patience only acquires moral status if we complement it with something else; but staying there would be a mistake. We speak of “the ability to hold oneself in a position that does not offer immediate gratification without this absence of gratification being experienced as suffering”. The Kantian virtuous is not someone who suffers from duty, he is someone who develops sufficient moral strength so that this wait becomes a positive experience. That is, he is someone who is patient in the full sense: he is not someone who resists instinct, he is someone who actively experiences that wait. What the hell does all this mean? Basically, for Kant, although being patient only makes moral sense in virtue of something; If our logic is to “be patient” to obtain a result, everything is wrong. We will have fallen into the trap: if we look for it, we have already lost it. Although formulating it this way would horrify the Konigsberg philosopher, his vision of patience is very similar to the idea of ​​enjoying the process for its own sake. In more Kantian terms, we could talk about ‘moral satisfaction’: “an indirect enjoyment of the inner freedom that arises from the consciousness of mastery over one’s own inclinations.” And can this be trained? In several of his worksthe philosopher addresses the question of whether this ‘moral strength‘What we call patience can be trained. And his answer is yes; although, to tell the truth, in an unusual way. Because it is not about doing self-control exercises, nor conditioning yourself to inhibit specific stimuli. For Kant, what is really important is to train ‘moral attention’: focusing on seeing how our inclinations affect how we see things and the evaluations we make about them; glimpse what is best. Over time, patience will come alone. The most interesting image has to do with ‘writing’: fluency is not achieved by seeking fluency, it is achieved by writing a lot. Image | Xataka In Xataka | 2,000 years ago Epicurus had already understood the secret of pleasure: “Nothing is enough for those who have enough is little.”

Thousands of CEOs admit that nothing is changing (yet). The productivity paradox of the 80s resurfaces with force

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AI will make us more productive, the studies said and AI advocates. It is a discourse that is already well known and seemed reasonable: models allow us to automate routine tasks and use that time on other productive things, right? Well, the truth is, (at the moment) no. And what is happening is curiously the same thing that happened 40 years ago. The productivity paradox. In 1987 the economist and Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow realized of a singular paradox in the so-called “information age”. The transistors, microprocessors, and integrated circuits discovered in the 1960s were supposed to revolutionize businesses and dramatically increase productivity. What happened was just the opposite. Productivity growth did not accelerate, but rather slowed down: between 1948 and 1973 it was 2.9%, but since 1973 that growth was only 1.1%. So much chip for nothing? It seemed that way, at least those first few years. History repeats itself: AI is of little use. As they point out in Fortunethat paradox has resurfaced just now that we are suffering exactly the same thing with AI. A new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) reveals a striking conclusion after surveying no less than 6,000 CEOs, CFOs and other managers from several countries: they see very little impact of AI on their real operations. AI is not changing anything. Although two-thirds of the managers surveyed indicated that they used AI in their processes, this use was very limited: about 1.5 hours per week. 25% of participants indicated that they did not use AI at all at work. Nearly 90% of the companies that participated highlighted that AI has not influenced their hiring or productivity in the last three years. But they are optimistic. The use of AI by these executives appears to be very limited at the moment, but those same companies are still waiting for a substantial impact. In fact, they expect productivity to increase by 1.4% in the next three years. Another paradox: these first years AI was supposed to cut hiring by 0.7%, but respondents revealed a 0.5% increase in those hiring. The data confirm that at the moment, little. The truth is that the vaunted AI revolution has still not become a reality, at least in terms of productivity and economic return. Economist Torsten Slok recently indicated that “AI is everywhere except in macroeconomic data: you don’t see it in employment, productivity or inflation data.” His thesis: the impact of AI is currently almost zero. In fact, except in the case of technology’s “Magnificent Seven,” there are no signs of profit margins or revenue expectations. But these revolutions take time. The revolution that semiconductors brought us took a while to crystallize, but it ended up doing so: in the 1990s and 2000s were produced productivity improvements such as an increase of 1.5% between 1995 and 2005. There are experts who they point because in fact this change in trend has already begun to occur: in the US, GDP in the fourth quarter grew by 3.7% despite the fact that there were job cuts. That points to an increase in productivity. Slok also pointed to this possibility, and theorized that the impact could end up having a “J” shape, first slowing down and then exploding. Let them tell the steam engine. Previous industrial revolutions, such as the one that produced the steam engine or, even more importantly, electricity, took their time. The initial delay disappeared over the course of subsequent decades because these technologies needed time to spread to the rest of the productive sectors. Excessive optimism does not help, of course, and at the moment what is reasonable seems to lie somewhere in between: neither “AI is useless” nor “AI will do everything for us.” Perhaps the only thing AI needs—in addition to improving—is for us to give time to time. It is not in vain that many describe it as “the new electricity.” Image | The Standing Desk In Xataka | Until now “software was eating the world.” Now AI is eating software

Elon Musk and Sam Altman predicted that AI will force the establishment of a universal basic income. The United Kingdom is already considering it

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The main economic organizations in the world they don’t agree in their forecasts about what the real impact of the arrival of AI will be in the economic and labor sphere. A report The World Economic Forum estimated that AI will create 170 million new jobs. The problem is that until that happens, it will destroy about 92 million jobs. The US Senate consider that some 100 million jobs could be destroyed. Elon Musk and Sam Altman have repeated on several occasions that, to minimize this impact on society, it will be necessary to implement a universal basic income. In the United Kingdom, the government is debating measures to protect workers with the same idea. Millionaires ask for a basic income. Some of the top AI millionaires, such as Elon Musk, have predicted that universal basic income will be a reality in a future dominated by AI. While it is true that Musk’s vision is based on a vision more optimistic about the future in which “work will be optional” and it will not be necessary to save for retirement, the millionaire does not deny that universal income will be a necessary instrument to achieve it. Along the same lines, although with a more realistic vision, the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has funded studies on the effects of universal basic income in a scenario of job destruction and how this income helps recipients return to work train for new jobs. Companies do not need human labor. In one your blog postDario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, warned that AI will have an “unusually painful” impact on the labor market. “AI is not a substitute for specific human jobs, but rather a general job substitute for humans,” the manager wrote. For this reason, this mechanism is increasingly seen as a transition instrument that allows employees laid off due to the arrival of AI to retrain to re-enter the labor market. A systematic review of the Department of Economics of the University of Huelva on more than 50 empirical casespoint out that universal basic income improves spending on basic needs without participants stopping looking for work, so it will be a way for employees to train for new jobs. jobs created by AI. The UK Government is debating it. In an interview for Financial TimesJason Stockwood, UK Investment Minister, has revealed that within the Government “it is definitely being talked about.” The minister noted that “without a doubt, we are going to have to think very carefully about how to smooth the process of disembarking those industries that disappear, through some type of UBI and some type of lifelong learning mechanism so that people can retrain.” According to published BloombergMorgan Stanley declared a net job loss of 8% in the UK in the last 12 months due to AI, the highest among large economies. Which explains the concern of the British executive to begin evaluating formulas that cushion this impact. A lifeline to keep them afloat. Unlike Musk’s “optimistic” vision, British representatives do not see the arrival of AI as a liberating element that makes work optional, but as a problem that will temporarily leave millions of workers who will need help unemployed. So declared it Sadiq Khan, mayor of London, concerned about the high rate of “white collar” unemployment that can cause the arrival of AI in a city like London. Liz Kendall, Secretary of Technology of the United Kingdom, spoke along the same lines, assuring that, although it is true that more jobs will be created than will be lost, there will be a transition period in which AI will be “a weapon of mass destruction of jobs. We will not leave people and communities to fend for themselves,” collected Guardian. The million-dollar question: who finances that income? It is easy to predict that universal basic income would be a solution for those who do not have a job to return to because AI has automated it. However, something more complicated will be determining who will finance that basic income. Bill Gates already gave some clues almost a decade agoensuring that they should be their own companies that use robots in their processes those that pay for that subsidy “if a robot replaces the work of a human, that robot must pay taxes like a human.” Ioana Marinescu, economist and associate professor of public policy at the University of Pennsylvania consider that taxing technology companies could slow down their implementation at the local level, so that this transformation process it would be more progressive increasing that transition period that would give time to the labor market to adapt. In Xataka | AI and its impact on the labor market: how the perception of its arrival varies by country, explained in a graph Image | Unsplash (Alexander Gray, enrico bet)

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