A question I wish I had never asked myself
I work with artificial intelligence every day. With it I build platforms, models and transactions that until two years ago would have taken whole teams and months of work. I watch it grow from the inside, week after week.
And yet some evenings, closing yet another project designed for the next twenty years, I catch myself asking a question I never wanted to write down. What if we are building a future we will not have?
It is not pessimism. I am a dreamer, someone who always looks for a solution. But it is precisely those who spend their lives looking ahead who notice first when the horizon narrows.
Not one crisis: all of them at once
For decades we faced crises one at a time. The financial crisis, the pandemic, the energy crisis: each had a beginning, a peak and a way out. That is no longer the case.
Wars have come close again, and with them the arms race. Climate is no longer a forecast: it is the summer that never ends, the rain that falls all at once. And artificial intelligence advances faster than any rule that tries to contain it.
Each of these crises, on its own, could be governed. The trouble is that they feed each other. Climate multiplies scarcity, scarcity multiplies tensions, tensions push states to arm themselves.
And artificial intelligence enters every step: war, information, the economy, work. It is not one more crisis. It is the accelerator of all the others.
The thread is the human being
This is what worries me most. Not the machines, nor even the weapons themselves. It is that all of this hangs by a thread, and that thread is human judgement.
And human beings today are conditioned as perhaps never before. We live inside a constant stream of news, fears and anger, amplified by algorithms that reward whoever shouts loudest. Decisions that change the lives of millions of people take shape in a climate that at times seems absurd, inexplicable.
We have built extraordinarily powerful tools and we are handing them to a humanity that is tired, frightened and distracted. Technology is racing ahead; the quality of our decisions is not keeping up.
The temptation of Armageddon
I confess a dark thought. Sometimes I wonder whether a great catastrophe really is close, a kind of Armageddon that wipes everything out and forces us to start again. As if humanity, unable to correct itself, needed to hit rock bottom.
I believe many people have had the same thought in recent months. But history proves it wrong. Catastrophes do not reset: they destroy, and the bill is paid above all by the most fragile.
The great new beginnings were not born from the rubble, but from those who had prepared them beforehand. The rules of the post-war economy were written while the war was not yet over. In Italy, with cities still to be rebuilt, men and women with opposing histories sat at the same table and wrote the Constitution together.
What comes after is not born from catastrophe. It is born from those who saw it first.
Every thirty-year contract is an act of faith
Those who build public works know this tension well. A hospital delivered as a public-private partnership rests on contracts of twenty-five or thirty years. The financial plan behind it assumes that in 2056 there will still be patients to treat, a public body paying the fee, a bank that exists.
Every thirty-year concession is an act of faith dressed up as a spreadsheet.
And this is where I find my answer to the doubt. If the future hangs by a thread, building is the way to make it stronger. A hospital, a home at social rent, a service that brings care to an elderly person living alone: these are extra threads.
They do not guarantee the future. They make it more likely.
Starting again first
I do not know whether the great catastrophe is close. Nobody really knows. But I do know that waiting for it in order to start again is the most comfortable choice, and the most dangerous one.
Seeing first is not about predicting the end. It is about preparing what comes after and, where possible, preventing the end from coming.
Artificial intelligence can accelerate disaster or reconstruction: it depends on who steers it, and with what conscience. Wars can be stopped, climate change can be slowed, tensions can be governed. But only if someone decides to do it today, before catastrophe decides for us.
We do not need an Armageddon to start again.
We need to start again first.