Important: Translated automatically from Spanish by 🌐💬 Aphra 1.0.0
What better way to start (and end) the blog year1 than with a self-quote. The moment I wrote that in the previous article, I knew it deserved an explanation. I planned to do it in a few days, but look how a whole year has passed. Tempus fugit2.
But ultimately, yes, you are also being part of that revolution. Probably a very active part in many moments of your life:
- When you created a free email account.
- When you switched to a smartphone and downloaded that app that has demanded so much of your time.
- When you uploaded content on some social network, hoping to please the algorithm.
- When your photos started uploading to a free backup service.
- When you made that online purchase.
- When you didn’t stop going to that place that installed automatic cashiers (and I’m not referring to banks).
- When you took refuge in the comfort of a subscription, forgetting other ways to access content.
I could continue the list, but I think the idea is understood, and the year is coming to an end.
Perhaps, as some people say, you have simply contributed to the progressive destruction of jobs that should never have existed in the first place. Or perhaps not.
The thing is, certain tints that we could consider as neo-Luddism3 are being noticed in the air, on the horizon. Probably fueled by a certain underlying fear that machines will take our jobs. I consider the approach, from different points of view, quite misguided. Because what we’d really like, paraphrasing the Cádiz carnival poet Juan Carlos Aragón4, is for the vacation month to be every month and for the weekend to occupy the entire week. Because when we say we don’t want to lose a job, what we truly don’t want to lose is the salary. It’s a social problem, not a technological one. And whoever doesn’t think so needs to have their head examined. But they should hire a real person and not use ChatGPT as a therapist.
So good luck, John Connor5. If you can count properly, you’ll know not to count on me6. You won’t see me in that war. Here’s my surrender. After all, almost no human being is interested in what I write. Maybe with LLMs7 I’ll have better luck.
I don’t know what will happen. Nobody knows. But I have the intuition that humans are approaching the biggest blow to the ego they have ever received. Bigger than realizing the sun didn’t revolve around them. Bigger than no longer placing themselves at the center of the universe. And that, in the ego era we live in (this blog as evidence), we’ll see how it feels. We’ll see how we handle it.
Perhaps in the future we can dedicate ourselves to living. Not living to work, nor working to live. Just living, while fulfilling ourselves as people. And that has as many meanings as there are human beings in the world.
What they don’t seem to want us to realize is that for a machine to replace you, a human being has had to make that decision beforehand. It’s better to point to the robot as the enemy, while the real battle remains the same as it has always been: the class struggle8. Perhaps in that trench we can meet.
Happy 2026.
P.S.: This text has been generated entirely by a natural human intelligence9, albeit a rather limited one. The same cannot be said for the accompanying image, which was generated back in April (pre-nanobanana era)10, when it took much more skill.
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This opening phrase (“Qué mejor manera de empezar y terminar el año del blog”) is a common Spanish blogging expression used for year-end reflection posts, analogous to “wrapping up and ringing in the blog year” in English. ↩︎
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Latin expression meaning “time flees” or “time flies,” originating from Virgil’s Georgics, commonly used as a reminder of time’s swift, irretrievable passage. ↩︎
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A contemporary philosophical movement opposed to modern technological advancement, echoing the 19th-century Luddite movement that destroyed industrial machinery, but updated for the digital age with concerns about AI, automation, and surveillance. ↩︎
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Juan Carlos Aragón Becerra (1967-2019) was a celebrated poet, composer and philosopher from Cádiz, Spain, famous for his contributions to the Cádiz Carnival. His work often contained social commentary and is widely quoted in Spanish popular culture. ↩︎
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Protagonist of the Terminator film franchise who leads the human resistance against intelligent machines in a post-apocalyptic future dominated by Skynet. ↩︎
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A common Spanish expression (“Si sabes contar, no cuentes conmigo”) that plays on the double meaning of “contar” (to count numbers and to count on someone) and is used as a humorous way to refuse participation. ↩︎
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LLMs stands for Large Language Models - AI systems like those powering ChatGPT that are trained on vast amounts of text data to generate human-like text. ↩︎
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In Spanish political discourse, especially leftist rhetoric, “la lucha social” (social struggle) refers to ongoing collective action against systemic inequality and capitalism, often framed as a historical continuity of class struggle. ↩︎
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The original “inteligencia biológica” (biological intelligence) is contrasted with artificial intelligence, emphasizing the human authorship of the text as opposed to AI generation. ↩︎
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Refers to an AI image generation technology called “Nano Banana” that revolutionized digital image creation, with “pre-nanobanana” referring to earlier, less advanced technologies. ↩︎
