ES
Former Telefónica president and SEK alumnus José María Álvarez-Pallete delivered one of the most anticipated lectures of the 11th Felipe Segovia Symposium at Camilo José Cela University, with a talk titled “Gods Against Chaos.” Drawing on his 26 years of experience in the company and now, as he noted, with “more time to philosophise,” he offered a global reading of the ongoing technological revolution and its social, political and economic consequences. “We are living through the greatest technological revolution in the history of humanity,” he warned, stressing that no previous generation has faced a comparable level of change.
To frame the present moment, Álvarez-Pallete turned to Greek mythology: from the initial chaos, only the energy of the gods could create order, and today, he argued, the world is once again subjected to enormous entropy. After recalling the post–Second World War order (Bretton Woods, the UN, the World Bank, global trade) and its transformation after the fall of the Berlin Wall and globalisation, he identified a new turning point in the convergence of mobility, computing and, more recently, artificial intelligence. “In the next seven years, AI will have an impact 70 times greater than the Industrial Revolution in its first 70 years,” he stated, underscoring the exponential speed of change.
This technological leap, he explained, is occurring against a backdrop of geopolitical and economic instability: open war in Europe, the proliferation of armed conflicts, inflation, fragmentation of global trade and increased defence spending. Citing the “doomsday clock,” he noted that the world is currently “one minute and 29 seconds” from a hypothetical nuclear catastrophe—closer than during the Cuban Missile Crisis. To this tension, he added new forms of warfare—space, cyberspace, disinformation—and the growing weight of “hybrid threats”: massive cyberattacks and manipulation campaigns that precede conflicts.
One of the central themes of the lecture was the data economy, which he described as a vast but invisible market for most citizens. “We spend our lives mining data so that others get rich,” he summarised. He reminded the audience that nearly 30 billion people and objects are already connected; that each of us generates tens of gigabytes daily; and that a connected car can produce between 5,000 and 20,000 GB of data in a single day. Meanwhile, major digital platforms concentrate more than half of global traffic and consume energy and water “at the scale of whole countries,” to the point where AI growth could demand as much electricity as Japan and as much water as Sweden in a single year.
In this context, he criticised Europe for “regulating horses in a world of motorways,” detached from the technological race led by the United States and China. He showed how the main companies and critical technologies are dominated by other blocs and called for a clear industrial policy, coherent regulation and fair competition conditions for sectors such as telecommunications, which are heavily regulated, in contrast with new actors operating with almost no restrictions. But he insisted that the response cannot be merely technical or economic: “This is not the time for technology; it is the time for the social sciences.”
Álvarez-Pallete devoted a significant part of his address to the human impacts of this transformation: rising inequality, political polarisation, the deterioration of young people’s mental health and the breakdown of the “social elevator.” He focused on the effect of social media on the self-esteem and anxiety of adolescents and university students—especially girls—and noted that, for the first time in decades, youth unemployment exceeds the general unemployment rate. “This generation is not guaranteed to live better than their parents. That is a tragedy we cannot afford as a society,” he warned, calling on education to play a key role in massive reskilling and in protecting opportunities.
Against currents that reduce individuals to “biochemical algorithms” and place the flow of data above individual freedom—what he called dataism—the speaker defended the need for a return to humanism. “Human value is intrinsic and stands above the algorithm. The algorithm only makes sense if it improves people’s lives,” he affirmed. In this regard, he argued for the urgency of a new social contract that redefines dignity, data ownership, wealth redistribution, the defence of truth and the protection of democracy in a media ecosystem dominated by platforms that “are not neutral” and whose algorithms reward what polarises most.
Although he highlighted the risks, Álvarez-Pallete stressed that the aim is not to reject technology but to direct it. He listed some of the advances already made possible by AI—from the design of new medicines to advanced medical diagnostics, natural disaster prediction, improved agricultural production and support for people with disabilities—and expressed confidence that “technology always ends up being good if used well.” The decisive question, he said, is who decides how it is used and with what values.
The answer, in his view, cannot be left in the hands of major technology conglomerates. Instead, he called on civil society and the academic world as the actors best placed to lead this debate. “We need philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, jurists, economists, politicians… who can help us formulate the questions we must ask,” he urged, citing the famous idea that, in times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. And, as a final challenge to the audience of the 11th Felipe Segovia Symposium, he posed an open question: “Who will be the new gods of Olympus to bring order to this chaos: countries, platforms or people? If we want them to be people, the time to act is now.”
