It’s impossible not to experience a vague sense of familiarity upon seeing Diego Luna, our June cover man. Or actually the feeling is very concrete: in Spain we met him in 2001 with the premiere of And Your Mother Too and, since then, this Mexican has gone from being a perfect stranger to being a close star, like a kind of attractive friend who you don’t see much but is always on your mind. It was, of course, a mirage. A phenomenon caused by our desire to have idols that look more like us than Ben Affleck or Brad Pitt. And yet it is equally impossible not to feel some satisfaction in the fact that, thanks to the universe Star Wars, Luna has become a Hollywood star. A star type A, as they say there, but who still sounds like Diego Luna, a man committed to the world and his intense biography and who is not afraid to reflect it in his work. In Andorthe prequel to Rogue One whose second season is rolling these days, the Mexican explores thorny issues such as the complexity of a revolution, no matter how laudable his motives are: “It is impossible not to talk about darkness, moral contradictions, constant errors,” he tells Iñigo López Palacios in an interview that is a pleasure to read.
Diego Luna’s story has eternal human qualities —love, tragedy, triumph, learning— and I thought about it while reading about the visit to Madrid of Sam Altman, the king of artificial intelligence. I’m talking about the CEO of OpenAI, or the man who controls ChatGPT, or the Silicon Valley mogul who could change our minds about Silicon Valley moguls. “If this technology goes bad, it could go bad enough,” the 38-year-old told the US Congress in May. Altman’s intervention, which is committed to regulating his own invention at the state level, was seen by observers in the corporate world as the arrival of a messiah: someone powerful, but, for once, also concerned about the consequences of his inventions beyond the economic benefits of the proverbial disruption.
“He’s like a less crazed Elon Musk,” said the Financial Times about the brilliant Altman, who does not invest in giant sailing ships that require dismantling bridges to get through (as Jeff Bezos almost did when he launched his new boat in Rotterdam), but in nuclear fusion and quantum computing. Unlike Bezos, Zuckerberg and company, Altman currently has no shares in OpenAI and has limited dividends to outside investors, a series of moves aimed at protecting such a high-profile project from speculative pushes.
It is hard to believe that an alpha male of technology with a human factor has emerged, but the idea alone is good news and, perhaps, confirmation that we are facing a change of era. Our admiration for these world-changing, profit-maximizing heroes of entrepreneurship has reached such an extreme, and we’ve adored hyper-efficiency for so long, I can only applaud the opposite: those TikTok girls who get up late and brag about missing their deadlines. deadlines or any work dynamic that escapes systematization.
Having said all this, it is essential to approach ChatGPT as a tool and not just view it as a threat if we don’t want to go crazy. I cling to something a wise man told me recently: “Artificial intelligence isn’t subtle enough to tell you what to do, that’s a field we’re too good at.” For now, this latest issue of ICON is full of human stories with human ideas, legs, eyes and wrinkles. Even relatives. I hope you enjoy.
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