MWC

Technology itself doesn’t decide anything. We do.

Curious enough to learn. Humble enough to unlearn.

This year I experienced Mobile World Congress in a different way, without my photography equipment, without rushing from stand to stand, without clients to please or a tight schedule to follow.

I was able to attend thanks to Daniel -thank you much! just after running into some minor technological issues applying for my press pass (isn’t that ironic?) Just with my phone, an openness to conversation, a lot of curiosity and more time to observe the atmosphere carefully. Instead of being so focused on producing content, I made space for conversations and exploring the booths that genuinely caught my attention. My intention was to learn and network and I think I accomplished that mission beautifully.

Now that the hype is slowing down, after being immersed in a space designed to receive over 100,000 people in a few days and engage them with the future possibilities, sometimes re-visiting the past like the Vodafone stand did, it's hard not to think about the obvious: every technological advancement in human history has two sides: more freedom and more possibilities on one hand. More capacity for destruction and control on the other.

I started thinking about this after witnessing a robot having real-time conversations in multiple languages and giving personalized suggestions, drones designed to fight forest fires and artificial intelligence solutions applied to improving consumer experience, boosting creativity, and shortening the time spent on manual tasks.

I also saw stands showcasing drones for military and city police purposes and AI for survaillance purposes, simultaneously I was chatting on WhatsApp with an old friend who now lives in Doha, who's been hearing missiles for the last 5 days… Ukraine is also being attacked with drones. I don’t want to get political here, but it was challenging not to feel a certain surrealism in the face of that contradiction.

Technology advances. This is inevitable. And it advances very quickly. Vodafone had a wall showing 40 years of technological progress in the phone industry and wow, we've really come a long way. The question always was and still is the same: how do we use it?

There were things about the event that really excited me. At the Ericsson booth, for example, Salvador gave me a very interesting tour of some of the solutions they're developing and how they can be applied to real problems. I was blown away by the possibility of choosing the color of my sports car with augmented reality. Or the networks they can put in forests to detect environmental changes and prevent forest fires.

I also kept thinking about the talk on the future of work. Many people are still speaking from fear: that artificial intelligence is going to take our jobs. I don't see it that way and I'm not the only one. I really enjoyed the panel at 4YFN “AI won’t steal your job but…” and what Marcel mentioned about how things are shifting towards personal responsability.

What's clear is that the way we work is changing and what we value too. Less rigid hierarchies, more collaboration. Less closed roles, more capacity to learn, adapt and think critically. This is what the incorporation of AI into the labor market brings. And I honestly think we have a fantastic tool at our disposition to make the impossible possible, if we use it right.

In this sense, artificial intelligence doesn't necessarily come to replace us. It probably comes to force us to evolve. To work better together. To develop more human skills: critical thinking, emotional intelligence, the ability to learn and also to unlearn.

There's something else that's been on my mind that I think is worth saying.

An event of this scale, with more than 100,000 people, should be much more sustainable than it was. I saw a lot of plastic, single-use packaging and an enormous amount of waste.

If we're going to talk about the future, sustainability can't be a minor detail.

Because all the technological progress in the world loses its meaning if we keep generating problems that we already know have consequences.

Technology opens up possibilities. But the direction we're heading depends on us.

On our decisions, our values and also on the type of leadership we choose to build. The future is already here.

The question is whether we're going to use these tools to expand the best of ourselves or to repeat the same mistakes with more advanced technology.

I quote Marcel, we need to be curious enough to learn and humble enough to unlearn.