Artificial intelligence, AI, is advancing fast and fast in the field of virtual assistants. His progress is drawn these days in the form of a clover: he took the lead on ChatgGPT (an initial project of Elon Musk), a few months ago; Microsoft is going to adapt it shortly to its Bing search engine; and Google will soon have developed its Bard.
These discoveries of the digital age stand in contrast to some other rather less successful developments. For example, in the automotive sector. The source of the future will be electricity or hydrogen. Well, on the one hand, in the latest study on the autonomy of electric vehicles, carried out by the Norwegian Automobile Club NAF, 28 European, North American, Chinese, Korean and Japanese cars were tested. All of them were subjected to very low temperatures to evaluate the resistance of the batteries. In these extreme conditions, in which energy consumption is higher, the actual range of the batteries was between 303 kilometers for the Hongqi E-HS9 and 424 for the BMW i7 xDrive60.
These are not very encouraging ratios for a sector that promises to plunge dangerously into the arms of the electric car; Taxi drivers tell me that for the average 200 kilometers per day that may not be bad, but that energy that doesn't solve long-distance journeys will never become a panacea. And on the other, something similar happens with hydrogen. It is thought of as the gas of the future. It is ecological, accessible, cheap and useful to cover long journeys, up to enjoying a range of 800 or 1,000 kilometres; it also does not require excessive space for batteries. But, its development advances much more slowly than the electric one due to the lack of hydrogen generators and, above all, regulations.
On the one hand, then, the flowering of AI at the service of virtual assistants of all stripes; on the other, digital setback in the vehicles of the future. We could add numerous similar cases in textiles, pharmaceuticals, medicine... Despite the strong investments made in new technologies, we are witnessing a dual scenario.
All this is happening while the big technology companies are reflecting a sharp drop in their business figures and causing significant disinvestments in talent and projects. We would say, then, that digitization is advancing unstoppably, reaping both successes and failures. Growth crisis, could we call the phenomenon? Better, perhaps, a time to adjust both the objectives of innovation and the application of new technologies, on the one hand, and the business models that are losing steam, on the other. Something similar must have happened when, upon reaching Eurasia, sapiens interbred with Neanderthals, some seventy thousand years ago. The resulting new breeds took advantage of the best of each house, while being contaminated by bad inheritances. Some became extinct definitively and other genes triumphed and dominated the earth.
