La Voz de Galicia – March 21, 2025 →
After much deliberation, I got rid of it. It no longer made any sense. There it was, bored, on the table in my New York apartment, where for years, the only calls it received were robocalls. Xan had been telling me for a while that paying for a landline we never used was pointless. And I would always reply talking about the remote possibility that if Wi-Fi networks or 5G ever went down, at least we’d have something to communicate with. The 212 number had been with us for more than twenty years, during which I had spent countless hours connected to it. And as I unplugged the cable from the wall, I reflected on how quickly technology has advanced in these past two decades. I had forgotten that not so long ago, a landline was our only means of instant communication, that the internet was not really reliable, or it was a privilege, and that video calls didn’t become popular until Skype arrived around 2003. I had forgotten what my life was like before all of this, and somehow, for me, that phone had become a symbol of that previous life.
In the age of artificial intelligence, I can’t stop thinking about the rhythm in which technology is moving right now: it makes the shift from landlines to mobile phones seem almost terribly slow. In just two years, AI has already become part of our daily lives, and this is only the beginning, because if the AI capable of performing cognitive tasks like a human, the “artificial general intelligence” (or AGI), becomes a reality, then the way we understand life will change in ways I can’t even begin to grasp. And at that point, there will be no disconnecting, no turning back.
