🔥 Hot Summer in the AI Era

🍏 Apple disappoints again: Strategic calm or technological fear in Cupertino? 🚗🔥 Trump vs. Musk: Los Angeles protests set Silicon Valley ablaze and shake up digital geopolitics.

This article from Transparent Algorithm #90 is also available in Spanish, Catalan, French, and Italian.

🌐 Politics, technology and global chaos: when Artificial Intelligence changes everything

This is an exciting time. Never in recent history have we witnessed a technological game this crucial for humanity — one so decisive in politics, social unrest, global discontent, and the struggle for power. Traditional newspaper sections like Politics and Technology no longer make sense. The International and Local sections have never been so interconnected. And the Society section? It no longer makes sense without technological content.

The summer of 2025 is critical for readers who haven’t yet immersed themselves in the world of AI. It’s essential for those who want to understand today’s world through lenses that until recently were seen as marginal or overly specialized. The Trump–Musk split, the protests in Los Angeles, Google’s announcements, Sam Altman’s essay, Meta’s AI push, and Apple’s third major annual disappointment all converged in the past week or two.

This 90th edition of Transparent Algorithm places us in the final, oppressively hot stretch of a global spring that cannot be understood without Artificial Intelligence and the power struggles we regularly cover. To make sense of today’s world, we need access to information that cannot be approached through media sensationalism or ideological oversimplification. Transparent Algorithm brings a solid summer “cooler” full of interviews with thinkers who offer unique, complementary perspectives. We’ll combine that with analysis of current events and curated links to key stories.

🔹 “This summer of 2025 is essential for anyone who wants to understand today’s world through perspectives once seen as marginal” ☀️🤖

Apple disappointed once again this Monday at its WWDC event in Cupertino. Analysts are quick to write it off as lagging behind in the AI race. But what if Apple hasn’t embraced Artificial Intelligence out of conviction? Revolutions—like this one—often reward those who time their entry perfectly. Monday’s event was preceded by an Apple paper criticizing current AI reasoning models as inconsistent. If Apple doesn’t fully trust AI yet, why force it to jump in if it’s not convinced? Are we seeing a cautious, prudent, and intuitive Tim Cook—or a CEO without direction? The fact that ChatGPT was mentioned more than Siri during the keynote proves Apple is taking the AI issue very slowly.

Just days before, Jony Ive—the designer behind the iPhone—announced alongside Sam Altman that OpenAI is working on a device meant to replace the smartphone, or at least reimagine AI in a form completely different from it. Under the shadow of Ive-Altman, Cook arrived at WWDC with bold design and sleek visuals, but minimal technological ambition. The very next day, Altman—who never tweets, blogs, or publishes without careful timing—released a manifesto-like essay on singularity and the immediate future of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). It’s a roadmap that goes far beyond flashy marketing, Twitter trolling, or vague techno-utopianism. This one has weight. It’s worth saving. We’re in the second spring since ChatGPT’s debut (if our dates are right), and Altman isn’t letting up.

The protests in Los Angeles—with iconic images of demonstrators burning Waymo self-driving cars, waving Mexican flags on car hoods, looting Apple stores and stealing iPhones and other devices—reflect a deep global discontent knocking at the doors of the world's leading power. Just hours after breaking with the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, the most powerful man on Earth, Donald Trump, throws fuel on already-burning streets. And he does it because chaos, tension, and polarization work in his favor. The first cities to explode are in Democratic California, near a Silicon Valley now split between Trump supporters and detractors, Musk loyalists and opponents.

🔹 “Human stupidity is AI’s worst ally. Or, to put it another way: no AI hallucinates hard enough to imagine the political, judicial, or police spectacles real life throws at us” 🙃🧠

From 6,000 kilometers away, it’s hard to gauge how this atmosphere of unrest, tension, defiance, and anti-Trump resistance will affect the balance of power between Big Tech and its tentacles in (or around) the White House. Musk’s dramatic exit, his later regret over his harsh tweets—how will that shape Trump’s AI strategies? How will Peter Thiel’s influence over J.D. Vance, budget cuts to key tech programs, and the ideological ambiguity of techno-tycoons like Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post factor into it all?

Meanwhile, in that burning superpower, with DeepSeek’s shockwave still reverberating and a U.S.–China tech trade war in full swing, the chip giants like Nvidia are playing a geopolitical chess game of historic proportions. This is the core of it all. Elon and Meta are playing another game altogether—building gigantic data centers or reviving decommissioned nuclear plants to power AI. OpenAI has released its most powerful (and expensive) model yet. Mistral is emerging as Europe’s flagship alternative. Ursula von der Leyen’s deregulation speeches with Draghi overtones? Practically forgotten.

Back in Spain, a troubling wave of anti-tech conservatism is gaining ground. It’s a deadly narrative that criminalizes teenagers and their screens. How can we justify banning smartphones or Wikipedia/ChatGPT access in classrooms as learning and social tools—when it’s been proven that disinformation thrives most among older, less educated demographics?

This anti-screen, anti-social media populism—supposedly for democratic and protective purposes—is a chapter that will deserve all caps when we one day write the history of this technological revolution. Blinded swings and smoke screens while algorithmic democracy trembles—not due to AI abuse, but due to corruption, polarization, and old-school politics.

Reality beats fiction—in the U.S. and in Spain. Human stupidity is AI’s worst ally. Or to say it again: there is no AI that could hallucinate hard enough to imagine the political, judicial, or police spectacles our miserable reality delivers.