The director of the Chair of Science and Society of the Rafael del Pino Foundation, Javier García, said at the presentation of the INTEC 2025 report Ten Technologies to Drive Spain forward that the aim of the work is “to bring clarity and direction at a time of uncertainty, and we do that by pointing out where and how Spain can lead in key sectors». According to him, «the window of opportunity is open, but others are not going to wait for us to decide to start up».
In her welcoming remarks prior to Javier García's speech, the director of International Programmes and Research at Rafael del Pino Foundation, Carlota Taboada, The current times, despite their difficulties, are “fertile in opportunity” for innovation, in line with the trends identified in the report.
«We are living through a technological acceleration unprecedented, but at the same time we are also witnessing a profound crisis of confidence in the institutions to a increasing polarisation and the lifting of new frontiers, The EU's role in the EU's external relations, including tariffs, comes at a time when we most need to build bridges,» said Javier García.
In his review of the global geopolitical context, he pointed out that “war conflicts are becoming chronicled in an increasingly worrying grey area where the border between what is war and peace is blurred». The Spanish economy “It is growing, but it does not solve the systemic problems: the productivity gap, the ability to compete in high-tech segments and the sustainability of our welfare state.
All of this leads, according to Javier García, to a “.“decoupling between the globally expanding private sector and an often overstretched, overstretched public sector, which limits the ability to scale up innovation and translate it into productivity, employment and welfare». Alongside this, there is a “decoupling between productivity and labour remunerationThe pie is growing, but many are getting less and less.
His speech reviewing the main contents of the report concluded with the presentation of a tool that connects the six INTEC documents with the more than 100 professionals who have participated in the acceleration programme of Celera.
Conversation with Miguel Hoyos
Afterwards, Javier García spoke with the journalist from RTVE Miguel Hoyos, Director of the programmes “Culturas 2” and “Un país para leerlo” (A country to read it). He stated that the artificial intelligence, The “democratisation of wealth and access to knowledge», present in all the chapters, "will democratise wealth, access to knowledge, that is not true, very few countries, I would say very few companies have access to talent, to the means, obviously to the chips".
“The more technological our society and our economy become, the more we have to humanist should be our education,» added Javier García. «The ability to innovate responsibly depends not only on the technical mastery of what we know about the technology but also on our ethical, social and cultural understanding of the world where these technologies are applied.
In this sense, “the report we are presenting today is not a catalogue of fashionable technologies, nor an exercise in guesswork; it is the result of a rigorous analysis to listen to those who know and to propose concrete solutions, and that is what we are going for. This is not about what artificial intelligence, biotechnology or nanomedicine can do, but what we want to do with them, putting people at the centre of innovation.
Round Table
The event ended with a round table moderated by the director of Celera, Alejandro Rodríguez Bolaños, The Chair's Professor of the University of Murcia, founder of Voptica and expert of the Chair, Pablo Artal, One of the advantages of Spain is that startups are doing things with much less money than they would have in other places, and with the same quality,» he said.
For his part, the founder of Talantia, Fernando Temprano, He argued that “in 10 years» time, the main seller of new or traditional nuclear technology in the world will be China, and there we have a problem of competitive geopolitics because whoever wants to have that technology will have to buy it from whoever is selling it".
Regarding the new role of science, he said that “when you are in an extraordinarily competitive world, it is very important not to work, from the point of view of innovation or research and development, only on improving what you have, but on improving what you have. building the future, especially when that scenario is changing.
The third speaker was Rosa Narvaéz, The director of IT Channels, Customer & Data at ING Spain and Portugal, who said that “before the technology itself arrives, it is essential to honour the lack of knowledge». When considering the introduction of a new solution, “I try to completely abstract myself from the technology and go back to the original need, back to the discovery, back to understanding the why and the wherefore. Interestingly, when you've done that part of the exercise, the implementation part is infinitely easier.
According to Rosa Narváez, “Artificial intelligence is not the future and it is not the present either: artificial intelligence is literally the past sorted by probability«. In this sense, he claims that “the ability to look to the future and to do imaginative management is still profound and intrinsically human. Today, we have the maximum technological capacity and the minimum capacity to reimagine what we do. We are not having a technology problem, we are having an imagination problem.