From a very young age he was curious about technology and, with an entrepreneurial father in technology, he was exposed to the innovations of that world. The first time he used a virtual reality headset, he couldn’t sleep all night thinking about all the applications it could have, and thus, his future was defined.
author of “7R: The seven technological revolutions that will transform our lives” and “The Human Dilemma: From homo sapiens to homo tech”his latest book, Joan Cwaick studied Media and Entertainment Management at the Universidad Argentina de la Empresa, has been dedicated to disseminating emerging technologies for almost ten years, works at Maytronics, a domestic robotics company of Israeli origin, did a postgraduate degree in multimedia convergence in the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and began to shape this book while he was in his last year of the Master Business Administration at IAE, the Business School of the Universidad Austral. Also, he is one of the ten members of the Assembly of the Future organized by Editorial Perfil and has given more than 400 conferences in relation to emerging technologies in more than 15 countries.
News: How did your concerns about technology start?
Joan Cwaik: I was exposed to technology from a very young age. The first computer that entered my house was in 1994, when I was four years old, after much effort from my father, and I was always very curious. In my childhood I had a relationship with logic, calculation, I spent a lot of time doing puzzles, more in my adolescence I had different moments of exposure to emerging technologies that were responsible for my work today as a technological disseminator.
News: And how did you go from experiencing it to being able to explain it?
Cwaik: Between my undergraduate studies, added to my work experience and other turning points such as “The World of Ideas”, I began to understand that there was a huge space and opportunity. From technology and communication there are two extremes, the side of technological journalism and that of science, technological journalism is more dedicated to day-to-day technological consumption and science is very abstract. There is a lack of people who mix both worlds a little. I specialize in emerging technology with social impact and economic impact.
News: How did “The Human Dilemma” come about?
Cwaik: I had been working hard to begin to analyze how technology challenges us and what impacts this socialization through such massive technology is having on us. It is an essay that was born in a pandemic that begins to understand what is the new form of humanity that we are heading towards, what is the new man in a world in which technology seems to be like a God. The purpose of the book is to give the technological debate the questioning of technology.
News: What is your vision for the jobs of the future?
Cwaik: Making futurism is very difficult, it is trying to understand the present and dare to take a step forward. The future of work is a very real concern. I am not from the school of believing that programming is something mandatory, I do understand and agree that programming gives you a very high level of open-mindedness. It is also real that there is a concrete need for programmers and more technical positions, but what ends up happening, even in programming and data science, is that if you don’t constantly reinvent yourself, you run the risk of job replacement. In terms of work, we are heading towards a hybrid world, beyond virtuality and presence, where emerging technologies, and for example, artificial technology is better than us in many things, but it will never be in the skills that make us human. That a computer is capable of reproducing a language is not the same as understanding a language. Human intelligence is much more than data processing. The ability to adapt, cognitive flexibility, sensitivity, creativity, empathy are human capacities that are and will continue to be irreplaceable.
News: How does the average young Argentine get along with new technologies?
Cwaik: There are many factions within the youth. In the centennials there are those who submit more to the rules imposed by technology and on the other hand there are the young people who take advantage of it. Those of us who work in dissemination try to explain the virtues and the wonderful moment of humanity that we are going through that technology allows us to create a lot of things.
News: How do you explain that in Argentina, despite all the difficulties, unicorns arise?
Cwaik: Culturally, we Argentines are used to very critical economic and political fluctuations, that somehow gives us certain skills to be able to adapt to very complex environments in macroeconomic and macropolitical terms. Argentines are highly valued for this cognitive flexibility and creativity. In the world of emerging technologies, the amount of Argentine talent involved is enormous. The Argentine government has a unique opportunity if it can recognize Argentine talent linked to emerging technologies. Many times, due to the current situation, they continue to link Argentina with cows, soybeans and soccer, and that’s fine, but I think that if the data related to the knowledge economy is taken seriously, we could double the jobs involved.
News: Would you be interested in being summoned by a political space?
Cwaik: To represent a portion of the population one has to be very prepared, I feel that I do my work from the private sector very well, I don’t rule out the other option, I had some approaches to issues that really involved me, such as the Knowledge Economy Law. I do want to get involved in dialogue spaces that have concrete actions as actions. At the Assembly of the Future of Profile, in 2020 and 2021, which were years of thinking a lot about these things that happen to us, and I believe that 2022 is a year of taking action and reaching more people.
