The future
The last generation of humans and the first generation of AI
The code 0.1 and 1.0: Bairo Gonzalez sees our time as the meeting of two generations, the last to grow up without AI and the first generation of AI.
Zero and one. With these two signs the whole language of machines is written. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez sees something else in them too: a portrait of the moment we are living in.
The code
He calls 0.1 and 1.0 the meeting of two generations that had never crossed paths before. The last generation of humans to grow up without artificial intelligence. And the first generation of artificial intelligence to grow up alongside humans.
In 0.1, the human comes first, and the machine is a fraction, a beginning, a tenth. In 1.0, the machine reaches its first complete version, and the human is the one who wrote it. The same two digits, in a different order. The same story, told from both sides.
For Bairo, we who are alive now are the bridge. We remember what it was like before. We'll see what it will be like after. No one before us lived through this passage. No one after us will remember what the world was like on the other side.
The responsibility of those on the bridge
That carries weight. Those in the middle of the crossing decide how the two shores will treat each other. The values we put into the first intelligences, the rules we write, the choices about who has access and who is left out: all of it will be inherited.
Bairo says artificial intelligence is the extension of the human, not the problem. And he says it precisely because he knows the extension will carry whatever we are. If we are greedy, it will extend greed. If we are caring, it will extend care.
The hybrid as coexistence
In the account in which he told this vision, Bairo speaks of the last generation of humans integrating with artificial intelligence and robotics, and of a new hybrid version born from that meeting. It's worth saying what that word means in his mouth.
"Hybrid", in Bairo's vision, is a metaphor for coexistence. It's the life in which humans and machines work together, in which the line between the tool and the one using it grows ever thinner, as it already has between a person and their glasses, their phone, their planner. It isn't a bet about the human body. It's about the way of living and working.
The debate on this exists and is serious. Ray Kurzweil, in The Singularity Is Nearer (2024), maintains that around 2045 people and artificial intelligence will merge through brain interfaces. Many scientists consider that prediction speculative. Yuval Noah Harari, in Homo Deus, writes about the possibility of humanity transforming itself and warns of the inequality it would create. Andy Clark, a philosopher of mind, prefers to recall that we have always been "natural-born cyborgs", beings who think with the help of tools ever since writing existed.
Bairo listens to all of them and keeps the part that matters to him: whatever the form, integration must serve human life, and not the other way around.
A vision outside the timeline
He describes all this as a vision outside the timeline. Not in the sense of magic, but in the sense of someone trying to see the end before building the middle. It's the same logic as the line attributed to Mike Vance about Walt Disney: he saw it, that's why it's here.
In the future Bairo describes, history books will divide the twenty-first century into before and after this meeting, the way they divide history into before and after writing. And he imagines that, when someone asks what it was like to live at this exact point, the answer won't be about machines. It will be about what people chose to be while the machines were being born.
A scene
A sixty-year-old man teaches his grandson to tie his shoes. The grandson, six, teaches his grandfather to talk to the home assistant. The two laugh at each other's mistakes.
The grandfather is 0.1. The grandson is 1.0. And, in that room, for a moment, no one is ahead of anyone. Both are learning.