Who Is Thinking About This?

I

On February 24, I had a long conversation with Andy Dauhajre at the Fundación Economía y Desarrollo . One of those conversations that begin with one topic and end on another, that travel between the local and the international, between the personal and the structural, between the past and the future, and that ultimately leave you thinking for days.

The starting topic was broad: what lies ahead for the Dominican Republic in this era of crisis in multilateralism, of challenges to the liberal order of international trade, of the emergence of artificial intelligence. We talked about Andy’s writings and his fascination with macroeconomics, about my writings on U.S. trade agreements and my experience in Washington, about anecdotes from our academic lives between New York and London.

And there I discovered one of those coincidences that remind you how small the world is: Andy studied in New York on a fellowship from the Leo S. Rowe Fund. Rowe was Director General of the Pan American Union (predecessor of the OAS) until one morning in 1946 a military jeep struck him on the streets of Washington. He died without children, without visible heirs, but with a precise will: he bequeathed everything he had (his estate, his pension, his properties) to the Union, with the express purpose of creating a scholarship fund for students from across the Americas. Since then, thousands of young people from all over the continent have crossed borders with that fund under their arm. Andy was one of them. Two Dominicans who shared, without knowing it, an institutional link in our formative and professional trajectories: one as a fellow, the other as a member of the board that administers what Rowe left behind. Sometimes history connects people through paths that neither of them chose, nor imagined.

We talked about Singapore and the admiration we both shared for what that country has achieved with its professional bureaucracy, with the decision to build a top tier civil service as state policy. But I told him something I had been thinking for a while: it surprises me that in Latin America we always turn to Singapore as our first reference, as if professionalizing the state required importing the model of an authoritarian city-state of five million inhabitants in Southeast Asia.

We have closer examples, more open, more democratic. Ireland transformed its public service and industrial policy in a generation, without sacrificing freedoms. Finland built the best education system in the world with a small state and a bureaucracy that works because it is respected, not because it is feared. Uruguay has spent decades demonstrating that you can be a small, stable, and serious country amid turbulent neighbors. Costa Rica abolished its army seventy-five years ago and dedicated those resources to building civilian institutions that to this day are the envy of the region. Singapore is admirable. But the Dominican Republic is a Caribbean democracy, not an Asian technocracy, and the models we imitate should resemble what we are and what we want to continue being.

We also talked about recent world leaders featured at Davos, in the persons of Prime Minister Mark Carney and President Alexander Stubb of Finland: leaders who understand the complexity of the moment, who speak with rigor and vision, who are not afraid of uncomfortable truths. We talked about the size of the Dominican state and its institutional framework in the face of a technological transformation for which they were not designed, about how much our institutional framework will have to change to adapt to what is coming, about the political leadership we have (immature in some cases, simply incapable in others) and about how to raise the level of debate and public service when the debate itself seems trapped in the permanent electoral cycle.

We did not agree on everything. And how good that was. Because therein lies the importance of conversing and exchanging ideas: we listened to each other, understood different points of view, made ourselves vulnerable by being questioned, and forced ourselves to rethink beliefs, convictions, prejudice s.

But at some point in the afternoon, the conversation shifted register.

Andy confessed something to me that, coming from someone with his track record and analytical rigor, shook me: that he himself did not know how to project a medium- and long-term future with changes as disruptive as those we are living through today. It was not resignation. It was intellectual honesty, of the kind that is scarce. And as he said it, as I processed that admission of uncertainty from a man who has dedicated decades to understanding the Dominican economy, something began to form in my mind. A question I had not brought to that meeting but that was born there, between his words and my silence: What happens to the Dominican economy if artificial intelligence delivers even half of what it promises? Not half of what the Silicon Valley evangelists promise (those can be ignored). Half of what is already happening. Half of what the very companies operating on our soil are implementing right now, as you read this.

At one moment during our meeting, Andy showed me some of his old books, pristinely preserved on the shelves of the Fundación. I looked at them carefully. I saw in them the weight of decades of battles that began long before my generation knew how to read them. Dauhajre and his peers built economic analysis in this country from the 1980s onward, when confronting a debt crisis or a structural reform required inventing the tools while using them.

That generation opened the debates we take for granted today. But the debates that are coming (those of artificial intelligence, of employment automation, of a commercial order that no longer responds to the rules they learned to master) need speed, new approaches, the willingness to fail fast and correct even faster. Not because what came before has lost its validity, but because the terrain has changed.

And when the terrain changes, you need more hands at the table, not fewer. The torch is not seized nor inherited in ceremony. It is shared. And it is carried better by many.

I left that conversation with the certainty that someone needs to put this on the table. Not as an academic exercise or futurist speculation. As a practical warning, directed at those who bear the responsibility of making decisions about the economic future of eleven million people. The result kept me awake at night. Not because the scenario is inevitable — none is — but because the possibility is real, the speed of change is verifiable, and the silence of our institutions in the face of that possibility is, in itself, a risk.

That same February 24, while I was processing in silence what Andy had told me at the Fundación, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, the company that builds Claude, one of the most advanced artificial intelligences on the planet, was saying something extraordinarily similar in an interview in Bangalore. Amodei, a biologist by training who left academia when he understood that AI would end up solving what the human brain could not, used an image that stopped me in my tracks: “It is as if this tsunami were coming toward us. It is so close we can see it on the horizon. And yet, people invent explanations: it is not a tsunami, it is a trick of the light. There has not been a public awareness of the risk.” And he added something I found even more unsettling: that the technical safety work within these companies has progressed better than he expected, but that society’s awareness and government action have gone worse than he expected. On the same day, thousands of kilometers apart, a Dominican economist with decades of experience and the chief engineer of one of the most powerful technologies ever built arrived at the same conclusion: nobody is paying enough attention. And we continue celebrating record tourism figures.

I look at the Dominican public debate of recent months and I see discussions about partisan politics, about the budget, about the prosecution of officials for corruption, about the metro line going to Los Alcarrizos, about record tourism figures, about bond issuances. All legitimate discussions. None of them touches what is coming.

The Ministry of Finance can present an exhaustive radiograph of public finances, debate the middle-income trap, cite Krugman, Edwards, and Corbo, invoke the Chilean experience as a warning, and propose structural reforms to sustain growth — all without mentioning artificial intelligence a single time. Not out of negligence. Out of invisibility. The tsunami Amodei speaks of is so large that it does not fit within the categories we are accustomed to using to think about the economy.

And while we debate the metro route, artificial intelligence is learning to replace the 50,000 Dominicans who work in call centers. While we celebrate record tourist arrival figures, AI agents are learning to plan complete trips without human intermediaries. While we place sovereign bonds with ease, the tax revenue base on which the repayment of that debt rests is being eroded by forces that do not appear in the Ministry of Finance’s models.

Allow me to take you to an uncomfortable place. It is a speculative exercise, not a prediction. But it is built on real data and trends that anyone can verify.

It is June 2031. Five years from today.

The Dirección General de Impuestos Internos reports that first-half revenue collection is 19% below projections. The Central Bank has just widened the exchange rate band because international reserves fell below three months of imports. The peso has depreciated 24% in eighteen months. Inflation exceeds 11%. Dominican sovereign bonds, which for years were placed with comfortable spreads, now pay 200 basis points more than the previous year.

And GDP grew 3.8% in the last quarter.

How is that possible? Because the resorts of Punta Cana continue operating, with a third less staff, served by autonomous hospitality systems, generating the same tourism output with a fraction of the payroll. Because the medical device free trade zones continue exporting, with robotized production lines that no longer need the thousands of workers they once employed. Because the banks continue processing transactions, but with AI agents that replaced the tellers, the analysts, the customer service officers.

The production exists. The jobs do not. The wages that once circulated through the economy, neither.

Let us call this phenomenon Caribbean Ghost GDP: production that appears in the national accounts but never becomes the lunch of a construction worker in Villa Mella, nor the motorcycle payment of a young man in Cristo Rey, nor the school tuition of a family in Los Mina. The Central Bank can display growth. Households cannot display well-being.

“I know what some are thinking: “That is science fiction. The Dominican Republic is not the United States. Here things work differently.”

Precisely. Here things work differently. And that difference does not protect us; it makes us more vulnerable.

The United States has a tax burden of 27% of GDP, an unemployment insurance system, a Federal Reserve with sophisticated monetary policy tools, and a deep capital market. We have a tax burden of 14%, we have no unemployment insurance, our monetary policy has narrow margins because 70% of our debt is in dollars, and our capital market is incipient.

If artificial intelligence transforms the American economy in the way current trends suggest, the Dominican Republic does not catch a cold. It gets a punctured lung. Because our three main sources of foreign currency — tourism, remittances, and foreign investment — all depend on the same variable: the spending capacity of the consumer and worker in the northern hemisphere. If that capacity erodes, our three sources contract at the same time.

It has never happened. The three have never contracted simultaneously. And that is why nobody models it. But the logic is relentless.

II

The Dead Wage Advantage

Call centers and shared service centers employ between 40,000 and 55,000 people in the Dominican Republic, concentrated in the Distrito Nacional, Santiago, and the free trade zones. They are the first formal job for a generation of bilingual young people who found in those companies (Alorica, TELUS, Concentrix, and dozens of smaller operators) a gateway to the middle class: a fixed salary, health insurance, pension fund contributions, and a job their families could name with pride.

That door is closing.

Conversational artificial intelligence agents already surpass in quality an average human operator in most first-level interactions. They operate in English and Spanish without accent, without fatigue, without absenteeism, without vacations, without maternity leave. And they cost cents per interaction where a human costs dollars.

The global companies that operate here do not make that decision here; they make it at their headquarters, where the chief financial officers look at a spreadsheet that says: human agent in Santo Domingo, $4 per hour; AI agent, $0.03 per interaction. There is no corporate patriotism that survives that arithmetic.

We could call this phenomenon The Dead Wage Advantage. For decades, our development model in service-sector free trade zones was based on offering skilled labor at a lower cost than in the United States. That advantage was not destroyed by a cheaper competitor. Honduras did not beat us, nor did the Philippines. A machine with no labor cost beat us. You cannot compete on price against something whose price tends toward zero.

Tourism: beyond what we imagine

Tourism represents between 15% and 17% of our GDP, directly and indirectly. It is not one industry among others. It is the circulatory system of entire regions of the country.

The threat is not that tourists will stop coming. It is multiple, and each vector strikes from a different flank.

Intermediation collapses. The AI agents that already manage consumption decisions for millions of Americans and Europeans are transforming travel planning. The tour operators who depended on negotiated packages with margins of 15–25% feel the pressure first. An AI agent does not accept the first price, does not tire of searching, does not have a personal relationship with the hotel salesperson. Commissions are compressed to unsustainable levels.

Resorts automate. The large all-inclusive resorts discover they can operate with significantly less staff. Autonomous check-in. Multilingual AI concierge. Partially robotized restaurant management. A resort that today operates with 1,200 employees for 800 rooms will discover, in two or three years, that it can function with 600. Each eliminated job is a family in Higüey that stops spending in the local economy.

Tour guides disappear. Meta already sells, in partnership with Ray-Ban, augmented reality glasses for less than 400 dollars. Those glasses see with tiny cameras, detect the environment, read signs, translate languages in real time, and explain to the wearer what is in front of them: a monument, a plant, a geological formation, a typical dish. Today they are an early adopter gadget. In three years they will be the standard for travel. Thousands of people in this country make a living guiding tourists. Who is thinking about them?

The tourist changes. The visitor who arrives in Punta Cana is, disproportionately, a white-collar professional from North America — exactly the demographic profile that artificial intelligence is displacing in the United States. If they lose their job or see their income compressed, they do not come. Or they come and spend half.

But there is something those four vectors reveal together, if read honestly: the closed resort model — where the tourist lands, locks themselves behind a wristband, consumes within a perimeter, and leaves without having set foot on a Dominican street — is precisely the model most fragile in the face of each of these forces. It automates easily because it is repetitive. It is disintermediated because it is standardizable. And it ceases to attract the tourist whose income is compressed because, for them, an all-inclusive in Punta Cana is indistinguishable from one in Cancún or Jamaica.

The crisis of the closed model may be the opportunity to open what should never have been closed. Urban tourism in the Zona Colonial. Rural tourism in Constanza, in Jarabacoa, in the towns of the deep Cibao. Gastronomic routes where the visitor does not eat at a buffet but at doña Carmen’s dining room. Experiences that involve the entire community — local accompaniment, the artisan, the farmer, the musician at the corner store — and where tourist spending circulates through the real economic fabric of the country instead of remaining trapped within a fence. The tourism that survives artificial intelligence will be the one the machine cannot replicate: authentic, distributed, irreproducible human contact.

Remittances: the river that dries up

Dominicans in the United States sent more than $10 billion last year. That flow, which represents about 8–9% of our GDP, is not an abstract macroeconomic figure. It is the rent a mother pays in Santiago. It is the investment in a corner store in La Vega. It is the down payment on the apartment in Herrera. It is the medical operation that insurance does not cover.

The diaspora works, in significant proportion, in services: administration, processing, logistics, small commerce, health as technicians and assistants. Many of those jobs are in the direct impact zone of automation.

Remittances will not fall all at once. They will fall as a river falls when the drought settles up in the mountains: first imperceptibly, then a little less each month, until one day the community that depended on that river looks at its channel and finds it dry.

Banking: the merciless irony

Each teller replaced by a smart ATM, each credit analyst substituted by an algorithm, each compliance officer displaced by an automated system, is a middle-class job that disappears. The irony is perfect and merciless: the bank automates to become more efficient, eliminates employees, those employees can no longer pay their mortgages, and delinquency rises. The bank that modernized falls ill from its own modernization.

Construction: when the cranes stop

Everything above converges on a single point. If housing demand falls because buyers lost their jobs or creditworthiness. If foreign investment in real estate retreats because the diaspora has fewer resources. If hotel projects pause because tourism contracts. Then the cranes stop.

And when the cranes stop in the Dominican Republic, hundreds of thousands of informal workers (masons, rebar workers, carpenters, electricians, helpers, truck drivers hauling materials) are left without income. They have no unemployment insurance. They have no significant savings. They have no pension fund because they never contributed.

And when that happens, when thousands of men who defined themselves by the work of their hands wake up every morning without a place to go, what happens next? Not in the national accounts. In the streets. On the corners. In the homes.

This is not speculation. It is a pattern documented in every economy that has experienced abrupt contractions in unskilled male employment. Crime rises, because the illicit informal economy offers what the licit one stopped offering. Alcoholism rises, because forced idleness without purpose seeks anesthesia. Domestic violence rises, because the frustration of being unable to provide turns into rage that is unleashed on those closest. Drug consumption rises, because the substance market knows exactly where to find its clients: where hope left first.

Our neighborhoods already carry those scars with current unemployment levels. What happens when they multiply?

The Triple Contraction

Each sector depends, ultimately, on the same variable. The spending capacity of the worker in the northern hemisphere. The tourist who comes, the relative who sends remittances, the investor who buys. If artificial intelligence compresses that capacity, all our pillars weaken at the same time. I have called that convergence The Triple Contraction: remittances, tourism, and foreign direct investment contracting simultaneously because all three depend on the same source.

And all of this can happen while GDP keeps growing. Production without human circulation. Ghost GDP.

III

Now I want to talk about something else. I want to talk about what we can do. About the advantages we have that no algorithm can abolish. About the bets we should be making now — not because we are certain the worst scenario will materialize, but because the logic of these investments is virtuous in any scenario. If disruption materializes, we will be prepared. If it does not, we will have built capabilities that make us more competitive in any case.

It is the logic of fire insurance. Nobody buys it because they are certain their house will burn down. They buy it because the cost of not having it, if it happens, is infinitely greater than the cost of the premium.

The frontiers of the machine

Before talking about strategies, we need to understand the frontiers. And to understand them, we must ask not one but three questions: What can AI not do, and will not be able to do in a generation? What could it do but humans prefer it not to? And (the most important one for us) what can AI do but whose value depends precisely on a human doing it?

The third question is our gold mine.

A cigar hand-rolled in Santiago is not chemically distinguishable, perhaps, from one that a fermentation algorithm could optimize. But its market value depends on a master cigar roller with thirty years of experience having rolled it; on having felt the texture of the leaf with his fingers, calibrated the tension by touch, detected imperfections that no sensor replicates. If the machine does it, it ceases to be what it is. The humanity of the process is not a production defect. It is the product.

A plate of chivo liniero prepared in Elías Piña with a recipe passed down through four generations. A bean-to-bar chocolate from Altamira. A specialty coffee from Jarabacoa harvested on a hillside by hands that know each tree. These products do not compete with automated production; they compete against it, and their value grows the more abundant the artificial becom es.

And then there is what the machine could do but we prefer it not to. Nobody wants a robot to care for their elderly mother. Nobody accepts their six-year-old child being emotionally educated by a screen. Nobody wants an algorithm to decide the custody of their children. These preferences are not sentimental whims; they are civilizational convictions that move slowly, much more slowly than technology.

There is a principle in systems engineering called Amdahl’s Law: when you accelerate some components of a process, those that have not been accelerated become the limiting factor and, paradoxically, the most valuable. Amodei illustrated it with an example that deserves attention: artificial intelligence already surpasses radiologists in reading medical scans, but radiologists have not disappeared. What they do now is accompany the patient, explain what the scan says, hold their hand when the news is difficult. The most technical part of the profession was absorbed by the machine; the most human part became irreplaceable. What the master cigar roller in Santiago does with his fingers, what the electrician does in a house with no blueprints, what the lady at the food stand does when she tells you stories while she serves you: that is the component that technological acceleration cannot touch. And the more everything else accelerates, the more valuable it will become.

Our authenticity as Dominicans

I want to talk about an intangible asset that rarely appears in economic policy documents but that may end up being our most important competitive advantage.

I have traveled the world. I have been to the most developed countries in Europe and the poorest in Africa. Every place has its uniqueness, its character, its way of welcoming those who arrive. Perhaps because I was born in Santo Domingo, I see this opportunity with a bias I should declare. But that apparent bias disappears when so many foreigners confirm what I have been saying: we are special. Caring. Empathetic. Joyful. Welcoming. With a capacity for human connection that is not taught in any course and is not programmed into any algorithm.

Don Freddy Ginebra already said it, in words that deserve to be read slowly:

“Being Dominican has no single definition. It is a feeling. It is an attitude. It is even a way of seeing life. It is faith. It is hope. It is believing in tomorrow. It is knowing that the warmth you feel is not the sun, but the beautiful love of an entire nation. It is rejoicing in someone else’s achievement as if it were your own; celebrating what we are, what we have accomplished, and what together we will build. That is being Dominican.”

In the future, surely, someone will want to come to our beaches. But more surely, they will want to come to meet the Dominicans. To sit in a neighborhood dining room where the woman who cooks tells you the story of the dish (and the story of her life) while she serves you. To walk through a town in the Cibao where people greet you without knowing you. To converse with a fisherman from Samaná who knows more about the sea than any documentary. To dance bachata where bachata was born, with those who invented it by dancing it.

It is exactly the opposite model to the closed resort I described earlier. And it is, for that very reason, the model that survives.

That cannot be automated. That cannot be replicated. That cannot be compressed into an algorithm or transmitted through augmented reality glasses like the ones I use.

First bet: the Republic of Trades

I say this knowing it sounds counterintuitive in a country where “studying a career” remains synonymous with progress and manual labor carries a social stigma it does not deserve: the most resilient future we can build requires dignifying, certifying, and exporting skilled technical trades.

An electrician who enters a house built in 1972, without original blueprints, with wiring modified three times by three different owners, and has to resolve a short circuit that could be anything: that electrician operates in an environment that current robotics cannot navigate. It is not a problem of intelligence; it is a problem of adaptive physical dexterity in contexts that never repeat.

What we need is a National Trade Certification System with internationally recognized standards. INFOTEP should be transformed into the most prestigious technical training institution in the Caribbean. The Philippines built a country brand around nursing. We can do it with technical trades, if we build the certification system that makes it credible.

Second bet: the Island of Care

The developed world is aging faster than the Caribbean. Japan, Germany, Italy, South Korea face a geriatric care crisis that AI can assist but not resolve, because caring for an elderly person is not an information problem. It is a problem of presence. Of being there, with the body, with patience, with tenderness.

It would be worth creating a Caribbean School of Care Sciences with international certification, and scaling up Law 171–07 to convert the Dominican Republic into a high-quality retirement destination. The hotel infrastructure that the tourism contraction will leave partially idle can be reconverted for this purpose. And here our cultural advantage converges with the economic opportunity: the retired German or American who comes to live here does not come only for the climate. They come for the warmth. For the neighbor who asks how they slept. For the humanity they found here and could not find in their own country.

Third bet: the Caribbean Artisanal Brand

We need protected designations of origin (in the style of the Italian “Denominazione di Origine Controllata” or DOC) for cigars, cacao, coffee, rum. And digital traceability chains that allow the consumer in Berlin to verify that the cigar was rolled by an identifiable master, that the cacao was harvested on a specific farm.

Here a beautiful paradox appears: using technology to certify the humanity of the product. The AI agents that plan purchases for global consumers need data to discriminate. If the Dominican certification exists and is rigorous, those agents will use it as a selection criterion. The very technology that destroys jobs in call centers can sell the products that only Dominican hands can make.

Fourth bet: the Caribbean Energy Hub

The Dominican Republic has one of the highest solar irradiation levels in the hemisphere. The data centers that power artificial intelligence need enormous amounts of renewable energy, and they need it close to the markets of the eastern United States. The technology that threatens us needs what our sun produces.

And the installation of that solar infrastructure generates local technical employment that robotics cannot do, because every roof is different, because every installation is a unique physical problem. The first bet feeds the fourth: the certified technicians install the panels that power the data centers that run the AI. The chain closes, but this time with a Dominican in the link that cannot be replaced.

IV

The Dominican state: designed for a world that is ending

More than 700,000 people on the public payroll. That number is the result of decades of a political logic that used state employment as a mechanism for social stabilization, as electoral currency, and as a substitute for a social protection system that was never adequately built. A significant proportion of those employees perform functions that the technology available today (not in five years — today) can do better, faster, and without errors. Circulating estimates suggest that at least 200,000 positions are functionally automatable.

The potential fiscal savings are enormous. The social crisis of eliminating them, as well.

The honesty that is missing

This is where I need to say something I know will not be popular, but that is necessary.

The most elegant proposal (massively reclassifying those 200,000 employees, retraining them as labor transition agents, geriatric caregivers, technological extension workers, community mediators) sounds good in a public policy document. But the viability of that reconversion collides head-on with a reality we know, but rarely name.

The human capital of the Dominican public service is, in a significant proportion, of low educational attainment. Not through the fault of the individuals, but through the fault of a system that for decades hired without merit criteria, that did not invest in sustained training, and that rewarded political loyalty over professional competence. Reconverting a 48-year-old person who has spent twenty years typing forms into a technological analyst capable of teaching a small business to use artificial intelligence requires not only a training program but a change in mentality, in habits, in the relationship with learning. That is extraordinarily difficult to achieve at a massive scale.

I am not saying it is impossible. I am saying it is much more difficult than public policy documents usually admit. Honesty demands recognizing that there will be a transition generation: people who cannot be fully reconverted, who will need direct support, transfers, social safety nets. And that financing that safety net while simultaneously investing in training the next generation for a different world will require resources we do not currently have. Which brings us back, once again, to tax reform.

The pension time bomb

The pension system under Law 87–01 was designed for an economy in sustained growth with expanding formal employment, where each generation would have more contributors than the last. None of those conditions has been fulfilled as projected. Fertility is falling. Informality persists. Technological displacement will erode the contributor base even further. And a majority of affiliates will reach retirement age with funds insufficient for a dignified pension.

And to that erosion is added an exclusion of origin that is rarely discussed with the necessary frankness: the self-employed — the shared taxi driver, the owner of the neighborhood beauty salon, the plumber who works on his own, the market vendor, the seamstress in Sabana Perdida — were never effectively incorporated into the system. The law contemplates them on paper. The administrative reality left them out. Without agile contribution mechanisms, without real incentives, without a registration infrastructure that adapts to the irregularity of their incomes, hundreds of thousands of Dominicans who work every day will reach old age without a single cent accumulated in any fund. And when automation displaces more workers from formal employment into self-employment — as is already happening — that exclusion will not shrink. It will multiply.

The Solidarity Pillar (which should cover those who do not reach the minimum pension) depends on transfers from the public budget. The same budget that can no longer handle the payroll, the debt, and the electricity subsidy. Law 87–01 made promises that the Dominican economy is not on track to fulfill.

The reform nobody mentions: data protection and ethical use of AI

Think about the health sector. AI has the potential to revolutionize medical care. But that potential comes attached to an enormous danger. The medical information of Dominicans flows today, without adequate regulation, between doctors, hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, and insurers. It is not compartmentalized. It is not protected by rigorous privacy standards.

An insurer with access to the complete medical records of its affiliates, processed by an AI algorithm, can identify risk patterns and deny coverage to those who need it most. An employer with access to health information can make hiring decisions based on confidential medical conditions. A bank can deny credit based on health profiles that the applicant never knew were being evaluated.

Without data protection reform, artificial intelligence will not only take our jobs. It will take our rights.

Who is the growth for?

If Dominican GDP grows at 4% annually over the next ten years but that growth is concentrated in automated resorts, robotized free trade zones, ports without stevedores, and banks without tellers, who are we growing for? If the national accounts show a prosperous economy but household accounts show an impoverished society, which of the two realities is the true one?

A country can produce more and prosper less. It can be more efficient and more unequal. It can grow on paper and empty out in the streets.

V

The mirage of the “digital native”

There is a dangerous myth in Dominican society: we believe that because our children know how to use TikTok from age three and handle a tablet with dexterity, they are prepared for the technological future.

It is an optical illusion.

Consuming algorithms is not the same as commanding them.

The real digital divide is no longer measured by who has access to the internet or a smartphone. It is measured by who knows how to use artificial intelligence to multiply their cognitive capacity and who is being passively shaped by it. I have thought a great deal about how to name what is coming: the new divide will not only be between those who have capital and those who sell their labor. It will be between those who work with the machine and those who compete against it.

The orchestrators and the displaced. The new social classes of the age of intelligence.

An education system designed for the wrong century

The Ministry of Education and our universities continue, in large measure, preparing students for a world that has ceased to exist. We continue rewarding the memorization of data, the repetition of processes, obedience to structured instructions, and the solving of standardized equations.

Artificial intelligence already memorizes, repeats, and processes structured instructions infinitely better than the most brilliant student in the country. If we teach our children to be human calculators or word processors, we are training them to lose.

What no machine has, and what should be the absolute center of Dominican education from today onward, is critical thinking. Adaptability. Empathy. Complex problem-solving where variables are ambiguous. Ethical judgment in the face of dilemmas where there is no correct answer. The ability to formulate the right questions, not to recite prefabricated answers.

It is a paradox that should give us hope: to survive the age of machines, we need our schools to teach philosophy, logic, and the humanities with more urgency than ever. The future does not belong to the one who knows the most data. It belongs to the one who knows how to think best.

AI as a democratizing force

Artificial intelligence is not only a threat to the great pillars of the economy. It is also, simultaneously, the greatest democratizing force that business history has ever known.

Today, the owner of a small boutique in Villa Consuelo or the owner of a hardware store in Los Guaricanos can access inventory analysis tools, predictive marketing, and multilingual customer service that three years ago cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and were only available to large multinational chains. AI levels the playing field. The corner store owner who uses an AI model to predict demand, manage inventory, and communicate with suppliers in real time will not only survive: they will prosper.

But only if someone teaches them that these tools exist. Only if someone shows them how to use them. Only if access does not depend on how much they can pay or where they were born.

AI can be the great leveler or the great amplifier of inequalities. Which of the two it will be in the Dominican Republic depends on decisions we must make now.

The land that feeds us

Precision agriculture (drones that monitor crops, sensors that measure soil moisture in real time, AI models that predict pests and optimize irrigation) is not science fiction for rich countries. It is technology available today, at decreasing costs, that can transform Dominican agricultural productivity.

A farmer in the Cibao Valley equipped with an AI-assisted climate prediction system can make planting decisions that previously required decades of accumulated experience. A cooperative of rice producers with connected moisture sensors can reduce its water consumption by 30% without losing yield. A rancher in Monte Plata with an $800 drone can monitor 500 tareas of pasture in one morning.

The Dominican Republic does not have to be merely a passive consumer of the technology developed in the northern hemisphere. We can be early adopters. The Spanish-speaking market for agrotech solutions is enormous and insufficiently served. There is an opportunity there that nobody in this country is pursuing with the seriousness it deserves. We are very close. I saw many applications in development during my time in Costa Rica at the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA).

Data sovereignty: the geopolitical question nobody is asking

Artificial intelligence does not live in the air. It lives in servers, in submarine cables, in microchips manufactured in factories that can be counted on the fingers of both hands. And the Dominican Republic sits in the middle of the Caribbean, a chessboard where the pieces of the United States and China move with increasing aggressiveness.

Whose will be the AI infrastructure used by the Dominican state? On which servers will the medical records of our citizens be stored? Under which jurisdiction will the biometric data the government already collects be processed? Data sovereignty is not an abstract concept for academics. It is a matter of national security. A country that does not control its data does not control its destiny.

Purpose, identity, and loneliness

Work is not only a way to earn a living. In our culture, it is a fundamental source of identity, dignity, and purpose. The mason does not only build walls; he builds the narrative of his life. The bank employee does not only process transactions; he occupies a place in his community, in his family, in the image he has of himself. When work disappears, it is not only the income that disappears. The meaning disappears.

I already described what happens to the economy when employment contracts. But what happens to a man who no longer has a reason to leave his house every morning does not appear in any econometric model. It appears in the emergency room. At the police station. In the silence of a house where there once was conversation.

And at the same time, the hyperpersonalization of AI (virtual companions, algorithms that isolate you in content bubbles, interfaces that substitute human connection for the simulation of connection) threatens precisely what makes Dominican society strong: community cohesion, the sense of belonging, neighborhood solidarity.

That is why the “Island of Care” and the “Republic of Trades” are not merely economic strategies. They are emotional lifelines. They are the bet on a model of society where the human being remains necessary not because they are more efficient than the machine, but because their presence has a value that efficiency cannot measure.

The new social contract: who pays when the machine works?

If capital captures a growing proportion of productivity and human labor is devalued, how is consumption sustained? How is social security financed? How is the cohesion of a society maintained where millions of people are no longer necessary to produce what the country produces?

In Europe and parts of North America, schemes of universal basic income, technology dividends, and automation taxes are being discussed. They are incipient debates, imperfect, full of legitimate objections. But they are debates that at least acknowledge the magnitude of the problem.

In the Dominican Republic, that debate does not exist. And it needs to exist. The Dominican tax system fundamentally taxes labor and consumption. If formal employment contracts and consumption weakens, the tax base collapses. Tax reform cannot be limited to raising rates on the same old base. It must rethink what is taxed in an economy where machines produce and humans, increasingly less.

VI

What we need, without adornment

One. Tax reform. Not next year. Not after the elections. Now.

Two. A National Trade Certification System with international accreditation.

Three. Honesty about the limits of public employment reconversion, accompanied by a safety net for those who cannot be reconverted and by aggressive investment in training the next generation.

Four. Pension system reform before reality imposes it in the worst possible way.

Five. A personal data protection law and a regulatory framework for the ethical use of artificial intelligence.

Six. A country-brand strategy built around artisanal products with designations of origin and verifiable traceability.

Seven. A serious commitment to renewable energy as a platform for technical employment and investment attraction.

Eight. The transformation of the education system from its foundations, with emphasis on critical thinking, the humanities, and critical appropriation of technology.

Nine. Building institutional capacity to manage long-term transformations: depoliticizing the civil service, professionalizing public management, creating planning mechanisms that survive changes of government.

Toward a Second-Generation National Development Strategy

I close with a proposal and with an act of faith.

The proposal: the Dominican Republic needs to design, with the greatest urgency and the broadest possible participation, what I call a Second-Generation National Development Strategy. Not an update of the existing National Development Strategy 2030, which was conceived in a pre-AI world with assumptions that no longer hold. Something new. Something that starts from today’s reality and looks with lucidity toward tomorrow’s reality.

What does “second-generation” mean?

It means it cannot be a rigid document with fixed goals for fifteen years, because the world changes too fast for that. It has to be a strategic framework with sufficient flexibility to adjust as technology, geopolitics, and demographics reconfigure the terrain. Not a Soviet-style five-year plan, but a compass with built-in review mechanisms: clear principles, adaptable goals, indicators that are updated, and the institutional honesty to recognize when an assumption has ceased to be valid and course must be changed.

It means it cannot be designed by a single party, a single government, or a single sector. It must be born from a genuine national conversation, where those who know listen to those who live it, where economists speak with educators, where business owners listen to the workers who are going to lose their jobs, where the diaspora has a voice because their future is also at stake, where young people participate because they are the ones who will inherit the consequences of what we do or fail to do.

The act of faith

I can point out everything that is wrong. I can describe in detail the risks, the omissions, the incapacities of leadership, the inertia of institutions, the fragility of our tax system, the precariousness of our education system, the vulnerability of every economic pillar that sustains the lives of millions of Dominicans.

But if I were to remain only in the diagnosis, I would be betraying something I learned from Andy that afternoon while holding his books in my hands: that generations succeed each other not to repeat the lamentations of the one before, but to try to resolve what the previous one could not.

Artificial intelligence is going to take many things from us. Of that I have no doubt. It will take jobs, it will take certainties, it will force us to rethink the meaning of work, of education, of prosperity, of the social contract itself. But it is also returning to us, with relentless clarity, the need to be profoundly, undeniably human.

And that, Dominicans know how to do.

We knew it when a cyclone destroyed half the country and the neighbors rebuilt without waiting for the government. We knew it when a diaspora of millions built, remittance by remittance, the social infrastructure the state did not provide. We knew it every time neighborhood solidarity filled the void left by public policy.

Now we need that same energy, but organized. Not spontaneous but strategic. Not reactive but anticipatory. Not dispersed but articulated into a national vision that acknowledges both what we are and what we can become.

I began this essay one February afternoon at a foundation, conversing with an economist who had the honesty to tell me he did not know how to project the future. That honesty was a gift, because it forced me to try. I do not know if what I have written is correct in all its details. I know it is necessary. I know someone had to put it on the table. I know that the worst response to uncertainty is silence.

The canary keeps singing. But this time I want to hear something else alongside its song. I want to hear the sound of chairs moving: people sitting down at the table, opening the documents, beginning to design the strategy, disagreeing with each other (because disagreement is progress), fighting over the details, but agreeing on the direction.

The future is not written. Neither is the worst scenario inevitable nor does the best one build itself. What is written is the cost of doing nothing. And that cost, the Dominican Republic cannot afford.