At midnight on a Friday in Tokyo, dozens of readers formed orderly queues outside bookshops in the city’s neon-lit districts. They were waiting for the first copies of La historia de Kaho, the latest novel by Haruki Murakami and the first in which the Japanese author places a woman at the centre of the narrative. In interviews published to coincide with the launch, Murakami drew a sharp line between his creative process and the outputs of generative artificial intelligence. “AI takes into account everything that has happened up to now and establishes analogies,” he told the Kyodo news agency. “But the processes by which I write novels are completely different.” For Murakami, the novelist’s task is to bring forth something that suddenly crosses the mind, a flash that cannot be reduced to pattern-matching. “Probably AI cannot do that,” he said.

Half a world away, in a Buenos Aires boardroom, a different kind of encounter with speed was unfolding. Gabriel Pereyra, founder of the cultural transformation consultancy Modo Beta, had been hired to redesign part of a company’s structure. He never delivered that proposal. As soon as he engaged, he sensed that the organisation was hurtling through a transformation its teams could not absorb: meetings impossible to schedule, decisions floating without owners, people running in opposite directions. “Agitarse no es moverse,” he told them — agitation is not movement. The episode mirrors a global pattern. McKinsey reports that 88 per cent of companies already use AI in some function, yet only a third have scaled it beyond pilot projects. BCG projects a doubling of investment by 2026, while its own modelling suggests that 70 per cent of AI’s value depends on people and processes, not the algorithm. Gartner finds that 79 per cent of employees have low confidence in their organisation’s capacity for change, and nearly three-quarters suffer moderate to high change fatigue, which measurably degrades performance.

The tension between technological acceleration and human absorption is not confined to corporate suites. In São Paulo, software developers are discovering that their profession has been reshaped faster than many imagined. Tools such as GitHub Copilot and Gemini Code Assist now generate entire functions from natural-language descriptions, shifting the developer’s role from writing code line by line to defining problems, reviewing machine-generated proposals, and exercising technical judgment. Brazilian firms increasingly seek professionals who can write effective prompts and critically evaluate AI output, not merely master a programming language. In Argentina’s agricultural heartland, a sector that has quietly embedded AI, biotechnology and precision agriculture into its daily operations still finds itself discussed in public debate as if it were a relic of the last century. Across Africa, the ambition to move from raw-material supplier to industrialised economy hinges on a similar calibration: the African Continental Free Trade Area promises to unlock intra-continental trade, but implementation demands infrastructure, political commitment and an environment in which young innovators can build without waiting for the state to catch up.

Viewed from Mexico City, the disquiet carries older echoes. A recent essay in the Mexican press traced the lineage of the AI debate back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray and Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics, before landing on an unexpected source: Karl Marx. In the Grundrisse manuscripts of 1857–58, Marx described machines as “organs of the human brain created by the human hand; objectified force of knowledge.” He argued that the development of fixed capital reveals the degree to which general social knowledge has become a direct productive force, a “general intellect” that enters the production process. The essayist’s provocation is that the truly decisive question is not whether machines will think like humans, but what intelligence they contain, where it comes from, and who controls that immense cognitive patrimony now packaged under the deceptively neutral label of artificial intelligence.

Back in Tokyo, as the first buyers emerged from the bookshops clutching their copies, Murakami’s insistence on the irreplaceable flash of human intuition offered a quiet counterpoint to the algorithmic logic that is rewiring industries from Buenos Aires to São Paulo. The company that called Pereyra did not halt its transformation; it renegotiated its pace, opening the conversation that had been missing. The developers reviewing AI-generated code, the farmers reading satellite data, the African entrepreneurs building fintech solutions — all are learning to distinguish between agitation and movement. The queues outside Japanese bookshops were not merely a commercial event. They were a small, stubborn ritual of faith in a kind of intelligence that does not arise from analogies.