She is I Founder, GHAYA
Its website : Creating Systemic Change for People and Planet | GHAYA
About Roberta is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of GHAYA, a management consultancy firm with a quest to inspire and transform leaders, governments, and organisations to make positive enduring change in the world through leading with purpose. A strategic advisor with 25 years of experience in the fields of leadership, financial services, investment banking, policy making, international relations, corporate and board governance, data protection, regulatory matters, real estate and family office. Today Roberta operates at the intersection of leadership with purpose, sustainability, women and youth empowerment, culture transformation to enable a thriving planet for all.
When Machines Run the Economy: Reflections on Nathan Never and the Future We Are Entering
I had just turned 20 when Nathan Never, one of Italy’s most iconic sci-fi comic series, created in 1991 by Michele Medda, Antonio Serra, and Bepi Vigna for Sergio Bonelli Editore, arrived in Italian newsstands. Nathan Never was former police officer turned special agent for the private security agency Agenzia Alfa, who operated in a bleak, hyper-technological future marked by towering megacities, ecological collapse, AI dominance, and deep social inequality. Haunted by personal tragedy—the violent death of his wife and the institutionalization of his daughter—Nathan was part detective, part philosopher, navigating a world where machines govern, justice is privatized, and the line between human and synthetic is increasingly blurred. I had no idea back then that this gritty, beautifully drawn comic series did not just tell stories. It was actually a blueprint to the future unfolding in front of my eyes as the years went by.
A Future That Felt Far Away—Until It Arrived
Back in 1991, the world of Nathan Never felt distant and stylized. Towering cities. Artificial intelligence running entire sectors. Corporations issuing their own currencies. People commuting to orbit. Robots replacing workers. Books forgotten. Justice outsourced to algorithms. Nature, a distant memory. It was all exhilarating—and horrifying. Surely it was just fiction. Surely it was centuries away.
And yet today, just three decades later, we are living many of its warnings:
- AI is no longer science fiction. It is in our homes, hospitals, courts, and weapons systems.
- Digital currency is real, and billions move every day through decentralized networks without banks.
- Inequality is widening—not narrowing—with the most vulnerable increasingly pushed to the margins.
- Climate collapse is accelerating, turning fiction into headlines.
- The human touch is being replaced by code, in everything from hiring decisions to medical diagnostics.
The world Nathan Never imagined for the 2300s has been arriving since the 2020s.
When Machines Don’t Just Think—They Transact
One of the most visionary elements of the series was its portrayal of machine-driven economies. In Nathan’s world, AI doesn’t just support the economy—it is the economy. Robots and intelligent agents manage entire logistics chains, energy systems, and even financial markets. They generate value, trade autonomously, pay each other for services. There are no banks. No accountants. No salaries. There are only systems—self-optimizing, cold, and efficient. Today, we see the early versions of this in:
- Smart contracts that execute without human review.
- DAOs that make decisions without CEOs.
- AI agents plugged into crypto wallets.
- Machine-to-machine payments happening at scale.
What Nathan Never foresaw is happening. The economy is detaching from the human hand.
What Happens When Justice Is Automated?
In Nathan Never, the legal system is predictive, digitized, and dangerous. Surveillance is constant. Private security firms enforce the law for profit. Judgment is rendered by machines. Nathan fights to preserve dignity in a system where no one is truly innocent—only poorly optimized. And now?
- AI is being used in courtrooms to recommend sentences.
- Predictive policing systems flag “likely offenders” before crimes are committed.
- Facial recognition watches us in airports, shopping malls, and city squares.
- And increasingly, we trust machines to judge what it means to be human.
The risk isn’t that machines will turn against us. The risk is that we will hand them our authority—and forget how to take it back.
A World Without Books, Without Roots
One of the most heartbreaking aspects of Nathan Never is cultural loss. Books are relics. Nature is extinct. Memory lives in data centers, not minds. People don’t gather—they scroll. They don’t remember—they search. The world hasn’t ended. It has just forgotten itself.
We are not far off. We are raising generations in the glow of a screen. We are demoting curiosity to clickbait. We are erasing slowness, solitude, silence. The human spirit needs more than bandwidth. It needs roots.
What Nathan Never Warned Us About
The brilliance of the series wasn’t its gadgets or its science. It was the way it held up a mirror and whispered: « This is what happens if you stop paying attention. »
And so here we are living in a world increasingly governed by:
- Systems we don’t understand
- Economies we can’t enter
- Decisions we can’t challenge
- Values we didn’t choose
The dangers are no longer theoretical:
- Loss of human agency
- Digital inequality
- Climate-driven collapse
- Ethical voids in code
- The disappearance of culture
But Nathan Never didn’t just offer a warning. It gave us questions. And those questions are still ours to answer.
What Must We Be Mindful Of?
- That technology must be designed with conscience—not just speed. Efficiency without ethics is the beginning of tyranny.
- That AI is a tool—not a sovereign. No machine should outrank a human’s dignity, story, or suffering.
- That economies must serve life—not displace it. We cannot build a future where the only ones thriving are algorithms.
- That remembering who we are matters more than what we build. If we lose our stories, our books, our sense of awe—we lose ourselves.
A Final Reflection
When I first read Nathan Never, I thought I was entering a fantasy world. More than thirty years later, I realize it was a preview, an uncomfortable one, if I may say. We need to remember that the future is not a destination. It is a decision we make every day.