★ While the world throws a launch party for generative AI, this book asks the one question nobody wants to answer: is this boom the bubble?

★ Stefano Quintarelli is the architect of Italy's digital identity system (SPID) and a member of the European Commission's High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence; in 2026 he was invited to deliver the closing keynote at the IFDaD (International Forum on Digital and Democracy) at the World AI Cannes Festival.

★ The book retraces the history of AI and the technologies behind it, unpacks how large language models actually work, and then goes where most AI titles stop short — the economic and financial consequences, and the geopolitical fallout.

What is Artificial Intelligence?
We have heard it talked about above all for its technical and philosophical implications, but we still know only a little about its use on an economic and even on a geopolitical level.
Technologies such as ChatGPT, Claude and Grok are now an integral part of our lives; suffice it to see how even the classic search engines have suffered a vertiginous drop in user accesses.
This means that we are using Artificial Intelligence more and more for the most disparate professional and sometimes personal questions. The fact is that these technologies are useful but also – probably – the cause of the upcoming financial bubble and subsequent crash. They are also the immaterial battleground for world politics, both on a legal level (with Europe) and on a pragmatic strategic level (with China). In this book Stefano Quintarelli and Luca Emil Abirascid discuss this persuasive thesis and offer us a photograph and a feasible scenario of what awaits us.

Stefano Quintarelli, an IT entrepreneur, Internet pioneer and venture capitalist, a former chair of the UN Advisory Group on advanced technologies for commerce and e-business (CEFACT), is a member of the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence and chair of the Agency for Digital Italy steering committee.

Emil Abirascid, a journalist, founder and editor of Startupbusiness, the leading Italian innovation ecosystem business startup magazine. A co-founder of Designtech, the innovation hub that brings together the worlds of design and technology, he is an advisor for the Austrian Business Agency, Emil Banca, Fondazione Symbola and Fondazione Quadrans. He is a regular participant in meetings, conferences and talks on the innovation ecosystem.