Day One, what if the dystopian future has already begun?

What part of our brain are we willing to cede to artificial intelligence? Just a few decades ago, such a question would have sounded like the premise of a dystopian novel by one of the genre’s greats, such as George Orwell or Aldous Huxley. Today, however, both the question and its answer no longer seem quite so dystopian—or so futuristic. Increasingly, they are becoming part of the present.

First, we handed over mechanical tasks to artificial intelligence: searching for information, summarizing, organizing, and even answering questions whose responses we often take for granted, without stopping to question them. Then came decisions: which travel itinerary suits us best, how to organize our savings, how to respond to a problem, or even what to say in a given situation. The next step still seems difficult to delegate: emotions, one of the traits that most fundamentally define us as human beings. Not only allowing technology to know what we feel or how we feel, but also allowing it to interpret and shape those emotions.

This is precisely the starting point of the series Day One (available on Amazon Prime), a production that could be described as dystopian, although the future it depicts may not be as far away as we would like to think. The series imagines contact lenses equipped with artificial intelligence, capable of seeing and recording everything experienced by the wearer while interpreting their surroundings in real time. Initially, the company behind them—Diskin, led in the series by Damián Diskin (Jordi Mollà)—presents the lenses as a tool designed to help users make decisions instantly.

But the technology soon reveals a much more unsettling capability: it can also intervene in emotions and even manipulate them. Preventing this technology from reaching the world becomes the goal of Ulises Albet (Álex González), one of the series’ protagonists, who finds himself in a race against time to stop its launch, scheduled to coincide with Mobile World Congress week.

But the distance between the fiction presented by the series and the present is not as great as it might seem. Fortunately, we still know of no company—at least publicly—developing contact lenses capable of directly influencing our emotions and, through them, our brains. But we do not have to look very far to find some of the technologies Day One imagines. Glasses equipped with artificial intelligence have already been a reality for months and can recognize what is in front of us. Nor are humanoid or animal-shaped robots, which play a significant role in the series and are a familiar sight at the Mobile World Congress (MWC), particularly unusual. They have become some of the most photographed elements of the technology event that lands in Barcelona every year.

Thus, the leap proposed by the series—from occasionally consulting technology to carrying it with us continuously—no longer seems so much a matter of science fiction as a matter of time.

Technological Barcelona

And this future—a future that may already have begun—has, in Day One, a very specific setting: Barcelona. The city that every year becomes one of the world’s major meeting points for the technology industry also transforms, in the fiction, into the epicenter of the story. So much so that most of the series was filmed in the Catalan capital. The production was driven by Prime Video, with the participation of 3Cat and Mobile World Capital Barcelona as an associated producer, and reportedly had a budget of €9 million, according to unofficial sources.

After the journey we began this summer at The New Barcelona Post through the different faces of Barcelona on screen with Lights, Camera and... Barcelona!,, Day One takes us a step further, towards the city of the future. If we have so far followed the trail of black Barcelona in productions such as El cerco, discovered the city hidden beneath the guise of eighteenth-century Paris in one of the most ambitious productions ever filmed in Barcelona, El perfum, and explored the margins of the Catalan capital in Petit Indi, the focus now shifts to another Barcelona: one of laboratories, supercomputers, artificial intelligence and technological innovation. 

A technological side of Barcelona that is not fictional and that the production did not have to recreate in studios or on sets, as is often the case with films depicting dystopian futures, because it already exists in reality. The quantum computers of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS), the ALBA Synchrotron, Pompeu Fabra University and even the Talent Arena—the event held as part of the MWC and focused on digital talent—are not products of the screenwriters’ imagination. They are cutting-edge facilities and spaces that form part of Barcelona and its metropolitan area’s scientific and technological fabric.

This is a Barcelona that is perfectly recognizable to researchers, engineers and scientists from around the world, but far less familiar to the general public and, in many cases, not easily accessible. Day One allows us to venture into these spaces and discover a city that usually remains outside the cinematic imagination, dominated by the grandeur of the Eixample streets and the monumentality of the Sagrada Família.

Likewise, the congress that provides the backdrop for the series, the Mobile World Congress, is also, in real life, a showcase for many of the technologies Day One imagines: artificial intelligence, smart devices, humanoid robots and glasses capable of interacting with the world in front of us. The boundary between reality and fiction is blurred even further by the series’ direct connection to the Mobile ecosystem: Mobile World Capital Barcelona participates as an associated producer and, in fact, used the well-known Mobile Lunch —the event traditionally held as a prelude to Mobile World Congress week—to present the production.

Technology without limits

But it is precisely because the line between reality and fiction is increasingly blurred that Day One acquires a particularly unsettling dimension. The real danger lies not only in what technology is capable of, but in the power we are willing to grant the tools that use it, and, above all, to the companies that design them. What happens when a tool created to make our lives easier becomes an instrument of control and manipulation?

This debate runs through all six episodes, each around 45 minutes long, and is carried by a cast led by Álex González and Jordi Mollà, alongside actors such as Alba Planas, Iván Massagué, Peter Vives and Melina Matthews. Yet, despite everything the premise promises, Day One never quite provides an answer. The ethical debate is there, resurfacing again and again, but it remains largely in the background, rarely becoming the true center of the conflict—or of the script itself.

The real danger lies not only in what technology is capable of, but in the power we are willing to grant the tools that use it, and, above all, to the companies that design them

In fact, this contradiction is embodied in the protagonist himself. Ulises, the man tasked with stopping the launch of the new device, is introduced as a kind of hermit who has withdrawn from technology to the point of rejecting almost any contact with it. Yet by the end of the story, he turns to some of those same innovations. Holograms and virtual assistants allow him to recover bonds, memories and emotions connected to people who are no longer there. Technology, which initially represents a threat, therefore also becomes a source of comfort

Thus, the ethical reflection on technology, embodied in the protagonist’s own conflict, gradually loses weight as the plot drifts towards the police thriller. Murders, chases, hitmen, corporate secrets and a race against time take center stage, while the series also leaves room for the protagonists’ personal and romantic storylines.

Perhaps, then, the purpose of Day One is not so much to resolve these questions as to leave them open and place the consequences—and contradictions—of a future that no longer seems so dystopian on the table. In technological terms, “day one” is the moment when a new tool enters the world and there is no turning back. But when does that moment really begin? Could it be said that we are already living our own “day one” with the arrival of intelligent tools? How much space are we willing to give technology? And, above all, do we know where to draw the line? These are questions Day One leaves hanging—and questions that, increasingly, can no longer be confined to the realm of fiction.