Two days after the debate between Sánchez and Feijóo, while most of the media delved into the face-to-face hangover, La Vanguardia opened its edition with the OECD report on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the labor market. Maintaining that 28% of jobs in Spain will be robotized due to its application, he put his finger on the sore spot about one of the multiple impacts that this new technological revolution will generate.
The strike by Hollywood actors and screenwriters, fearing that they might replace their work or create doubles of their bodies, is another sign of its impact. As is the lawsuit that creators and the media maintain with the big technologies, which they accuse of living off their data.
In this sense, it cannot be ignored that the destruction of jobs will be indirectly proportional to the ability to replace those destroyed by jobs that are generated in the production process of new AI technologies. And leaving China aside, the main artificial intelligence companies are American and some Israeli, so it is easy to guess that the EU (regular champion) will be the main loser as far as the occupation is concerned.
Beyond employment, no one disputes that the AI ??revolution is destined, through access to a vast amount of information, to produce prodigious progress in production processes, in the scientific and health fields. Or in the military, now that new warmongering winds are blowing! In short, it will transform our lives as never before have been transfigured by previous revolutions. And it will do so by bringing surprising changes that are difficult to imagine today.
But, for the first time in the history of our civilization, the consequences of the new revolution could mutate the rationality of the human being, leaving it a simple puppet of the AI, which with its decisions would shape human actions.
Advances in AI will be irreversible, and the destination we reach with them, far from being certain, will depend on humanity itself. In a recent essay on The Age of Artificial Intelligence and Our Human Future, Henry Kissinger, along with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and MIT computer scientist Dan Huttenlocher, argues that faced with every AI advance, humans will have three choices: limit it, collaborate with it, or give up completely. It seems reasonable to try to avoid the third and try to achieve a synthesis between limitation and collaboration.
But limiting means regulating and controlling, and this doesn’t seem like an easy alternative, when experts claim to ignore what’s going on by emulating the way the human brain processes information in neural networks. We would have to be able to regulate to protect the person as an individual and the common interest of society as a whole. And here again appears another great concern. Some seem to be thinking of the general interest when they request the creation of an international agency to regulate the use of AI and prevent misuse, as was done in the past with nuclear energy.
Others, the big technology companies, the same ones that have developed it and from which they benefit, are now calling for regulation and a moratorium. It does not seem that the motive is the general interest, but the defense of their patents and private interests. Meanwhile, AI, invisibly, is being integrated into our daily lives.