CARLOS BONILLA
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a term coined in the 1950s. Although it tends to be identified with a single technology, it actually encompasses a wide variety of techniques and methodologies whose theoretical bases were developed more than 70 years ago.
According to experts in the field, Artificial Intelligence will improve the quality of life of many people and will help to overcome global challenges such as climate change or health crises. It will have an increasingly important role in everyday life. It is expected to be key in developing innovative solutions for automating processes, improving safety and efficiency in industry, as well as in medicine and education. For this reason, a lot of money is being allocated around the world to the development of AI systems, as they see enormous economic potential in it.
However, the dizzying development of Artificial Intelligence is causing concern among governments, which are already considering new ways of generating regulations. The concern of governments regarding its meteoric growth is real and for this reason various countries are focusing on generating regulatory frameworks to promote its regulation in different parts of the world, such as the United States, which recently announced new plans to deal with this issue.
The government of President Joe Biden announced various actions for the responsible development of technology. One of the most relevant measures is an investment of 140 million dollars to launch seven new National AI Research Institutes (NAIRs, for its acronym in English).
In October of last year, the United States government launched the “AI Bill of Rights”, a project that sought to serve as a framework for the use of technology in the public and private sectors, promoting protection against discrimination and discrimination. privacy.
Some of the main companies that are developing the latest advances in AI (Google, Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI, among others), agreed to allow their language models to be publicly evaluated at DefCon, one of the most important hacker conventions. which took place in Las Vegas.
The urgency of regulating AI lies in the fact that we are currently experiencing a paradigm shift: compared to symbolic AI, connectivist AI – a ‘bottom-up’ approach that allows learning or discovering patterns in data without following pre-established rules – has opened up way (after having also been conceptualized decades ago) thanks to surprising results in fields as diverse as image recognition, language processing, both spoken and written, or the development of recommender systems. In short: AI has been with us for a long time, but it is now, thanks to the explosion of data, and the increase in processing capacity at decreasing costs, when the solutions that rely on it are experiencing a boom that has come to an end. referred to as the fourth industrial revolution.
Along with their promises, artificial intelligence algorithms also bring a number of risks that need to be considered and corrected. What steps do data scientists take to prevent the information being ‘fed’ to machines from being incomplete or biased?
On the other hand, every technological innovation has pros and cons associated with it. We can think of dozens of examples from a historical perspective: from dynamite, to automobiles or aviation, through nuclear energy or, more recently, the green revolution in agronomy. Its applications pose ethical dilemmas for us: they drive progress, but they can also bring risks that did not exist until now, or magnify others already identified. Specific applications should be ranked according to their potential impact, using coherent and quantitative criteria.
The risk is that this tool gets out of control. There is speculation that unregulated AI could outpace human intelligence and cause humans to go extinct. A kind of Frankenstein whose undesirable effects are not being calculated and therefore later it becomes impossible to control them.
Those who have predicted the great technological advances and their incorporation into the changes in the daily life of human beings, in their time seemed fanciful, but in many cases reality has surpassed fiction. Let us hope that the same does not happen in cases in which the disappearance of the human race is heralded.