Last year ended with the irruption of an artificial intelligence software emulating the wise and conversing HAL 9000 computer that appeared in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). It has spread with unprecedented speed even in the world of the Internet. Within six weeks, one hundred million fans had conversed with him and five million do so daily. Access is easy and you just have to open a free account in a period that the promoters consider testing. It is difficult to comment, without seeing it, such an amazing and almost magical contraption; it is necessary to experience a dialogue with it to get an idea of its scope. But it is easy to predict that it will change our lives.
Because there are innumerable economic, educational, social and political activities that will inevitably change. And also changes today unimaginable and surprising. It is perhaps not an exaggeration to equate its impact to that of the second invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. It was the disseminating and multiplying element of knowledge that made Europe grow and prevail in the world for centuries.
But this time the revolutionary innovation does not arise from inventiveness or from the European initiative. For more than a decade in the United States and China, huge amounts of talent and capital have been invested in the development of artificial intelligence. The recently hatched software we are referring to, ChatGPT, created under the auspices of Microsoft, is going to face competition from other similar ones promoted by Google (United States) and Baidu (China) and other budding competitors.
None, that we know of, European.
Almost simultaneously, another major, colossal achievement of artificial intelligence has been disseminated: David Becker has announced that through an algorithm of his creation he has managed, together with his team in Seattle (USA), to reveal the three-dimensional structure of proteins. This has been, since the days of Linus Pauling (Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954), one of the greatest challenges in biology. Protein engineering has unimaginable potential for all life on this planet. David Baker has published 550 scientific articles, has registered more than one hundred patents and has created 17 companies. As superhuman as his talent was, it is clear that such achievements are only possible in an optimally favorable cultural, economic, administrative, and political environment.
We are all going to be direct or indirect users of artificial intelligence very soon. But it is those who create it who will run the world, and accumulate political and economic power. Because it is not the same to be a user of innovations to improve the productivity of traditional activities (for example, computerizing processes, whether administrative or mechanical) than to be the creator of innovations (in this example, computer manufacturers and their programs).
The most serious consequence of being a user, even a creative one, of new technologies, without producing them, is unemployment: the use of new technologies tends to replace work; its production, to create it in equal or greater measure. For this reason, among other reasons, the Spanish economy, which absorbs and uses new technologies to modernize itself, but does not produce them, suffers from massive chronic unemployment.
Two professors from the University of Alicante warn us of the risks of decline that Europe runs if it continues in the subordinate position of user of the new technology created in the United States and China, if it is not capable of competing in its production. Luis Moreno and Andrés Pedreño, both active technological entrepreneurs, as well as teachers, have published a very elaborate and extensive warning analysis on the many aspects of their innovation policy that Europe should reformulate to avoid its decline. Decline will be that public pension, health care and education systems can only be financed with debt and inflation due to insufficient tax revenues obtained in insufficiently efficient economies.
The conditions for business success in the era of artificial intelligence are similar, on the one hand, to those that have characterized all periods of innovation and growth: strong synergies between research, education, active cooperation between public powers and administrations, and entrepreneurial dynamism. The authors devote several incisive chapters to the conditions for success of the new technological stage.
Europe seems to suffer from a secret resistance to innovation. It is something that must be highlighted in order to adequately assess its consequences. As soon as ChatGPT appeared, the newspaper pages were full of warnings and fears: “AI can undermine democracy” or “Catastrophic success” were prominent headlines.
Our authors ask themselves, with a touch of bitterness: what has had more impact on the life of the reader, and on their well-being, the advances that are taking place in California and increasingly in China, or the sublime and guaranteeing European ethics of protection of data?
Few more stimulating readings for those who decide on our future: Europe against the US and China. Preventing decline in the age of artificial intelligence (Printed by Amazon).
