Xavier Herce is founder and CEO of Nemeda, which enhances business growth through technological innovation
What can we learn about London's technological revolution?
The AI revolution has been here for days and you have surely heard about it. He transcribes calls, writes meeting minutes, scans invoices, but also helps discover new materials, new therapies and medicines. Microsoft, with all this revolution, announced that it was opening an AI center in London. All of this will most likely result in a migration of workers from a company like, for example, Google to Microsoft. But, above all, it would also have to impact the attraction of talent. Still, we see that less than 2% of work visas issued last year in the British capital were for two of the main visa routes aimed at attracting the “brightest and best”: visas for high-income individuals. potential (HPI) and global talent visas. Even so, more and more experts point out some problems in these new algorithms. If you have had the opportunity to watch the film Code Bias, you will see how these facial recognition algorithms have biases. There is also talk of the high energy consumption of these technologies. However, if we look at most public initiatives, they all talk about ethical and responsible AI.
How could this experience be transferred and applied in Barcelona?
The market capitalization of big technology companies does not stop growing. It is, without a doubt, one of the engines of growth and one of the sectors with the best health looking at the barometer of the technology sector in Catalonia. There is a certain inevitability to this transition. An aging population and lower birth rate point to a need for higher levels of automation to maintain productivity and competitiveness. Rethinking the city and particularly public institutions is necessary. I imagine, for example, that part of the state or local funds were in exchange for participation in these new technologies. This could result in an incentive to link the private and public mission. But there is work to be done, such as optimizing the energy consumption of these new algorithms. This implies a great opportunity for companies and universities that study more efficient models in terms of energy consumption, such as the Neuroplus project of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, which seeks to build devices with high energy efficiency, high latency and low bandwidth density. We will have to continue betting on these avenues of public-private collaboration in order to achieve a fairer transition.
