Two days after the debate between Sánchez and Feijóo, while most of the media went into the hangover of the face-to-face, La Vanguardia opened its edition with the OECD report on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the labor market. Affirming that 28% of jobs in Spain will be robotized due to its application, he pointed to one of the multiple impacts that this new technological revolution will generate. The strike by Hollywood actors and screenwriters, fearing that they could replace their work or create body doubles, is another example of the impact it has. As is the lawsuit that creators and media maintain with the big tech companies, 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 with jobs that will be 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 (champion when it comes to regulation) will be the main loser in terms of employment.
Beyond workplaces, no one disputes that the AI revolution is destined, through access to vast amounts of information, to produce prodigious progress in productive processes, in the scientific and health fields. Or in the military, now that new bellicose winds are blowing! Ultimately, it will transform our lives as no previous revolutions have ever transformed them. 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 end up mutating the rationality of the human being, leaving him a simple puppet of the AI, which with its decisions would shape human actions.
Advances in AI will be irreversible, and the fate 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, with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and MIT computer scientist Dan Huttenlocher, states that with every advance in AI, humans will have three choices: limit it, collaborate with it, or give up entirely. It seems reasonable to try to avoid the third and try to reach a synthesis between limitation and collaboration.
But limiting means regulating and controlling, and it doesn't seem like an easy option when experts say they don't know what's going on in emulating the way the human brain processes information in neural networks. We should be able to regulate to protect the person as an individual and the common interest of society as a whole. And here again another major concern appears. 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 its misuse, as was once done with nuclear energy. Others, the technology giants, the same ones who have developed it and benefit from it, are now asking for regulation and a moratorium. It does not seem that the reason is the general interest, but the defense of their patents and particular interests. Meanwhile, AI is being invisibly integrated into our daily lives.
