Last week I attended the presentation of what may be one of the reference books of the year in artificial intelligence (AI). Entitled ‘IA, how the world (and your life) will change’, it has been written by one of the leading scientists at a national and international level, Pablo Rodríguez. During my almost 20 years at Telefónica, I had the opportunity to meet Pablo as director of the Barcelona R&D Center, where he worked for several years developing various innovative projects.
In the R&D area Pablo was one of the promoters of Bullipedia, an initiative that joined him with Ferrán Adriá to create the largest gastronomic encyclopedia in the world based on the vast amounts of data from that world, computing and processing, and the algorithms to find out the best possible combinations between all the foods on the gastronomic scene. Pablo also collaborated, and the area he led, with FC Barcelona, to characterize through data and artificial intelligence the pattern of play of the team from the Catalan capital.
Pablo speaks of both projects in his book, which he began to draw up several years ago, but which he has not written until a few months ago, already as CEO and head of Telefónica Innovation Alpha, a company that aims to discover and work with the Disruptive technologies that will revolutionize Society in ten years, including artificial intelligence and all its derivatives. Pablo has the appropriate training and know-how to be able to carry out this task successfully. He is a doctor from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and has worked in several companies and startups in Silicon Valley, as well as corporations such as Inktomi, Microsoft Research or the Bell-Labs. And he has also been a professor at Columbia University.
At the presentation of his book, which has the foreword by Professor Sandy Pentland of the MIT Media Lab, Ignacio Cirac, a Spanish scientist who is one of the world’s leading experts in physics and quantum computing, was present as a colleague, precisely one of the fields that in the coming years are pointed out as keys to exponential advancement in AI developments. “Although there are limits, since we will not be able to exceed the speed of light with computing, we will soon be able to take giant steps to take AI to another dimension,” said Cirac.
The foreword to Pablo’s book explains that almost all the important problems of the human being can be addressed using data and artificial intelligence, but until now it had not been possible to solve them due to the lack of references and links that allowed to analyze all the data. The biggest advance is that now everything and everyone is digitally connected to the rest of the world.
“Over the past two decades,” says the book’s foreword, Sandy Pentland, “my team at the MIT Media Lab and myself have examined the pattern of interaction in communities through AI. And we have observed that the essence of a community and its characteristics can be understood simply by measuring its interaction patterns thanks to artificial intelligence. The bosses tell us if it is poor or rich, if it is healthy or sick, if it is innovative, or if it does not advance ”.
And this is just one example of what Pablo Rodríguez’s book tells in which he clearly defines how AI is going to change not only the world but also people’s lives. Pablo dares to say that “in 20 or 30 years we will have machines with computing capacities much greater than the human brain. Today, AI is at the level of the brain of a mouse ”.
Machines will learn from us, also affirms Pablo. And the more human we are and the less bias we believe in them, the better they will behave. Despite this, the CEO of Telefónica Innovation Alpha is aware that many tasks will disappear, not jobs. “And do not be afraid of it, since 40 percent of the jobs that will be in 2030 do not exist today.”
