From his vantage point at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, Jesús Cardeñosa, professor and doctor in Computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI), leads a team of pioneering linguists, computer scientists and programmers who research and develop solutions based on some of the most advanced techniques in science. AI.
Dail Software, the spin off of the UPM directed by Cardeñosa, plays with intelligently enriched lexicons that ensure extreme precision in the treatment of texts in Spanish; applies search engines to locate and access information in online media of different languages and of different structures; automatically extract information from unstructured texts; uses advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools for automatic text processing and comprehension; intelligently manages knowledge bases that allow finding hidden relationships between events, entities and people; performs sentiment analysis with an automatic system that identifies and defines whether the information has a positive, negative or neutral connotation, and automatically classifies the user’s intention; and, among other things, it automatically extracts and detects the most relevant topics, ideas and trends in online and offline content thanks to semantic analysis.
And with his experience in the tools that drive artificial intelligence, not only academic but also as a developer of what he himself teaches at the University, Jesús tells us that “ for a long time there has been talk of the possibility of taking out what we have inside of our head , inside our brain, and be able to put it into a machine that knew how to use it like us. But I don’t see this even in the long term. Today this seems like science fiction to me ”.
The UPM professor does not agree with people who say that AI is going to change our lives from here to nothing. “It’s not true,” he says. The most advanced technologies, from the moment they are devised until they reach the market, take between ten and fifteen years. And don’t forget that things that were designed 30 years ago are now coming to the market. “ In 20 years I don’t see huge changes . I see a lot of very useful gossip in everyday life. Let our refrigerator talk to us and things like that. But this in the laboratories of some prominent technology companies had been going on for many years. 20 years from now I don’t see big qualitative changes. A longer time, maybe not either ”. And he explains all this because for him the implementation of technologies in people’s lives takes a long time, since people are reluctant to change their ways of living.
Regarding Education in the field of artificial intelligence, Cardeñosa is clear: “we must create a critical mass of researchers, and strongly favor the creation of specialized companies in the field of AI . When de Gaulle in France decided many years ago that his country should be a powerhouse in Computing and Aeronautics, 30 years later he succeeded. But he put in real jets of money from the Public Administration itself ”.
For Spain, in Education, the UPM professor is pessimistic. “Our politicians are in other things. As much as they say that they are going to favor production models and industrial models, I don’t see it. In addition, the good people that were in Spain , since our last economic crisis have left us . And obviously they will not return . A person who earns much more money abroad than here, I find it very difficult for him to return. A researcher, between 30 and 40 years old, outstanding and with a high level of training, and who are charging between 10,000 and 15,000 dollars a month, bring him to Spain and pay him 2,000. You have to be a hero to come back ”.
“I don’t think AI can ever match human intelligence,” says Cardeñosa. AI systems do no more than what they are told. And the one who tells you is the one with human intelligence. What we do now is get information that was not easy for us to get before. ” A machine will never do what it is not told to do .” Blaming machines for things they shouldn’t do is very easy, but the truth is that machines do what they are told . The biggest ethical problem is to hide behind machines to divert responsibility from the people who have created and programmed them.
And regarding the controversy of whether machines and robots will end jobs and jobs, the reflection of the UPM professor is clear: “ today many more people work in the world than before” . The population grows, and the industrial world is capable of assimilating these people with a different training, although in the intermediate process, while a job is destroyed, there is someone who has had to recycle. And there are probably people who cannot transform. And that is already more of a political or social problem than of artificial intelligence itself.
