Ramón is one of those authorities in his discipline that does not admit of discussion. And I am not saying it, because I am nobody in the field he dominates. His own biography says so: Research professor of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) and director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA). Master in Computer Engineering from the University of California Berkeley, PhD in Physics from the University of Toulouse and in Computer Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Barcelona. Pioneer of artificial intelligence in Spain and plenary speaker at numerous international congresses. Member of the editorial board of several international publications and of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI). City of Barcelona Award for research; the Robert S. Engelmore Memorial of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 2011; national award from the Spanish Computer Science Society in 2012; and Distinguished Service Award from EurAI. He is also a member of various expert panels and advisory boards of public and private institutions in the United States and Europe.
And with these credentials, we enter flour to talk about what he knows, to corroborate from the beginning of the talk that artificial intelligence will arrive one day that is indistinguishable from human, but that we are still very far from that day. “ Today AI is specific. It only does one thing well . It is capable of winning the best chess player in the world, but the same machine will be unable to recognize images of cats, for example ”. Ramón calls this ‘ catastrophic forgetting ‘, because artificial intelligence today is incapable of multitasking and learning incrementally like humans.
And in what is even more categorical, the director of the IIIA is in stating that AI does not have and will not have much to say regarding the mortality or immortality of human beings. Now, if we understand immortality to be able to upload to a computer all the information in our brain , with all our memories, our life, …, then we could speak of a type of immortality, in quotation marks. “But nobody knows how to do this either . And, furthermore, from the point of view of neuroscience it makes very little sense because the brain is continually changing and it is very dynamic, it is not a still photo.
What is the use of taking a still photo of our brain at any given moment? López de Mántaras asks himself. A second before would be one thing, and a second after taking the ‘photo’ would be another. And we could not say that the photo taken would be true to who we are. “ For me this is all science fiction, and I don’t think it will ever be done . Well, it will probably be tried, but I don’t think it will be achieved ” .
Regarding fears in the field of AI, the director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute of the CSIC points out that the person to be afraid of is the human being . “ The machine is still a tool that, like all technology, has a dual use. It can be used for good or maliciously ” . And this is a problem that is now under debate in Congress IA to instill ethical principles in the training of engineers and technologists to take into account what they will do in the future will have a significant impact on employment, privacy, potential control of people , autonomous weapons , and so on.
And no one knows if AI will destroy more jobs than it will create . If you look at history, it seems that the technologies that have been introduced have compensated, not in the short term but in the medium term, the jobs that have been initially destroyed creating jobs that could not be imagined. This will happen again. In the future there will be jobs that today we cannot even imagine . It is also true that there will be a transitional time in which before new jobs are created there will be a serious problem of job destruction . And something will have to be done.
López de Mántaras speaks in this area of universal basic income. “ W hen production systems are automated using robots or other automatic devices, the employer would have to continue to contribute even though human workers have been removed. It would be necessary to redistribute the wealth that is generated, and continue paying the same taxes, or even more ”. And this would be the only way, says the CSIC professor, that there would be social peace and stability in a golden age in which artificial intelligence was widespread.
