Artificial intelligence (AI), modification of the human species, climate change and sustainability, new mobility, the sharing economy, new social patterns, global food, new materials, space exploration and global governance are the 10 challenges that the LLYC consultancy has identified as challenges for scientific-technological progress in the next two decades.
The document also identifies the advantages and risks they entail, and offers a medium and long-term vision of the new resources that will be available to humanity in the near future, as well as a warning of the need that, without delay, , regulatory, agile, adequate and global frameworks are adopted.
As I will not have space to reel off each of the ten challenges to which LLYC alludes, I am going to focus on artificial intelligence. The consultant says that most of the techniques used today in the field of artificial intelligence were developed in the seventies in the heat of the Cold War. However, this sector suffered a great technological depression when verifying that the computational capacity of the moment did not allow the development of a minimally useful artificial intelligence compared to human intelligence.
Much of these techniques were being forgotten until, exponentially – according to Moore’s Law – the computational capacity has been increasing. For example, the computational capacity that exists today in our pockets, in any of our smartphones, exceeds by several orders of magnitude the computational capacity of the computer that in the sixties took Man to the Moon.
In this way, already in the 2000s, these techniques have been recovering – under other names – as they can now be used in a competitive way with human intelligence to solve certain specific problems in the various fields of engineering. There are numerous examples of this, from IBM’s Deep Blue machine specialized in the game of chess, to, more recently, the Watson system, also from IBM. In fact, among many other metrics, Watson is already capable of exceeding, for example, the average diagnostic capacity of GPs. Therefore, in technological terms, it would be entirely feasible to replace the primary care physician with a talking machine. In addition, this would be more efficient both from the economic point of view and for the promotion of public health. However, current laws do not allow – nor will they allow in the medium term – the adoption of this technological disruption to replace the traditional doctor.
The sensoric and the bigdata
Many people, LLYC also says, wonder where the vast amount of data that feeds new systems and applications developed with artificial intelligence comes from. The answer to this question is in “the explosion of the sensoric”. According to the scientific definition of the term, the human species has a total of nine senses. The traditional five – sight, touch, taste, smell and hearing – plus the sense of temperature, pain, balance and the kinesthetic sense, that is, knowing where oneself begins and ends. However, a mid-range mobile phone contains more than 20 electronic sensors: gyros, touch sensors, radio sensors, microphones, cameras, GPS, temperature sensors, etc. This advance in the miniaturization and serial manufacturing of sensors is what is known as “the explosion of the sensor.”
Therefore, an electronic device, such as a mobile phone or tablet, that we always carry with us can get to know more about us than we do ourselves. The amount of information that electronic devices can collect about their users is an aspect that clearly invades the privacy of the individual. However, at the legal level there are rarely problems, since the user voluntarily accepts hundreds of legal clauses, usually without any kind of thoughtful reading. But if users do not accept the clauses and terms of use, they find that they cannot take advantage of most of the current utilities of the mobile phone.
Quantum computing
With the progressive miniaturization of technology and the creation of nano devices, says the LLYC report, current science can not only measure if electrons circulate through a circuit, that is: if electricity passes or not, but it can also measure in which direction a single electron rotates. Therefore, it is now possible to create electronic devices that are not based on measuring zeros and ones or whether or not electricity passes, but in which of the eight possible directions the electrons circulating through the circuits rotate. This opens the doors to quantum computing, a new paradigm that is disruptively revolutionizing computing. To illustrate what it means, it can be said that going from a digital system to a quantum system is equivalent to going from the abacus to the computer.
This new computing paradigm is not related by itself to artificial intelligence, although significant advances in AI have always been accompanied by a significant advance in computing power. And quantum computing, which is currently in an incipient stage of development, although it follows from all this that in the coming years artificial intelligence will experience another great leap forward and will be able to solve questions through ways until now exclusively reserved for the human species, such as artistic creativity, empathic capacity, emotional intelligence, etc. All this will pose, as it cannot be otherwise, great regulatory challenges.
