Technological innovation at the forefront of Artificial Intelligence, opportunities and risks

Today I want to propose to you with some updates the topic and partly the content of an article I wrote in May 2017 in ‘Noticias Cuatro’ about the future of humanity. A brief reflection that, after a hiatus of almost three years of a devastating pandemic and a year of war that is revolutionizing balances and economies, is once again absolutely topical because Artificial Intelligence is the playing field of competition between the two great powers. worldwide that are already projecting their deployment into space. Technological development is unstoppable and continues to travel at exponential speed. Disruption has reached all personal and business activities, creating new entertainment and business environments and new customs. The need to compensate, for example, the physical absence in companies due to a pandemic ‘block down’ has expanded the knowledge and use of technology, adding remote work to business operations. Well, the disruption continues and today its central element is the development of artificial intelligence. The great Unicorns move, the Metaverse is launched, there is talk of generative Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence platforms are beginning to be seen that allow the user, having chosen a theme, to autonomously generate the relative content, articles or presentations. Robotics at the same time has begun to replace the work of humans. The only new aspect that is more evident today and that we, in particular, Europeans should consider after this unpleasant experience of the war, is that all these new technological horizons are not exempt from high energy consumption. It is true that technology can help to generate efficiency, but this does not solve the urgent need for European energy independence, all the more so that it is essential to keep up with the pace and evolution of “virtureal” innovation. Many studies have been done: a study by the World Economic Forum preceding the Pandemic said that if 8% of jobs had been replaced by robots, in 2020 this percentage would have risen to 26%. According to another study at the time, McKinsey estimated that with technological advances, in the United States, 45% of existing tasks could be automated. Along the same lines, a report from the University of Oxford said that in the next 20 years 700 professions will be replaced by robots (47% of the activities in which the Economically Active Population works). This means 1.6 billion jobs. The possibility that these forecasts continue to be current and are already being carried out is based on the great advances in technology, the availability of an enormous amount of information (“big data”), the need for greater efficiency and improvement of the productivity. These are the questions to which, after 5 years, there has still not been an answer: Will a world in which the world population continue to increase and with it life expectancy, while artificial intelligence will gradually replace a large part of human activity, be sustainable? ? If it is expected that artificial intelligence will improve productivity, bringing a reduction in costs and therefore in the prices of products and services, then what will happen to people, to their work? And one more question: will the significant number of jobs that will be lost with the use of artificial intelligence be offset by the new professions resulting from this fourth industrial revolution? The theses are different and depend on the countries that are analyzed. For example, in the most developed countries there have been other revolutions and in each of them there has always been doubt about a positive balance between lost and new jobs. But in the end, the new jobs have made up for those lost. If this were also the case in our times, the question is, who is most at risk of losing their job and what would be the new jobs? According to several studies of the past years that are reaffirmed today, the people who are most at risk of losing their jobs are those with the lowest level of knowledge, while people with a higher level have more opportunities not to lose it as long as their training is continuous. . With respect to new jobs, according to some studies from the year ’17 that I consider to be absolutely current, the IE Demographics and Diversity Observatory, led by Prof. Rafael Puyol, indicated that the sectors that would have led hiring were: a) The technology and R+D+I sector b) Health and well-being c) Tourism and leisure d) Energy e) Environmental engineering f) Biotechnology and genetic engineering g) Training While emerging professions would be: 1) Computer application consultants 2) Growth hackers 3) Mobile application programmers 4) Computer security managers 5) Learning analytics experts 6) “Cloud” managers. Unlike what happened in the past, being in the clouds is going to be very advantageous. 7) Cyber ​​lawyers 8) Nanomedicians or medical engineers 9) Social and health technicians 10) Business neuropsychologist 11) Personal doctors 12) Educational researchers 13) Mathematician lawyers 14) Computer architects 15) Digital artists 16) 3D experts 17) Robotics and mechatronics experts These forecasts are already a reality, reforming the form and especially the substance of the current educational system is urgent. Equipping young people with the necessary tools for new professions is a priority. At the same time, people who already work will have to constantly align their skills with the new profiles in demand so as not to lose their job or, if they do lose it, they will need new training to get it back. It would be more complicated if the new jobs did not compensate the new ones. This hypothesis would determine a serious problem that we already see clearly today: how to ensure the survival of those who lose their job without being able to easily recover it or who cannot find it. Would it be sustainable to reduce working hours while maintaining wages so that more people work? Would a survival income be sustainable despite its high cost? As Bill Gates told Davos, will robots pay social security to humans? There is no doubt that these are the issues of our day. It is now when we have to plan and prepare for what is coming, otherwise the exponential speed of technological advances could catch us off guard. Above all, it is now when, with the advancement of Artificial Intelligence and its generative extensions, we have to increase our awareness of the use of technology. We have to consider the benefits in terms of efficiency and new service opportunities, but also the risks derived from the use that can be made of the information we generate, starting from our behavior to our thinking to manipulate information and consciousness. A new world where the underdeveloped critical consciousness, which is the only one to give the supremacy of the human being over technology, will not be enough. This still little-explored and difficult-to-order world will need the law to do its part. Thank you for your attention.