A few days ago, the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) considered the expression “Artificial Intelligence” as the word of the year, understanding its definition as the “scientific discipline that deals with creating computer programs that execute operations comparable to those performed by the human mind, such as learning or logical reasoning”. It is not minor what happened with the term, if one takes into account that for three years the words highlighted by the Hispanic linguistic institution were related to SARS COV 2.
The expression alluded to seeks, according to some, to create machines with capabilities similar to the human being. It is, strictly speaking, technology that has been present in our day to day for a long time and whose evolution is going at a more vertiginous speed than is believed. It is a matter of observing how we jump from playing Pong on mobile phones type “brick” to streaming 4K movies on devices whose potential is millions of times more than all NASA computers at the time of landing on the moon, only half a century ago.
It is not strange to think that artificial intelligence (AI) has been one of the scientific and technological advances in 2022, surely and will be increasingly present in the routine processes of industry and other sectors, along with technologies that will continue to grow in 2023, highlighting among them the Superapps and the metaverse -I emphasize in the latter-, Well, I think it will be a recurring term.
Despite what many believe, these concepts are not new ideas. Of course, the advances made in recent years have allowed AI, blockchain or virtual reality -among others-, to be incorporated into all sectors.
In that sense, artificial intelligence reveals the context in which the world finds itself at this time: according to the World Economic Forum, millions of jobs will be lost as a result of its implementation, hence the importance of studying the consequences of its application and what our contributions can be from an academic and social responsibility perspective.
Picking up the challenge, it is necessary to understand that all technology must be thought and treated to complement and not supplant intellectual capital. Machines, after all, are much more predictable than humans, and the world today demands a quota of creativity.
While technical skills are important, the people who will never cease to be relevant are those who, in the age of machines, master a set of skills, many of them intangible, allowing them to pave the way for innovation and the good use of technological advances. Hence the importance of knowing how to guide, through appropriate methodologies and with a defined purpose, its application in various media to become a contribution and not a channel that calls to discard the emotions, feelings or passion that often affect the final result, product, among other instances, of applied ethics, question of which we will comment on another occasion.
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The content expressed in this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.
