Artificial intelligence and its consequences is becoming a recurring theme in the media, within a debate in which governments demand regulation to which technology companies object. Therefore, in the midst of this process, the exhibition on the subject at the CCCB titled IA: Inteligència artificial, co-produced with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) based on an exhibition curated by the Barbican Centre in London, is very timely.
The exhibition, which can be visited until March 17, 2024, is truly striking, with the possibility of interacting with a dozen devices and surrounded by an almost dystopian film atmosphere. Thus, the CCCB becomes an ideal framework to reflect on this phenomenon that, evidently, will offer advantages but also unpredictable and unsettling consequences.
Before us, a world is opening up that until now we only knew from science fiction. Robots that will replace many of our activities, self-driving cars, and software and algorithms that will manage all aspects of our lives. We have even just seen that artificial intelligence has been able to resurrect the Beatles. By the way, say what you will, the song Now and then, beyond being a curiosity for collectors, is very far from the brilliance of a Lennon-McCartney composition from the good old days. Surely that's why John Lennon discarded it and only left a record on a poorly recorded piece of tape. Someone had to say it. And a Beatlemaniac capable of spending a fortune on an almost inaudible concert recording says it.
These days we have attended an international summit hosted by the British Government in which leaders of the main powers and technology companies have been unable to reach an agreement on the future of artificial intelligence. Something will have to be done to avoid putting more obstacles than necessary to the development of a technology that can provide us with a better quality of life but that right now is more frightening than anything else.
We must build legal certainty around artificial intelligence that curbs uncontrolled excesses in the form of malicious chatbots and applications that can fabricate parallel realities that ruin our lives. We have already seen some experiences of fake photos and videos.
We will have to get used to being surrounded by machines that think and can learn. In the mythical 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clark created the computer HAL, which ended up imposing its will on the crew of a spaceship when it felt threatened. Then, we read the novel and watched the movie with admiration. It gave us food for thought, but we couldn't imagine that such a dystopian future was so close. In a future world full of HALs that will almost entirely direct our lives, we will end up reduced to mere data, and if we get sick, an algorithm will end up deciding if it's worth it, for example, to operate on us and the degree of priority we are given.
We must build legal certainty around artificial intelligence that curbs uncontrolled excesses in the form of malicious chatbotsThe Briton Mustafa Suleyman is one of the world's leading specialists in artificial intelligence, founder of one of the first major companies in the sector. He has just published the book The Coming Wave, which is on its way to becoming a bestseller. In it, he warns of the dangers this technology poses if it is not regulated, something he considers a priority because everything is advancing very quickly. That someone like Suleyman says this is unsettling. Very unsettling. I hope that at some point he appears in Barcelona presenting the book or giving a conference. I would like him to clarify some things for me live.
For now, I recommend visiting the CCCB exhibition and reflecting on what is coming our way.