Artificial intelligence and human stupidity

After the blockchain rev­o­lu­tion that was sup­posed to change the way the in­ter­net works, the ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence rev­o­lu­tion has ar­rived with even more am­bi­tions: no less than chang­ing our lives for­ever, ac­cord­ing to its en­thu­si­asts. But the ex­perts who work with it have long been warn­ing of the risks and po­ten­tial down­sides of a tech­nol­ogy still in the test­ing phase, and which, due to its ap­par­ent sim­plic­ity of use, is being adopted by mil­lions of peo­ple at break­neck speed. It is true that the blockchain has changed many things and has great po­ten­tial. But its ex­am­ple also ad­vises us to be cau­tious with the ex­pec­ta­tions gen­er­ated by all new tech­nol­ogy. Be­cause, as is ob­vi­ous in the case of AI, there are often hid­den com­mer­cial and in­dus­trial in­ter­ests be­hind the so-called great tech­no­log­i­cal ad­vances. Ex­perts who have been work­ing in AI for years con­stantly warn of this as­pect and against its thought­less use. In Cat­alo­nia, a lot of work has been going on for some time, in fields such as health, sci­ence, busi­ness, etc., that of­fers great po­ten­tial for the fu­ture. And that’s why we need to lis­ten care­fully to the warn­ings of sci­en­tists and de­vel­op­ers. Yes, AI re­ally is a tech­nol­ogy with great po­ten­tial, but at the same time it can have harm­ful and coun­ter­pro­duc­tive ef­fects. We are still far from an AI that could match, and then rapidly ex­ceed, the ca­pa­bil­i­ties of a human mind. In fact, it is still in an ex­per­i­men­tal phase, and be­fore putting it on the mar­ket and in the pub­lic do­main, gov­ern­ments and the EU would need to set a reg­u­la­tory frame­work to pre­vent the dev­as­tat­ing dam­age it could cause our way of life, and our eco­nomic and so­cial model. AI will test our abil­ity to deal with change and learn, and just as the emer­gence of any­thing this big and new ex­cites some, it ter­ri­fies oth­ers, while pro­vid­ing sci-fi plot lines for years to come. We still have time, and it is to be hoped that the ad­vice is­sued by ex­perts from all over the world will be taken into ac­count. Be­cause there is a real risk that ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence will un­leash human stu­pid­ity.