Last Tuesday the Supreme annulled the conviction of a man who defrauded 5,000 euros to the vending machines of the Madrid Metro. The man in question inserted some metal pieces similar to coins, canceled the transaction in the middle, and the machine returned legal tender coins. The court upheld the conviction for fraud that the Madrid Court had already imposed on him, but acquitted him of counterfeiting because, for the agency, for a counterfeit to occur, the replica must “deceive an average person” and not an average person. machine. The few survivors of the (imminent, according to many media) apocalypse driven by artificial intelligence will find this news at some point in the future and will laugh at the condescension with which the legal system treated machines in our era.
Jokes aside, the world is paralyzed between the real-time findings that artificial intelligence and catastrophism show us every day. It is understandable in part because what has caught everyone offside is speed. If less than a year ago you could ask the AI for a drawing and it was capable of sending you orange textured blobs on a starry background, now, a few months later, it is capable of generating hyper-realistic images of the Pope wearing an anorak in the blink of an eye fashion or Donald Trump being forcibly detained. Images that deceive our eye, which is incapable of warning us that this is not real and that we can suddenly do, from our mobile, with DALL-E2 or Midjourney. Saving the distances, it is as if in January 2022 IBM released its first computer, and at the end of the year we all had an iPhone 13 in hand. That speed, logically, scares. And the general perception can turn, in the best of cases, towards technological suspicion and, in the worst, to a general distrust of information.
Technology can be used for good, for bad, and also, and this is often forgotten, to play dumb. The images that have been created these days have quickly become memes, not fake news. Some clever one arrived, at the beginning of March, to ask an AI what the series would look like The Last of Us if it were a video game. The result was not bad if, of course, we ignore that the series is already based on a video game. It is the same as always: having a technology does not necessarily imply knowing what to do with it, although the suspicion has gone in crescendo. The UN has warned about the dangers of using AI and has called on companies to be responsible. Politicians of all stripes have launched warning messages and several experts (Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yuval N. Harari… and up to a thousand) have called for a six-month moratorium in order to study the implications of this new technology. Once again, speed and vertigo: this news, from science fiction a year ago, has happened in less than two months. It will be necessary to see if those fussy are so completely disinterested as they are announced. Let’s not forget that Open AI, the creator of Chat GPT-4, also poignantly defines itself as a “non-profit company to benefit humanity as a whole”.
Artificial intelligence belonged not long ago to the bag of things you didn’t know and suddenly you know, a bag, we said recently, to which series, social networks, cryptocurrencies, influencers. All these themes —stretched narrative, live communication, digital economy, live players…— had something in common: before storming the world, they were cooked in the video game ecosystem that, as so often, played the canary in the mine. In fact, the term, “artificial intelligence”, is a concept to which gamers They have been using it every day for almost two decades, and which made reference to the rivals controlled by the machine that we faced, whether it was in a shootout, in a soccer game or against the final boss of a platform game.
We can say that Skynet is just around the corner, but (memes aside) until today artificial intelligence is a tool that has led to advances in the climate challenge, in mathematics or in precision medicine. It is, of course, necessary to monitor the advances in this type of technology and keep in mind the changes that it could introduce in the world, but from the audit to say that it is necessary to bombard the data centers that do not back down in the race to achieve a super-intelligent AI that wipes out humanity (as requested by in the magazine Time the expert doctor in artificial intelligence Eliezer Yudkowsky), perhaps a long way. The one that is not so great is the distance that separates the accusation of wanting to “achieve a super-intelligent AI that will end humanity” from the accusation of having weapons of mass destruction, or any other excuse to endorse the enemy on duty. In other words, it would be convenient to ask whether, as catastrophists say, the future is at stake or just control of the future.
It is necessary to deal with the obscure points of AI, such as the ethical debates that it can cause or the consumption problem that it may require. But you have to do it from the rigor, not from science fiction. In recent times we have seen how they deflated as quickly as hyped-up concepts such as NFTs or the metaverse arrived (where is the metaverse?). It should be remembered that we already covered the science fiction news quota of our era three years ago and that, as the virus taught us, well-announced revolutions are not usually as revolutionary as what can suddenly happen on any given Tuesday afternoon. . “AI” sounds like a bray. Let’s hope it’s not a veiled reference to our behavior when they talk to us about it.
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