15 TRILLION dollars recklessly ignored
Three years ago, a project carried out by Price Waterhouse Coopers (a multinational network of professional services companies that operates as companies under the PwC brand), estimated that “Artificial intelligence technologies could increase world GDP by US $ 15.7 trillion, an extensive 14%, by the year 2030 “.
However, the socioeconomic benefits of this technology appear to be predestined to meet only the needs of the first world citizen. Or worse still, of the country that achieves supremacy in the development of ‘thinking’ computing systems, which are already transforming our societies and economies.
On the other hand, to ignore that there are only two alternatives to align the course of our nations in the era of COVID, is to abandon the interests of our people and selfishly condemn future generations. Because there are only two options: 1) develop; 2) use smart systems developed by third parties. But to truly understand the possible big mistake of ignoring over fifteen trillion dollars ($ 15,000,000,000,000) and / or loss of agency in human evolution, we must understand what each of the alternatives means.
So, below, I will do my best to simplify a very complex subject, although fundamental to our new way of life.
- Development:
Despite the fact that the idea had been coined in the high academic sphere at the end of the 19th century (as for example with the argument of the mathematician George Boole that logical reasoning could be systematized) and that an essay in the middle of the 20th century the mathematician and Computer scientist Alan Turing argued “Computer Intelligence and Machinery”, artificial intelligence was born in 1956 at the hands of Stanford University computer scientist John McCarthy.
The development of this discipline has been exponential; ever since McCarthy and other colleagues like Professor Marvin Minsky and American engineers Nathaniel Rochester and Claude E. Shannon began work on building ‘machine-demonstrated intelligence’ (and in 1957 Frank Rosenblat designed the first artificial neural network) artificial intelligence has managed to play a fundamental role in the socio-economic activity of our times.
However, its development does not come easy, because in addition to needing brilliant minds investigating and proposing new models and ideas, machine learning requires collaboration between the public, academic and private sectors.
That is, for this technology to reach prominent levels of development:
a) Governments must establish updated methods of action and select the alternatives that guide the well-being of their populations, and determine legislative, executive and judicial decisions — present and future; in addition to devising high-level general plans that cover the operation of public entities, multilateral organizations, and public servants in the face of the new wave of exponential technologies led by artificial intelligence.
b) The academic sector must ensure that the research and training of future professionals is modern and of global quality; in addition to trying to be on par (in a fair way, and including our thinkers and demographics) in the development of machine learning systems that are emerging as the drivers of social services in the near future.
c) For their part, for-profit companies must immediately incorporate machine learning into their processes. Well, in addition to optimizing their performance and profitability (for the public good), they contribute to the generation and processing of data (the core of facts, statistics or information elements that feed the machine).
2) Usage:
Yale University statistician and professor Edward Tufte said, “There are only two industries that refer to their customers as ‘users’, one is, of course, information technology, the other is the illegal drug trade...”
Let’s see why this is significant below:
a) The Oxford dictionary defines reality as something that is experienced or seen, in contrast to what people might imagine. Therefore, it is perception that structures reality (in this case, a very personal and individual experience). The importance of this observation is that currently what the masses observe is the result of their interaction with private algorithms that almost totally influence the social behavior of these times. (You just have to review the colossal number of USERS on social networks to understand it; USERS who do not know that they are being exposed to behavioral experiments that increase their dependence on these platforms and greatly determine their opinion and behavior.)
b) Users have no agency in defining the parameters used to train the machine. That is, for example, if we train an artificial intelligence model to feed humanity, but we do not enter your data into the system, do you think you are going to eat?
c) As the systems learn more about their USER, the more the possibility of the data being used against humanity by autocratic systems, economic interests, or simply idiots who find it great to do evil, increases.
Anyway, if 15 trillion dollars seemed enough to you to read to the end, learn more…
Because only when you get down to business will you know if we will have an effect on the new world order!
