“Can machines think?” asked the English mathematician and computer genius Alan Turing in 1950. Seven decades later, artificial intelligence (AI) has accelerated what appears to be leading to a new industrial revolution in which jobs are being annihilated and machines are taking over concrete jobs are created, along with changes in society and in the way we communicate with others. AI awakens apocalyptic fears, concerns or passionate attachments in humans. One of the people who want to shed light on this future is Asunción Gómez-Pérez (Azuaga, Badajoz, 55 years old), an expert in this field who develops computer programs to carry out operations similar to those of the minds of earthlings. This Sunday he entered the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), where he will hold the q presidency and has also become the youngest member of the institution’s plenary session.
“Artificial intelligence is the technology of today,” he emphasized in his speech, and it is advancing “so fast that very soon new inventions will be in our pockets, at home and at work”. Instead of tools like ChatGPT or Bard, developed by Google, which imitate human speech, “there will be other toys that use artificial intelligence and open newspaper front pages.”
With a speech on “Artificial Intelligence and the Spanish Language” and in a lecture that attracted much more public attention than on previous occasions, said Gómez-Pérez, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the Politecnico de Madrid (UPM), where she is Vice President is. Rector for Research, Innovation and Promotion, is the first specialist in information technology and communication to invest in academic language. After graduating in computer science, she obtained a doctorate in computer science and artificial intelligence in 1993.
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The successor to the philologist Gregorio Salvador Caja, who died on December 26, 2020, has pointed out that “learning and thinking are the two great pillars of AI”, that the machines that surround us understand Spanish and use it correctly. with all its richness and diversity. Elected in the plenary session on April 7, 2022, after her admission there are 43 academics out of the 46 available places, she has 10 academics (novelist Clara Sánchez has yet to read her speech) and out of the last five elections, four were for Women
Artificial Intelligence expert Asunción Gómez-Pérez poses before the act of entering the RAE.Andrea Comas
In his curriculum, he highlights that he has participated in 106 research projects, 49 of them international (“In research, it is not easy to balance private and professional life,” he said) and leads the Ontological Engineering Group at UPM , composed of 61 researchers. The phrase “ontological engineering,” as she told this newspaper in an interview about her election, “refers to computer models that make a system intelligent, and that’s what they use words for.”
Since 2018 he has been a member of the expert group advising the government on AI and Big Data. Specifically, the act was chaired by First Vice President and Minister of Economy and Digital Transformation, Nadia Calviño, who presented her with the academic medal. Gómez-Pérez recalled the development of AI, which is now used by university students for their work, lecturers in their speeches, images are created, but which also intoxicates social networks with false reports: “Although it is believed that the concepts of AI…” modern, in the 19th century British inventors Babbage and Byron designed mechanical and electrical devices to perform cognitive activities and in World War II the first digital computers were built.”
His journey stopped in 2019 when the European Commission presented “ethical guidance for artificial intelligence based on human rights, justice and respect for the law”. All of this in an area where tech giants and the EU face stiff competition from the United States and China.
Discrimination, hatred, violence
“These days the Commission is finalizing a regulation on artificial intelligence systems and more are needed every day.” A circumstance that is due “to the possible risks of the new large language models” which, if they are derived from faulty databases are created that reproduce prejudices perpetrated by people, using terms “ranging from discrimination, exclusion, incitement to hatred or violence”. “Not everything that is technically possible makes social sense, the limits of what is ethical, legally acceptable and ecological can be overcome.” On the latter, he warned of the “enormous amounts of energy” that new technologies require. The name “cloud” is a euphemism for servers and platforms in data centers around the world.
Where is Spain in the birth of this new civilization? Gómez-Pérez recalled that in 2019 the RAE launched the Spanish Language and Artificial Intelligence (LEIA) project, the aim of which is to “ensure the use of correct Spanish in technological media and avoid the loss of unity” avoiding the nearly 600 million Spanish speakers; that the machines with which we live and use our language (a mobile phone, a car, a refrigerator, a robot…) are “trained with inexpensive linguistic materials”. And that’s where the RAE, “which receives 20 million inquiries a month via its website,” has the experience and corpus.
The importance that this institution attaches to AI is shown by the fact that its director, Santiago Muñoz Machado, was responsible for the welcoming speech to Gómez-Pérez, which had not taken place since 1932. Muñoz Machado has stressed that the new academic is an authority “on a whole new topic in this House, ushering in a new era in the academy.” “Certainly, advances in AI are worrying the world.”
Before these words, Gómez-Pérez urged the Academy to “integrate more artificial intelligence into its daily tasks, such as the work of lexicographers”. Partly because we are “in a race where Spanish is lagging behind English”. To regain ground, in 2020 the government launched the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence, a plan that “in addition to the RAE, governments, large corporations, universities and research centers should also participate,” he said. We are in “Mr. Chip’s Era,” as Miguel Ríos sang forty years ago in 2000. Though it’s better that what was said in the lyrics isn’t fulfilled: that Mister Chip is “taking your job away from you for now / aside from it being your file endless”.
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