Digital technology expert David Boronat spoke at the 4th sessions in the lecture cycle DisruptAI, that Banco Sabadell is hosting this year to disseminate knowledge about the great challenges and opportunities that are already being seen by adopting Artificial Intelligence in more and more parts of our daily lives both in businesses and in the home.
Boronat started his talk quoting something said by Bill Gates, that in his extensive career he could only remember living through two truly revolutionary moments. The first one, when the industry decided to adopt graphical user interfaces, leaving behind command lines, which led to the ‘Windows revolution’. The second is the current revolution, the emergence of Artificial Intelligence.
“Soon we will look back on the Internet of today like we look back on the Internet of thirty years ago, with the first modems and not much more than photos and text”.
Boronat said, along the same lines as speakers in earlier sessions, “that right now we are at the dawn of a revolution that humanity has seldom experienced that nobody calls into question. What is taking everyone by surprise is the speed of that revolution, which no one foresaw and which just continues to accelerate”.
We are heading towards an environment in which we will interact with our tech by speaking to it.
Among other innovations, Boronat singled out the appearance of conversation bots which are becoming flawless and can already hold an ‘intelligent’ conversation with people. Such bots will come to be of great importance for businesses, not only as channels of communication to significantly improve customer service, but also as internal management tools. Those technological capabilities are leading us, he said, to an immediate future in which we will interact with and give commands to our devices using only our voices.
Emergence of new actors in the online world. A real threat to Google?
AI and new business models enabled by AI are among other things leading to the emergence of new actors and businesses that many analysts predict may lead to Google losing the online supremacy that it has enjoyed since it was formed. “It hasn’t happened yet,” he said, “as is shown by the available data. But it could happen in the future, bearing in mind that we are moving towards an environment in which we will start searching for information in a very different way to what we’re familiar with today”. As an example of a future possibility, he tabled the revolution that may be seen in the medium terms, enabled by the technology: starting to chat with online newspapers, which will cease to be something we read or browsed but will become a resource that we can ask questions to, with a view to obtaining faster responses that will show the most up-to-date information that a media outlet has.
We are moving towards an assisted or ‘co-piloted’ world: the multiple applications of artificial intelligence
Boronat then went on to describe a large number of the thematic or specialised virtual assistants that are already in operation and providing service for specific groups such as lawyers and doctors, to give two examples. In the short to medium term “practically all of us, at least in the developed world, will routinely work with assistants or co-pilots who will relieve us of the need to do the most routine tasks”.
Those assistants will also come to be part of our day-to-day lives outside work, and people are already talking about (and some of them actually exist) being able to have virtual friends and cyber-partners, that we can talk to and relate to. After a short learning period, the AI will know your tastes, interests and past experience to perfection, which will enable them to have conversations with their people which will be just as satisfactory as a conversation with another person… or maybe even better, given that these systems will never forget anything you’ve ever gold them before, making them, at least in that regard, better companions that people “particularly men, who are much worse at things like that,” he joked.
The advent of virtual workers: robots
Boronat also talked about aspects of AI that may be more concerning at a societal level. For example, the advent of a new generation of robots that in conjunction with AI could take the jobs of workers who carry out the most basic or physical tasks. Those robots already exist (he showed some video clips of them in operation). They are still extremely expensive, which means that today it is not financially viable for businesses to incorporate them into assembly lines. However, it is foreseeable that their price will fall considerably in the medium term. When that happens, it would not be surprising if they started to be used more.
The impact of artificial intelligence on the jobs market and on society
In that regard, although nobody can know it today, he said that it doesn’t seem crazy to suggest that AI will see smart tech displace significant numbers of jobs currently filled by people. It is also clear that it will create jobs that are hard to imagine today. “As we are told in a now famous quote,” he said, “nobody can know where their job will be replaced by an AI. What we can be sure of is that you will be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI, if you haven’t learnt to use it yourself”. In any event, his prediction is that the balance of job destruction vs job creation will in the end see more jobs destroyed than created in the economy. Politicians now face an important challenges, because we may have to devise new ways of organising society to respond to a new environment in which there is a decreasing need for humans to work.
David Boronat’s speech can be watched in full in this video.
In summary, David Boronat’s talk was a comprehensive and profound description of the current landscape and the innovations brought about by AI and its impact on different parts of society. It is clear that AI is transforming our way of life, and our ways of working and interacting with the world around us. Whilst that transformation will bring great opportunities, we must also be aware of the challenges and the risks presented by the use of AI. It is of utmost importance that governments, businesses, individuals and society as a whole work together to make the most of the benefits of artificial intelligence and mitigate its negative consequences.
