How excited or worried are you about the development of artificial intelligence and virtual reality?

How excited or worried are you about the development of artificial intelligence and virtual reality?

I feel very excited about the development in artificial intelligence, but I am quite aware of the dangers of this technology.

My enthusiasm is due to the attraction for new technologies and an irrational hope to save the planet with it. Indeed, the progresses have been amazingly fast and, once again, the result was far beyond our expectations. I tested ChatGPT as soon as it became famous, and I was flabbergasted. I spent my internship in an international team working about different uses of AI in the medical field, especially about image processing. I remember some of its applications, such as recognising lesions and tumours in pancreas ; or apprising in real time the safety of the process during an operation.

Recently I read a book named “2041, l’Odyssée de la médecine” from the French specialist Jean-Emmanuel Bibault. It makes an inventory of the applications in every stage of the treatment. The book presents for example how AI models can predict the development of an epidemy in a region.

It seems to me that AI opens a new world of opportunities and will save a considerable amount of time and resources.

However, because of my interest for this technology, I have also done some research on the risks of AI. During my internship, I understood some of the issues in medicine, such as the responsibility of AI. The real question is: can we trust them? Because we know they can make silly mistakes and, in such a field, they can cause very important problems!

More generally, many people are afraid of the reduction in the employment. It is true that many repetitive jobs will disappear, but I do think that journalists and such other jobs must not be afraid for a couple of years.

I heard, and I agree, that artificial intelligence is another type of intelligence, totally different from our ones. Thus, our society will have to adapt to find other jobs which require some forms of intelligence that AIs do not have. It will, instead of increasing the rate of unemployment, give the opportunity to many people to do other jobs, more enjoyable.

As for the conquest of world by AIs, this is very irrational. Nowadays, they have neither any consciousness, nor any concrete knowledge. How could they, in these conditions, want to dominate the humans.

As regards my hope about how AI could help stopping the climate change, I have mixed feelings. I know that if the passion does not stop, financing won’t too, and the progresses will probably make many wishes possible. But I think must resign myself: AI can’t stop the climate change. First, this technology requires many resources that are beginning to miss. This summer, in Chile, the lithium battery production was reduced because of the water restrictions, and the Santiago population missed water too. In a few years, it will probably be complicated to keep producing so many electronic devices. But this is not the only problem. The actual AI systems (and probably the future ones) require an enormous amount of data. And data is stored in data centers we need to cool constantly. They represent 2 or 3 percent of the global electric consumption, being approximately as much as the aviation consumption!