Carme Artigas: “Artificial intelligence will prevent the humiliation of Spanish”

The Minister of State for Digitization and Artificial Intelligence is one of the biggest experts in his sector in Spain, and therefore, in an interview with this newspaper, he can give the same importance to the past, present and future. What is the future For him, educating seniors in basic digital skills is as vital as anticipating preparing for the future. new economy resulting from the imminent emergence of artificial intelligences in our lives. “We can’t miss that train,” he warns.

To ask: PERTE is called the ‘New Economy of Language’, why was it decided to connect these two concepts?

Reaction: It was designed to value the Spanish language not only as a historical asset and linguistic heritage, but also as a linguistic heritage. great engine of the new economy. We are faced with a language with great potential that comes with the development of artificial intelligence in the world, but despite the existence of this language, it has been pushed into the background. 600 million Spanish speakers all over the world.

Q: And how do you fix this situation?

A: We saw the economic opportunity for Spain to lead the development of artificial intelligence in Spanish, along with Latin America. It’s not, it’s extremely important. protect the languageTo develop practices that are at risk of deterioration if we lose control, and that are much more accessible and closer to the principles and values ​​we advocate.

Q: What do you mean?

A: Whereat We cannot leave all this in the hands of private American companies. what they will do is to simplify the language and try to compress the variants that add so much richness to our language. An example of what we would like to achieve is that artificial intelligences do not have biases, but in English, a language much less rich than ours, for example, gender is not as present as in Spanish. How to fix this shortcoming? To train them with Spanish data models that don’t exist yet, but that we’re going to build.

Q: But isn’t there already enough information in our language on the Internet?

A: No, the linguistic corpus in Spanish is simplified and we cannot allow ourselves to be culturally colonized through technology. We need the Spanish that these AIs speak to be much more nuanced and understandable. mouth roots and varieties of our language. This, for example, will enable older people to better engage with technology because you and I at 90 will definitely live alone and will need voice assistants for help at home or to access public services.

Q: How are these corpora created?

A: It provides spoken Spanish as well as providing lots of text for written Spanish. We are considering starting a project for this. outsourcing in Spain and Latin America thousands of hours of recorded conversations and oral expressions In all idiomatic variants and accents of the Spanish-speaking world.

Q: How do you convince private enterprise that this is important?

A: They know this very clearly, because they know the great potential of the Spanish-speaking market. We also bear in mind that it is important for the public and private sectors to cooperate when creating this great corpus, so within PERTE not only for the development and uses of artificial intelligence, but also for this data easily accessible For businesses, start-ups and, for example, scientific groups.

Q: So why is it so important for new technologies to know Spanish if they can translate from any language?

A: Language is more than a means of communication, behind every language there is a world map, a way of seeing and thinking about things. There is no reason why Spain should not have more presence through him than in the world today and in the future.

“The final decision should always be human”

Q: A world that will be very different from the current world. Do you think we will be tempted to eliminate the human factor when making economic or political decisions in the future?

A: Not possible. If there’s one thing that’s hard to model for an AI, it’s related to intangibles and emotions, and I can’t think of anything more connected to them than economics. If this were not the case, there would already be a model capable of predicting the stock market’s ups and downs with complete precision. Unfortunately or positively, what these AIs do well is to process large volumes of data and create contingency scenarios. Fantastic decision support tool and freeing ourselves from repetitive tasks to which we add no value.

Q: So what will our role be?

A: Our difference value lies in the unpredictable, namely our ethical values. A robot doesn’t bargain, it lacks the necessary subjectivity to raise the issue. Emotions in the decision process. Therefore, for example, the pandemic was managed in different ways, because different human, economic and social factors were taken into account when acting. We asked, “What would happen if…?” we think, machines don’t think.

Q: That’s exactly what the UN said when it talked about the arrival of AI in education, for example. Teachers should develop human qualities because technology can’t go that far.

A: Not right now, that’s for sure. We are leaders in the development of technological humanism in Spainnamely, with the Digital Bill of Rights, we are able to position ourselves globally when it comes to claiming that all developments continue to put people at the centre.

Q: But when issuing a loan, we already hear phrases such as, for example, “The machine does not allow”.

A: And this is exactly what we should avoid. this The final decision should always be human. because we consider many more parameters. Look, we are facing a new generation artificial intelligence. For example, they are now starting to detect patterns in the voice to identify an Alzheimer’s patient much earlier. Or, for example, they can detect cancer months before the doctor, thanks to an image. And because? Because a doctor will have seen 30,000 mammograms in his lifetime, but a machine can check billions of mammograms in seconds. The key is knowing how to get the most out of both.

“We are experiencing a change in the economic model”

Q: There is even talk that we are facing the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

A: True, we are experiencing a shift in the economic model. Vertical industries will disappear, and there will be a constant interconnection between the physical world and the digital world. This will obviously be transferred to the industry. And I say more: we cannot imagine the full potential of artificial intelligence as a whole. We see applications in very specific sectors, but we have no idea yet about the impact it will have. Like when Edison invented electricity. He was thinking about the light bulb, not everything that comes next.

Q: But today’s technological focus is China and the United States, how can we compete with them in the European Union?

A: We must try to make up for lost time. The 2008 crisis caused us to lose many battles on this issue, especially in the personal data held by the major platforms, but we are slowly coming back. control position. Imagine that the volume of data we’re going to consider between now and 2030 is multiplied by five.

Q: And how can we prevent them from ending up on Amazon, Google or Huawei?

A: By ensuring that the data is subject to the laws we want in Europe. In the United States, data is transferred to big tech companies with consent, in other countries governments hold it, and what concerns us is that it is in the hands of citizens and democratic states.

Q: Couldn’t that affect our ability to attract talents?

A: this is true you have to find a point where innovation isn’t killed, but we must agree that certain limits must be set so as not to reach such extremes that it will be more difficult to return later. Europe is becoming a moral benchmark in this sense, and what we end up with is that other countries join our legislation because protecting our citizens’ data is a goal. We can’t miss this train, but we need to catch it in a way that interests us.