After the end of the Napoleonic Wars, in 1815, Europe experienced a long period without significant armed conflicts.. For the next four decades of relative peace, the industrial revolution fueled a technological advance never before seen, until the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853, the American Civil War in 1861, and Prussia's wars against Austria (1866) and France (1870), and all that technical progress was put at the service of the first industrialized wars in history..
The train, the telegraph, and the steamship amplified the capacity for mobilization, supply, and strategic information in battles, while long-range rifles, the Dreyse rifle, and Minié bullets inaugurated the massacres of contemporary times.. Currently, we are witnessing the birth of Artificial Intelligence, and the ethical debate about its uses and effects is in the making.. The European Union is preparing its first regulation and some authoritative voices are clamoring to establish a protocol similar to the one reached by the international community in the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
The six-month moratorium, signed by several scientists to reformulate technological progress under an ethical code, is more symbolic than real. It seems unfeasible to put doors to the development of AI, but at least it warns about the need to develop legal frameworks at a global level. Nobody is going to stop behind closed doors, and their involvement in the arms industry and national security is a priority for governments.
Among the experts, opinions range from the bad omen of the extinction of humanity to the utopia of a Universal Basic Income while robots improve Mahler's Fifth on our laptop. The only sure thing, for now, is that the OpenAI company, in charge of developing ChatGPT, pays its US employees the minimum wage, $15/hr, and less than $2/hr to its Kenyan replicants of SamaAI, based in Nairobi, as reported by Time magazine last January.
Luis Búrdalo (Palma de Mallorca, 1978) holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the Polytechnic University of Valencia. During the last fifteen years he has been a guitarist in Valencian rock bands such as Sellas, Blue Dots and the Sanford Alligator Band.. “Machines do better than humans at constant, repetitive tasks, as well as pattern selection and search.. there is no tiredness. An airport control employee can get tired at a given moment and allow someone to enter the plane with a dangerous object, a machine does not. In 2019, in Google's first foray into neural network issues for tumor detection in X-rays, the AI scored 94% correct. However, the expert radiologist, who did not reach that percentage of skill, is still, for now, the one who explains why that spot is a tumor or is not”.
What we are facing in the coming years is the possible replacement of a large part of the jobs that can be mechanized, which would imply a restructuring of the labor market and the loss of millions of jobs.. But also to a polarization of work that will widen two bands, that of highly qualified workers and that of precarious jobs. “In the 20th century we went from the donkey to the tractor, and until the machine appeared we did not need people responsible for it. In the future, new jobs will appear related to the maintenance, design and improvement of everything automated, and others that we have not yet imagined.. The problem is that pivoting at work is not easy and there will be a population that, due to age, does not enter training and requalification programs,” says Búrdalo..
In the musical field, ChatGPT is capable of building lyrics and music with a simple basic indication, although being generative it composes squeezing an already existing legacy, other software clones the voice of any artist, living or dead.. In the same way that movie studios could continue to release Indiana Jones movies years after the physical disappearance of Harrison Ford, an Artificial Intelligence would be in a position to put together a brand new Beatles album following the compositional patterns of the band's albums and the artistic trajectories of the four members of the group from Liverpool: something that in 1994 was called Oasis, but that today would incorporate an infallible precision.
Antonio José Albertos (Valencia, 1968) is the director of Volumens, International Festival of Art, Science, Technology and Music, created in Valencia, in 2015. He also works as a deejay H4L9000 and is an accredited voice in the Valencian electronic culture. In its next autumn edition, the festival will be dedicated to Artificial Intelligence. Now he is preparing a musical selection of artists who use AI to compose and that he will premiere at the DataBeers scientific meeting. “On May 18, DataBeers will be held in Valencia, an informal meeting in which some expert scientists in AI will present, in short talks aimed at an uninitiated public, the state of the art.. For the event I have selected songs by musicians who rely on AI as a creation tool, such as the American Holly Herndon, who started in 2019, or the German Atom TM (Sr. Coconut) who has released full albums with AI”.
Volumens’ proposal will be the first in Valencia in which we will see musicians presenting live their work developed with AI. “There are artists in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom or Germany elaborating different stylistic proposals with Artificial Intelligence. An industrial revolution 2.0 is coming our way,” Albertos concludes.