The professor in artificial intelligence Asunción Gómez-Pérez enters the RAE with a speech in which she predicts: "Soon we will have other 'toys' instead of ChatGPT"

"Can machines think?" asked the English mathematical and computer genius Alan Turing in 1950. Seven decades later, artificial intelligence (AI) has accelerated what seems to lead to a new industrial revolution, in which jobs that will be performed by machines will be eliminated and specific jobs will be created, accompanied by changes in society and in the way we communicate with others. AI arouses in humans apocalyptic fears, misgivings or passionate adhesions. One of the people who wants to shed light on that future is Asunción Gómez-Pérez (Azuaga, Badajoz, 55 years old), an expert in this discipline who creates computer programs to execute operations similar to those of the minds of earthlings. This Sunday he has entered the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), where he will occupy the chair q and has also become the youngest member of the plenary of the institution.

"Artificial intelligence is the technology of the moment," he stressed in his speech, and advances "so rapidly that very soon new inventions will be in our pockets, in homes and jobs." Instead of tools like ChatGPT or Bard, this one developed by Google, that mimic human language, "there will be other toys that will use artificial intelligence and open newspaper covers."

With a speech entitled Artificial Intelligence and Spanish Language and in an act in which there has been much more public than on previous occasions, Gómez-Pérez, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), where she is Vice-Rector for Research, Innovation and Doctorate, is the first specialist in Information and Communication Technology invested academic language. Graduated in Computer Science, she received her PhD in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence in 1993.

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Asunción Gómez-Pérez, the new academic of the RAE who teaches machines to speak correct Spanish

The successor in chair q of the philologist Gregorio Salvador Caja, who died on December 26, 2020, has indicated that "learning and reasoning are the two great pillars of AI", that the machines that surround us understand Spanish and use it correctly, with all its richness and varieties. Elected in the plenary session of April 7, 2022, after her admission there are 43 academics of the 46 available places, with her there are 10 academics (the novelist Clara Sánchez has yet to read her speech) and of the last five elections, four have been for women.

Asunción Gómez-Pérez, an expert in artificial intelligence, poses before the act of entry into the RAE. Andrea Comas

In his curriculum he highlights that he has participated in 106 research projects, 49 of them international ("reconciling personal and professional life in research is not easy," he said) and leads the Ontological Engineering Group at the UPM, formed by 61 researchers. The phrase "ontological engineering" refers, as she told this newspaper in an interview when she was elected, "to computational models that make a system intelligent, and for this they use words."

Since 2018 he belongs to the group of experts that advises the Government on AI and big data. Precisely, the act has had the presidency of the first vice president and minister of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, Nadia Calviño, in charge of delivering the academic medal. Gómez-Pérez recalled the development of AI, which today is used by university students for their work, lecturers in their speeches, creating images, but which also intoxicates social networks with false messages: "Although it is thought that the concepts of AI are modern, in the nineteenth century the 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. "

In his journey he stopped in 2019, when the European Commission "presented ethical guidelines for an artificial intelligence based on human rights, fairness and respect for the law." All this in a field where there is fierce competition between tech giants and the EU with the United States and China.

Discrimination, hatred, violence

"These days, the Commission is finalizing a regulation on artificial intelligence systems, and every day that passes more is needed." A circumstance due "to the possible risks of the new great models of language", which if created from erroneous databases, will reproduce the biases committed by humans, using terms "ranging from discrimination, exclusion, incitement to hatred or violence". "Not everything that is technically possible is socially expedient, the boundaries of ethical, legally acceptable and environmental can be overcome." On the latter, he has warned of the "enormous amounts of energy" needed by new technologies. The name "the cloud" is a euphemism for servers and platforms in data centers around the world.

In what position 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, whose purpose is "to take care of the use of correct Spanish in technological media and prevent the loss of unity" of the almost 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 favorable linguistic materials". And there the RAE, "which receives 20 million monthly consultations through its website", has experience and corpus.

The importance that this institution gives to AI has been felt in the fact that its director, Santiago Muñoz Machado, was in charge of the welcome speech to Gómez-Pérez, which had not happened since 1932. Muñoz Machado has stressed that the new academic is an authority "in a radically new material in this house, which opens a new era in academia." "In any case, advances in AI are making the world worried."

Before these words, Gómez-Pérez urged the academy to "incorporate more artificial intelligence in its daily tasks, as in the works of lexicographers." Among other reasons, because we are "in a race in which Spanish progresses behind English". To try to recover ground, in 2020 the Government launched the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, a plan in which "in addition to the RAE, Administrations, large companies, universities and research centers should participate," he said. We are in "the era of Mister chip", as Miguel Ríos sang forty years ago in 2000. Although it is better that what the lyrics said is not fulfilled: that Mister Chip "for now takes away the work / in addition to being your endless tab".