40% of Spanish workers would prefer artificial intelligence to make decisions for them, according to a study

In just over four months, ChatGPT has managed to find a place in the routine of many Internet users, whether they are students or workers.

Many may not be clear about what technology supports it or why a thousand experts have asked to stop the program's activity for a few months.

However, the presence of artificial intelligence in our daily tasks is being assumed so naturally that, according to a study carried out by Oracle, a cloud platform and application company, 40% of Spaniards would prefer algorithms to make decisions on their own. he.

In the report The Decision Dilemma (the dilemma of the decision), published this Wednesday, data is collected from more than 14,000 employees and business leaders from 17 countries, including Spain.

Faced with the problem of data saturation, 45% of the bosses in our country would prefer that all the difficulties derived from it disappear and that an artificial intelligence make the decisions in their place.

Javier Arroyo Gallardo, professor at the Department of Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence at the Complutense University of Madrid, is surprised by these figures: "It seems to me that they show a very high confidence in artificial intelligence (AI), when, in reality, in Society is not very clear about what it is and how it works and they overwhelm us because there are many or complex tools”, he explains.

Globally,

the percentage of people who would delegate to algorithms is 64%;

and 70% if we refer to business leaders.

Among the conclusions drawn by the American company, it stands out that for 73% of the 1,000 Spaniards surveyed, the number of decisions they make each day has multiplied by 10 in the last three years and, when they try to make a decision, 85 % feel bombarded by more data from more different sources than ever before.

In the same way, 82% affirm that the volume of data is making it very difficult to make decisions in their personal and professional lives and 59% admit that more than once a day they do not know what decision to make.

Despite the anxiety that the volume of data and the difficulty of processing so much information can generate in people, the computer science professor explains that “we must understand much better what implications it would have if artificial intelligence algorithms make sensitive decisions for we",

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Arroyo insists that, although tools like ChatGPT can help us solve many tasks, “they are not specifically designed for decision-making and it would not be appropriate to delegate them;

at least, if they are important decisions for us, that involve other people or that could seriously affect the environment that surrounds us”.

The study indicates that for 81% of Spaniards, the inability to make decisions has a negative impact on their quality of life and causes peaks of anxiety (43%), loss of opportunities (25%) and unnecessary expenses (19%).

Given the saturation of information and the difficulties to discern trustworthy sources, 94% of those surveyed have changed their way of making decisions in the last three years.

Of course, according to 81% of business leaders, the decision is often made first and then the data is sought to justify it.

And furthermore, 24% of employees even feel that many decisions made at their company are irrational.

According to Albert Triola, general director of Oracle Spain, "business leaders who make critical decisions about the management of their companies and do not take data into account,

Javier Arroyo reiterates that delegating sensitive decisions to artificial intelligence is a complex matter and, for this, AI must be transparent and 'auditable'.

“It must be possible to review and understand the decisions it makes and the criteria that guide it, it must be predictable because that allows us to know what to expect and there must be the possibility of determining responsibility in case problems arise.

If the decisions have a moral aspect, it is complex to delegate them to an AI because there is no single universal morality and it must be taken into account that, in most cases, systems learn from data and, therefore, can reproduce biases and perpetuate those that we do not consider ethical or that are even illegal”, he adds.

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