Mexico City. Although many wonder how similar artificial intelligence (AI) can be to human intelligence, physicist and mathematician Raúl Rojas González, a specialist in the subject, maintains that both are fundamentally different, “because humans have a concept of the self, a body to protect and fear of dying”, while the machines do not.
Specialist in AI and robotics, the professor at the Free University of Berlin, Germany, was one of the participants in the round table “Can machines think? ChatGPT and machine learning”, held this Thursday night at El Colegio Nacional.
Coordinated by the physicist Alejandro Frank, from the Center for Complexity Sciences and a member of that collegiate body, the engineer Carlos Coello, a specialist in computer sciences from the Center for Research and Advanced Studies (Cinvestav) of the National Polytechnic Institute ( IPN); and electronics engineer Luis Antonio Pineda, leader of the team that built the first robot in Mexico, Golem, and researcher at the Institute for Research in Applied Mathematics and Systems of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
The specialists explained that although the idea of creating intelligent machines and the attempts to automate reasoning are very old, the birth of artificial intelligence as a study discipline dates back to 1956, with the Dartmouth conference in the United States.
Carlos Coello reviewed the history of this discipline and stated that the first research work on “thinking machines” was inspired by various ideas that had been developed since the 1930s: “Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, which described control and stability in electrical networks; the information theory of Claude Shannon, known as the father of Information Theory, who described digital signals; and Alan Turing’s Theory of Computation, which showed that everything ‘computable’ could be described digitally”.
Given the commotion caused by ChatGPT, Luis Antonio Pineda indicated that it is a system based on “automatic language” and argued that machines and computer systems, no matter how advanced they are, are far from thinking and even more from reaching to feel.
In this regard, Carlos Coello added that to answer the question of whether machines can think, “it depends on what is meant by thinking. It is not enough for the computer to give the correct answer, it must be aware of what it is saying, and awareness is still a very human thing.
Raúl Rojas considered that “there must be social concern” in view of the fact that the transformation process caused by new technologies is going so fast that it can displace many workers.
“Before they were supragenerational transformation processes, in that they lasted 50, 60, 70 or more years, and now what we have are subgenerational transformation processes. So to the question of whether (the machines) are going to displace humans, we must answer yes. Now, the question of whether they are going to dominate us is very different and depends on many other factors.
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