“One controversy in Artificial Intelligence is the tension between development and security”
In the InfoCLACSO of July 31, “Is Artificial Intelligence beneficial for humanity?”, Flavia Costa, a researcher at Conicet, the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and the Interdisciplinary School of Higher Social Studies of the University of San Martín (UNSAM) in Argentina, spoke with CLACSO.tv.
Referring to the various controversies surrounding Artificial Intelligence, the researcher noted: “I don’t believe the existential risk is a false controversy. I do believe there is a very interesting, and quite unusual, controversy for us, which is that the industry internalizes the discussion. It doesn’t leave it in civil society; it brings it back. That’s an important issue for us as social scientists, because we are not civil society, we are science.”
In this regard, Costa added that the development of Artificial Intelligence "is combining two vast universes of knowledge: the way to synthesize social interaction. This requires experts in the social sciences because we know a lot about them. Engineering experts know other things, but they know less about these. I think we need to work together to think about these problems."
Furthermore, he pointed out another important controversy, which “is the tension between development and security. And above all, what kind of development, because there is corporate, competitive development, which is also part of the geopolitical development of defense, which sometimes pushes us into a race without the necessary safeguards. So, that's where we have to be very attentive (...). We have to provide ourselves with rapid training, rapid literacy. We have to make that rapid advance to be in line with the public conversation at its different scales. The public conversation at the macro level, about Open AI, about existential risk, is not the same as at the meso level, which today, curiously, is the nation-state. We used to imagine states as macro, but today they are meso. State decisions at the regional level, as in Latin America, cannot be applied to many of the discussions taking place at the macro level. And then, the micro level consists of local implementations or developments for local solutions.”
Interviewed by Gustavo Lema.
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