by Risks of fraud will also increase, warns the president of the Portuguese Association for Artificial Intelligence
The president of the Portuguese Association for Artificial Intelligence said this Monday that tools like ChatGPT make it possible to speed up work and increase productivity, but will lead to the disappearance of professions such as drivers, train drivers or programmers.
In an interview with the Lusa agency, on the sidelines of a seminar on “Artificial Intelligence and ChatGPT – Pedagogical Disruption in Teaching”, which took place this Monday in Porto, the president of the Portuguese Association for Artificial Intelligence (APPIA), said that new applications and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT will destroy many jobs, but on the other hand, they will also allow people to work less and be happier.
“In the future, I think this revolution of artificial intelligence and robotics, which is coming, will take away jobs, but what I think mostly is that people will work less in the future. Working less on more interesting tasks, leaving a large part of the less interesting tasks to machines,” said Luís Paulo Reis, considering that the goal of artificial intelligence is to help human beings be happier, with machines working for and with the human species.
The scientist of the era of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics acknowledges, however, that automation in general, digital transition, digitization, artificial intelligence and robotics will take away many jobs.
“There are jobs that will disappear. Employment as truck driver, mechanic, bus driver. Many of these jobs will likely disappear in the near future, and many others will, including the basic job of a programmer who makes simple programs. At that point, it can easily be replaced by an artificial intelligence capable of programming a program equivalent to what that person would do with a high-level description,” he explains.
However, there are other jobs that will be boosted, such as “more creative jobs,” he points out.
Genetic AI models such as ChatGPT are capable of generating, from a simple text, generating highly complex texts, answering questions, generating new questions, generating content, journalistic pieces, teaching programs of tertiary or secondary education disciplines , exam answers, even creating exams, can help create all kinds of texts or develop tasks that would take a long time to develop and which we can develop much faster, as exemplified by Luís Paulo Reis.
As for the benefits, Luís Paulo Reis says that ChatGPT will allow, above all, the “acceleration” of daily work, “in the form of learning” or “developing scientific work”.
“Using these types of tools, we can go much faster and be much more productive.”
There are also risks of fraud, the researcher warns, and therefore there should be a “rigorous model to train the AI with the right data”.
“We’re entering a new world with artificial intelligence, where people’s mental tasks are no longer exclusive to humans, and it looks like they’re going to do them better than us. Technology is unstoppable and we have to adapt to new challenges,” he argues, noting that tractors will also replace horses in the past.
The scientist reminded that there are already commercial robots that represent us, but they are still very simple and that in the future there will be applications, robots that can represent human beings in meetings and that can be controlled remotely.
The president of the Portuguese Association of Artificial Intelligence believes that people working in the field of artificial intelligence will not have a shortage of jobs.
Luís Paulo Reis said that students who are now finishing 12th and want to pursue this field should study computer science engineering or the field of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, in which there is already a collaborative course between the Faculty of Science and Engineering of the University of Porto.
“This field is excellent both in terms of salary for professionals who graduate, especially those who do masters or PhDs in this field, find excellent jobs in top companies, Google, Google DeepMind Technologies, Sonny, its biggest companies world, because it is a field that needs many highly skilled professionals who are able to create new artificial intelligence tools and new robots.”
Asked by Lusa about the qualifications that students should have to enter these artificial intelligence courses, the expert and professor at the School of Engineering in Porto as well as around 400 scientific publications in scientific journals emphasizes that students must be “ intelligent”.
“Intelligence is that ability to solve new problems through the use of knowledge,” he explained, noting that math often shows intelligence because math “is what it is.”
“We will always solve new problems using knowledge, but physics, logic, algorithmic ability. The method of solving a problem’ or ‘interpersonal qualities’ are all important in undertaking such a course in higher education.
