ChatGPT, cryptocurrencies and the metaverse are some of the exponents that are growing and threaten to revolutionize the market.
The application that has gone viral in recent weeks on social networks is simple in appearance only: the user can have their own portrait generated by artificial intelligence in just seconds. In essence it works the same as other AI imaging services, such as Midjourney: just type in a line what you want to give an idea to the artificial intelligence that produces the new images.
The user wants to see what a version of him with steampunk aesthetics would be like, in an environment like Blade Runner? You just have to write “Realistic portrait of me with steampunk aesthetics”, upload eight selfies (like everything that, in principle, is free, requires the user to provide sensitive data) and let the app do the rest. What looks like a game is barely the calm before the storm in the world to come.
Italy was the first country in the West to ban ChatGPT, the famous AI with which you can chat and threatens to shake up, among many other things, professions that have to do with teaching and writing.
Those who have seen Ella, the 2013 film in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an artificial intelligence Voiced by Scarlett Johansson, you can get an idea of the possibilities that AI offers for the future. In cinema and literature, the great authors and works of science fiction (from Orwell to Kubrick, from Jurassic Park to WALL-E) cease to be fantasy to accurately predict tomorrow.
Perhaps one of the most revealing data from the new study of Goldman Sachswhich analyzes which are the jobs that run the most risks due to the development of artificial intelligence, is that contrary to what the collective imagination supposed years ago those most dependent on human mental effort are most at risk.
In the first place: office and administrative work. Then follow the works of the legal branch, architecture and engineering, and the social sciences. The other surprise is that the jobs that will receive the least impact due to automation and artificial intelligence are manual jobs, such as construction, cleaning services, and catering.. But no job is going to escape the transformation that some define as a new industrial revolution: 25% of jobs around the world will be affected by technological development.
In 2016, when Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were competing to win the presidency of the United States, a lawyer and millionaire businessman from New York, Andrew Yang, pointed out that the axes on which the Republican and Democratic candidates argued were wrong.
The problem, Yang argued, was that job automation was going to advance faster than new jobs could be generated to replace obsolete ones for humans. The answer, which was his campaign platform for the Democratic primary that he lost in 2020 to Joe Biden, was a universal basic salary: $1,000 for all US citizens.
In his book The War On Normal People, published in 2018, Yang seemed to predict a catastrophic future, perhaps exaggerated: the development of artificial intelligence will widen the gap between rich and poor to give rise to a great social and economic crisis. In addition, it predicts that the concerns of humanity in the following decades should turn to personal and creative development.
Yang, technocrat and nerd, offers two possibilities: a utopian and benevolent futurein which educated humanity is dedicated to the conquest of space, “like Stark Trek” or a future of despair in which everyone is desperate to collect junk, “like Mad Max”.
What is what in the new technological terminology
- metaverse. The future dreamed of by Mark Zuckerberg that seems to have been squandered by the advancement of AI The creator of Facebook failed to convince the general public that virtual reality is humanity’s next great leap. The concept would be, basically, to live in a virtual world without leaving home. Virtual reality is an impressive technology and has come a long way in recent years, but it is still expensive. Although Zuckerberg’s company is now called Meta, the presentations that were made (with virtual avatars that look like they were from a game from 20 years ago, moving without legs in pixelated environments) provoked memes and ridicule. Sony also bet on reinforcing virtual reality: the PSVR 2 helmet (which works with Playstation 5) is more expensive than the console itself, US$550 for the peripheral against US$500 for the PS5. Sony has sold, so far, only 270,000 units of PSVR 2. On the Meta side, the layoffs and the slow development of the metaverse seem to have squandered Zuckerberg’s ambitions to create a 2.0 world: “AI is now developing in each of our products”, said the creator of the most famous social network, as if anticipating the company’s swerve.
- Artificial intelligence. They are systems and algorithms that can perform tasks associated with human intelligence. Midjourney, for example, is an artificial intelligence that draws pictures and causes controversy among visual artists. Several online communities decided to ban any type of illustration made by an artificial intelligence. There are still ways to detect when an image is not real (or was not created by a human being), but it is a matter of time until it is no longer possible to differentiate one from the other. This, of course, will generate strong social crises in the post-truth era and the dependence on audiovisual material, as the viral image of Pope Francis with a striking white jacket, or the “arrest” of Trump in New York proved. There are artificial intelligence programs that can even imitate human voices or faces. Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak (co-founder of Apple) and several engineers from Amazon, Google and Meta, signed an open letter asking to stop the development of AI GPT-4, developed by OpenAI, the company founded by Musk but acquired by Microsoft, since has the ability to imitate human conversations and develop creative writing.
- cryptocurrencies. The digital merchandise that was born based on blockchain technology, that is to say: registration, verification and decentralized distribution through cryptographic code (hence it is a “chain of blocks”). For some, crypto was akin to the gold rush: the important thing was to get there first. To others, they are a pyramid scheme or Ponzi scheme. Leveraged in the mainstream media by stories of people who became millionaires by holding cryptocurrency (or those who, unfortunately, “traded it for some pizza and lost millions”), interest seems to fluctuate as more and more cryptocurrencies are on the market. (Bitcoin, Dogecoin, etc.) and its value goes up and down like a roller coaster. Although some Hollywood personalities, like Spike Lee, sell them as the answer to government control, claiming that they empower individuals, for others they function as a large-scale casino.