<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - AI]]> 10 <![CDATA[Automatic literature]]> Following a recent case of plagiarism of an article in the Catalan sphere, which the forger attributed to a mishap caused by AI, and a rather important Anglo-Saxon literary prize, which an author allegedly won also using AI, there has been renewed discussion in the world of literary creativity about what we will do from now on with texts that wish to circulate in the world, the authorship of which may be questioned by virtue of their possible algorithmic origin. For someone to use AI to write a literary piece can only be due to reasons related to their shortcomings as an intellectual or as a writer. For a true author, using AI to write would be like using skates to play football, when precisely the grace of the game is running. For me, having the machine write for me is equivalent to having a machine make love for me, or sending a robot to bed with the lover, simply because I'm lazy or I fear that this way I will look better in front of my beloved. It makes no sense to entrust a machine to do what gives us pleasure and lucidity, what makes us feel alive and intelligent. Furthermore, I doubt that any machine can currently write with the accuracy that good writers continue to have, but even if that point were reached in the near future, what the bot might tell us would also be of no interest, since it is literally no one and what ends up being interesting about literature and journalism is what a flesh-and-blood person thinks—or feels or sees—about it. A machine cannot tell me what I think about things, because it does not know. Thanks to AI, we might end up simulating an erudition that we do not have, or pretending to have read books we have not actually read, but that would not be a new imposture either. Cheaters are older than the printing press in this trade, and it was precisely the printing press that democratized writing and knowledge. AI is nothing more than a kind of automatic printing press, which produces text at the consumer's whim, which is not what writers end up doing; the role of intellectuals is precisely to remind us of what we do not want to remember, or to make us think about things that can give us a headache. When I see an AI questioning the fundamental ideas of the tribe, I will begin to get scared, but for the moment it is only the voice of the master, because we should not forget that all AI is nothing more than a form of business for those who give it a push. “We were clever enough to invent AI, and foolish enough to need it, and stupid enough that we can't figure out if we did the right thing…”; this was said by none other than the comedian Jerry Seinfeld in a recent interview. And we can think about whether he's right or not without AI. I, for one, still prefer to keep reading people who make mistakes, who doubt, who obsess, and even who self-destruct while writing, rather than a machine that simply calculates which sentence fits best with the preceding ones. Literature is not just text production: it is vanity, it is contradiction, it is a human consciousness trying to understand itself. And this, for better or for worse, cannot yet be automated. 

]]> <![CDATA[Crisis and crisis]]> In November 2008, I finished writing this introduction for an article for the magazine Lluc with the same title, which was published in issue 867 of January-March 2009: “Not all crises have the same etiology. There are conjunctural crises, which once the storm has passed, disperse and the sun shines again. However, there are true tsunamis, that devastate everything in their path and require a significant task of reconstructing the economic, social, and institutional architecture that orders our lives. I understand that the current crisis is not a conjunctural crisis, but rather that we are facing a true structural crisis or 'crisis of regulation' that will change our social imaginary, productive structures, and institutions on a national and international scale”.I sensed that important changes were coming, but not on the scale of what has happened to us in these last seventeen years in terms of the impact of recent technological revolutions: intensive use of the internet by a new generation of mobile phones and the creation of new applications to manipulate public opinion on an unthinkable scale, social polarization and, above all, since covid and the emergence of generative AI, an enormous concentration of scientific, economic and political power in very few hands, which would make Marx himself pale with his law of the concentration of capital.The first major technological revolution was that of agriculture, 10,000 years BC. According to Cristian Canton, associate director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the time until the massive social impact of the agricultural revolution took between 1000 and 4000 years. In terms of a technological system, it encompasses slavery and feudalism where wage labor does not exist and a few individuals concentrate maximum economic, political, and social power through the exclusive ownership of land and labor. Throughout this period until the modern age, writing and money were invented.With modern science and the Renaissance, Humanity moved towards the industrial revolution over a period that represents less than a tenth of the time it took for the agrarian revolution to achieve its massive impact. This period introduces revolutionary economic changes with the emergence of wage labor, capital accumulation, and leaving land rents in a marginal place. Not to mention the political and social sphere with the introduction of parliamentary democracies and the welfare state, without forgetting the scientific and technological advances: vaccination, printing press, aviation, electricity, railways, automobiles, telephones, antibiotics, nuclear energy, among others.And now we enter another major systemic change with generative AI, which has its precedent in the emergence of the web and the intensive use of the internet for more than twenty years now. Why is it a systemic change? Because the internet and its massive use to generate value through generative AI are at the base of the internet of things, robotization, financialization and tertiarization of the economy, and the geostrategy and security of states. And now all this is in a few hands that want to control everything, that is, power in capital letters and on a planetary scale. It is a revolutionary change that has come upon us suddenly at a surprising speed, less than ten percent of what it took to implement capitalism. As The Economist says in its latest issue of May 16: “Finally, humans could, like horses in the age of the car, become uneconomic. Incomes could go mostly or entirely to the owners of capital, who then spend it on things made by AI and robots using natural resources they monopolize. This dystopian possibility is behind the warnings from Silicon Valley that state intervention, and perhaps a Universal Basic Income (UBI), will be necessary”.It is not surprising that for this reason Pope Leo XIV signed, on Friday, May 15, his first encyclical, titled Magnifica Humanitas, on the protection of the human person in the era of artificial intelligence, where it is affirmed that the technological revolution of AI represents a social transformation of a magnitude comparable to that of the second industrial revolution.The dilemma is this: either a democratic way out of generative AI control by society and a UBI is proposed, or we can fall into capitalist neo-feudalism, that is, into a new barbarism where democracy and the control of capital and labor will once again fall into a few hands on a global scale.

]]> <![CDATA[The majority of UIB students live with their parents, use AI and aspire to be civil servants]]>

Students at the Universitat de les Illes Balears (UIB) mostly live in their family home, choose their studies out of vocation, intensively use artificial intelligence (AI) for academic purposes, and see themselves working in the public sector. This is the conclusion of the first Barometer of the UIB Social Council, based on a sample of 2,067 students, comprising 36.8% men and 63.2% women, as detailed this Monday by the director of the Balearic Institute of Social Studies (IBES), Gonzalo Adán, with the president of the Social Council, Antoni Bennasar.

]]> <![CDATA[Sailing without sailors: the sailboat that wants to connect the Balearic Islands with the Peninsula with AI]]>

A sailboat less than three meters long, with no one on board and only a one-kilogram bag of salt as cargo. This is the challenge that will set sail from the Sant Antoni Nautical Club and could mark a before and after in maritime navigation. The project, christened Raig FNB, is the work of about twenty students from the Faculty of Nautical Studies of Barcelona at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.

]]> <![CDATA["AI has no memory and does not store our data"]]>

Pep Martorell is a physicist, holds a PhD in Computer Science, and is a partner at the management firm Invivo Partners, where he helps develop artificial intelligence (AI) projects. As an expert in the field, he will participate this Thursday, March 12, in the "Companies with a Human Face" symposium in Palma, to discuss the trends that will shape AI in the next decade.

]]> <![CDATA[Artificial fiction]]> Things seem to be moving very fast. In the field of AI, the devastating impact of technology on employment is becoming increasingly apparent, especially among the tech companies' own workers. It's within the companies that are driving AI development that AI itself is usurping the jobs of programmers, who realize that what they were helping to create was a competitor that would do the same thing they do, but much faster, better, and cheaper. I don't know what might happen to these professionals, although we know that certain technical profiles are highly sought after within tech companies. But all the experts are predicting it, some apocalyptic, others fully integrated into a system they now lament not knowing how to rein in: AI will be a revolution that will turn everything upside down.

]]> <![CDATA[The UIB develops a revolutionary AI chip with minimal power consumption]]>

A team of researchers from the Electronic Engineering Group (GEE) at the Balearic Islands Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IAIB) has achieved a significant breakthrough in the field of high-performance intelligent processing. The group has designed and manufactured a chip with an innovative artificial intelligence architecture, specifically designed for energy-critical environments such as IoT devices and edge computing systems. The chip uses stochastic computing to implement a morphological neural network, a technique that enables a high degree of parallelization within the circuit and significantly increases energy efficiency. According to the researchers, "the probabilistic coding used in the chip resembles the way neurons in our brain operate when communicating with each other, and this is key to achieving high energy efficiency," explains Josep Lluís Rosselló, principal investigator of the project.

]]> <![CDATA[In a bikini]]> For the past few weeks, social network X has had new interaction options. There's a form of artificial intelligence that can search for information about what's posted there, telling you if it's factual or not, or helping users provide context or question the veracity of what's being said. But the algorithm also has another application: undressing young women.

]]> <![CDATA[More than half of the residents in the Balearic Islands use AI to make inquiries about their health.]]>

According to the study, 70.2% of residents in the Balearic Islands have admitted to using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make inquiries about their health. The dangers of digital self-diagnosis, from Línea Directa. The figure for the Archipelago is slightly above the state average (66.4%), which rises to 90% in the case of young people between 16 and 19 years old.

]]> <![CDATA[Death in peppers]]> There are more and more centenarians. In Catalonia alone, there are more than three thousand; and it is estimated that, in about twenty years, the figure will triple. For some reason, the region of Spain with the fewest people of that age—so 'respectable'—is the Balearic Islands. Since there is no longer so much "calm," say the doctors, we islanders no longer reach a century. But the trend is general in the West; it is increasingly likely to go beyond the average life expectancy, which has been steadily rising for some time. Access to universal healthcare, medical and pharmacological advances, and greater vaccination, hygiene, less tobacco and alcohol abuse, and above all, social and community support, have a decisive impact in helping us live longer and longer.

]]> <![CDATA[Prohens presents the Digital Twin: the virtual replica of the Balearic Islands to monitor the territory live]]>

The President of the Balearic Government, Marga Prohens, announced this Friday the awarding of the contract for the Digital Twin of the Balearic Islands, a project that will create a virtual replica of the archipelago for real-time monitoring. With an investment of 4.6 million euros, this tool will allow for predicting scenarios, managing emergencies, and controlling strategic resources such as water and tourist flows.

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