Okay, I may have had my tongue in my cheek last week when I spoke of our dear homeland and its baked-in bureaucracy pushing back against Artificial Intelligence and ultimately breaking it. Or did I? Time will tell if the truest things are said in jest. And the way things are going, we may not have to wait too long to find out.
Looking into that AI-infested future, as I seem again to be, and as I continue my month-long analysis for the benefit of the Good Morning Portugal! Community and you here, let’s take a look today at what the official line is from the leadership and furthermore, whether we will have any say in what’s coming.
I fancy that most citizens will allow themselves to be boiled like frogs in the sopa do dia of technological advancement, so let’s start by looking at what recipes and heat the Portuguese government has planned for us.
According to (and thanks naturally to AI-powered Googling), the ‘AI Portugal 2030’ document proclaims that Portugal will be “a leader in artificial intelligence by 2030” with a strategy that “focuses on fostering a knowledge-intensive labor market, supporting AI-driven innovation in companies, and ensuring AI technologies are accessible to all, including SMEs and public services.” As you might expect, it also “emphasizes ethical considerations, human-centered AI development, and the importance of digital skills and education.”
On one level, this is the standard copy that you’d guess any presumed advanced and progressive government in the world would be offering its people, whilst hoping to strike a balance between keeping up with the global Joneses, and calming any fears the electorate might have, when it looks AI in the eye, considering its job-threatening and society-transforming reputation.
‘Key Goals’ around the matter, at least expressed explicitly and within those neat electoral time-frames that allow for big promises and a lot of ‘wiggle room’, include increased economic growth through AI adoption and innovation; scientific excellence, which elevates Portugal’s position in fundamental and applied AI research; improvement in the qualifications of the workforce and promotion of digital inclusion; and the development of AI systems that are “ethical, safe, fair, and transparent.”
Launched as recently as December of last year, this strategy “aims to maximize AI adoption and use of emerging technologies, with a goal for 75% of companies to adopt AI tools,” clearly a brave target, depending on whether we are talking about the boardroom, management or shopfloors of said enterprises.
So, what do you make of it so far? And for that matter, are you an ostrich or a meerkat when it comes to this latest and perhaps most disruptive of new technologies? Are you keeping your head in the sand until your backside is kicked by an everyday implementation most likely within your most-used online apps, or are you heads-up and twitching as you read these words, keen to know how your life will be enhanced or impeded by the uninvited and inevitable forces at play?
Google, empowered as it is now by the invisible hand and vast mind of AI, concludes my curiosity with: “Overall, Portugal’s AI strategy is an ambitious plan to leverage* AI for economic growth, scientific advancement, and societal improvement, while ensuring that these advancements are developed ethically and inclusively.” *I don’t know about you, but any vision or mission that uses a noun for a verb must be treated with some skepticism and suspicion.
Case in point here: gone, evidently, is an old-fashioned list of links that used to appear when we searched online, and welcome we must now a computerised-crowd-sourced opinion – the most obvious everyday change that I am aware of, as our reality becomes steadily more robotic. This is, I am sure, how it will work, as does all change of this kind, whether we want it or not.
Recall, if you will, how your camera, your phone, your car, and pretty much everything else you use in daily life changed sometimes steadily, sometimes suddenly, but always without your permission. Permission ‘given’, it seems, through adoption rather than consultation.
On another, somewhat musical note, it’s worth remembering here too what Talking Heads’ frontman David Byrne said about technology in, for me, his landmark article ‘Eliminating the Human’, penned brilliantly for the MIT Technology Review, way back (technologically) in 2017. Even then, he said: “We are beset by – and immersed in – apps and devices that are quietly reducing the amount of meaningful interaction we have with each other.”
He continued, pondering a world of reduced human interaction that is “often perceived, from an engineer’s mind-set, as complicated, inefficient, noisy, and slow. Part of making something ‘frictionless’ is getting the human part out of the way. The point is not that making a world to accommodate this mind-set is bad, but that when one has as much power over the rest of the world, as the tech sector does over folks who might not share that worldview, there is the risk of a strange imbalance.”
Well, I think we already got to ‘strange imbalance’, didn’t we? And with a predominantly male world of tech’, he feared too that “testosterone combined with a drive to eliminate as much interaction with real humans as possible for the sake of ‘simplicity and efficiency’” made for an even more skewed society and odd future – a reality we now all take for normal in less than 10 years, since the ‘Road to Nowhere’ man has his say.
So here it comes: A world made by interaction-averse men (my mind goes again to the traumatised boy-man Elon Musk), empowered by susceptible, suggestible, me-too politicians, whether you like it or not.
And isn’t it strange that in a supposed democracy, there’s next to nothing you can do about it, apart from switch off, and become a savage on the outer fringes of an almost entirely digital world.
We all realise latterly we can’t keep the things we liked and trusted: The chequebooks we once brandished, and those soon-to-go banknotes and clunky coins, when the brave and new are unleashed upon us. It’s out with the old, in with the new, and their way or the highway.
When the corporate and political realms align for the next shiny thing that’s going to make all our lives ‘better’, you’d better just say “obrigado”, and get ready to utter: “Can I have some more please, Sir?”, when AI is ultimately the gatekeeper of all your precious online assets, including your money, all for the sake of smoothly-spoken efficiency.
AI awareness month continues on Good Morning Portugal! Watch, read and comment at www.theportugalclub.com
