The most important thing is to "be critical consumers of information"
The Computer Science professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, Pedro Domingos, states, in an interview to Lusa, that "there is nothing more important" than being a "critical consumer of information", at a time when disinformation is rampant.
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Pedro Domingos is the 'keynote speaker' for the first day of the APDC Congress, which starts today in Lisbon, and where he will address 'Living in a future with AI' [Living in a future with AI - Artificial Intelligence].
Read Also: Pedro Domingos: Digital literacy is an essential point for using AI (Portuguese version)
The 33rd edition of the congress has the motto "40 years Futurizing", in the year in which the association celebrates 40 years of existence.
"There is nothing more important nowadays than being critical consumers of information and the role of scientists, journalists and educators is to contribute to this", says the academic, for whom the commitment to digital literacy is increasingly urgent.
Regarding the risks of artificial intelligence in the increase of misinformation, Pedro Domingos considers it to be "an illusion" for someone to look at AI "as an entity in itself".
"What we must be able to do is see through artificial intelligence who is controlling it" because "the danger is not" in AI.
In an illustrative way, the danger "is not in the machine gun, it is in who has the machine gun in their hands".
The important thing is "to understand who is using artificial intelligence and for what", points out the academic.
The winner of the "SIGKDD Innovation Award", the most prestigious award in 'data science', and 'fellow' of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and author of the book "Master Algorithm", admits that artificial intelligence can be used "and is already being used to generate information", which "is bad".
But "the world is already full of misinformation even without artificial intelligence, social networks are full" of it.
Pedro Domingos highlights that "the great role" of AI in the economy "is to reduce the cost of intelligence or some aspects of intelligence".
As much as misinformation is generated, there is a finite capacity for people to retain and this will not increase, not forgetting that "artificial intelligence can also be used to combat misinformation".
Currently, "the role of artificial intelligence is much greater" than the capacity to generate, argues the specialist and professor.
"There are millions of people generating misinformation and what prevents all this vastness from passing through" is artificial intelligence, he stresses.
Therefore, "what we need is more and better artificial intelligence", concludes Pedro Domingos.
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