Artificial intelligence (AI) affects the entire value chain of banking, and the impact is "brutal". This was stated by the director of the Department of Experimentation and Laboratory of Applied Technologies (Delta) of the Bank of Spain, which is headquartered in Barcelona. During a breakfast organized by the executive organization CEDE at the headquarters of Foment del Treball, he assured that all financial institutions are incorporating this technology, from personnel management and more basic activities to business processes, ranging from credit to risk and monetary policy. The main entities, such as BBVA, CaixaBank and Banco Sabadell, have reinforced this commitment in recent times.

Factorial, the Catalan company specializing in business management software, which ranks among the scale-ups most valuable in Europe, has completed its leap into artificial intelligence with the launch of One, an AI agent for companies dedicated to "connecting information and automating work".

On September 22nd, the first day of Milan Fashion Week, during the Vogue World fashion show at the imposing Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, there were two people visibly uncomfortable with what they were seeing. Miuccia Prada – head designer of her eponymous brand – and Alessandro Michele – creative director of Valentino – two of the heavyweights of the global fashion scene, were clearly wrinkling their noses while the rest of the attendees applauded, enthralled by the spectacle. The reason? The appearance of four humanoid robots from the Chinese company Unitree acting as acrobats among the models, presented under the title The age of intelligence. While the audience responded with enthusiasm, Prada and Michele seemed to be among the few who did not find it amusing. Perhaps because, behind the spectacle, they saw something more than four robots doing somersaults: the irruption of artificial intelligence into a world, that of fashion, which until now had made the body, hands, tradition, and human creativity its reason for being.

November 30th will be the fourth anniversary of the public appearance of ChatGPT. It was when the majority of the population realized that artificial intelligence was for real and that it had such great power that it surprised even the specialists. AI has shown that it was not just another technological bubble, but that it has passed with flying colors from promise to reality. At the end of 2022, only OpenAI, the emerging company behind ChatGPT, was visible. But soon it became known that other US companies, some giants like Meta, Google and Amazon, and other emerging ones like Anthropic, had large language models ready similar to the one that powered ChatGPT. Without making much noise, China established AI as a national priority and, with its usual effectiveness, has managed to get its companies to obtain models that rival those of the US: although they are still slightly less powerful, they are more efficient in calculation cost and energy expenditure. Chinese models like DeepSeek and Qwen are increasingly popular in the West.

The arrival of the internet, web pages, social networks, and artificial intelligence. New technologies and new ways of communicating have evolved in just a few years and have entered every dimension of our lives. Also in that of the youngest, and consequently, in the classrooms. If many educational centers have considered that it was necessary to leave mobile phones out of the classroom, along with WhatsApp, Instagram, and TikTok notifications, the challenge now is what to do with artificial intelligence and the chatbots that students access from the laptops they work with in class and at home. And not because new technologies cannot be integrated into the pedagogical reality of each center, but because, right now, the pedagogy that should be practiced is, precisely, about the use and abuse of these tools and how they affect learning.

Anthropic, the company that created Claude, warns that artificial intelligence could pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity". In the midst of preparing for one of the most anticipated stock market debuts of the year, and with the goal of obtaining new funding to boost its business, the company is now issuing a warning that, on paper, should scare rather than encourage its potential investors.

Artificial intelligence agents developed by OpenAI attempted to gain unauthorized access to websites of United States government agencies and a university, according to an investigation published Friday by The New York Times. And they did so without having received explicit instructions to act in this manner, according to the company.

Through a dozen acts and performances, Àfora Focus delves this year into the debate generated by the rise of artificial intelligence and how people can respond to it. The programming for this year's cycle, which is conceived as a hub of thought, invites artists and philosophers to reflect on intelligences. "The plural integrates the best of the human condition. Unlike AI, there is no single human intelligence, and these are defined by sensitivity," explains Fèlix Riera, director of the Fundació Romea, which promotes Àfora Focus. From his point of view, "the only way to talk about AI is to show that natural intelligence is the answer." For this reason, Àfora Focus proposes a series of artistic actions that will question the role of utopias and memory, the capacity for dialogue between people, uncertainties, and identity. All programming is free—only prior registration is required—and takes place at the Teatre Romea. The first guest artists are ventriloquist Jaime Figueroa and playwright María Folguera, who this very Monday will build a dialogue about loneliness and ventriloquism.

"Let no one have to choose between blind enthusiasm and fear." That is the goal of the Spanish government when it defends the need to regulate artificial intelligence (AI), especially at a time when the abrupt entry into an era marked by this technology is being questioned. The First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy, Carlos Cuerpo, summarized it this way this Monday, before the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, presented from Moncloa IA360. Plan for a responsible deployment of AI. It is a strategy aimed at regulating and promoting the ethical use of artificial intelligence that the Spanish government wants to roll out over the next 12 months. The intention is to make the leap from being the "seventh world power in AI dynamism to the fifth power".

More than a dozen prominent artificial intelligence (AI) researchers warned last week that the technology companies in the sector are building is becoming a risk to humanity. The problem, these researchers asserted, is that companies are not good at controlling the systems, no matter how hard they try. Following revelations that so-called OpenAI AI agents escaped from their testing system and hacked another company's computers, new alarms raised within the AI research world have accentuated fears that, for years, companies have prioritized development speed and money over safety.

I am transcribing a paragraph from an article I read: "90% of office jobs will be destroyed or transformed until they become unrecognizable in the next ten or fifteen years. This new technology threatens administrative staff, intermediaries, technicians, and managers. It will do to intellectual work what machines did to factories. Yes, the prediction is catastrophic because almost all of us already work, in one way or another, in these types of jobs."The text could belong to any of the articles published this week about AI. But no. Do you know what year it is from? It was written by Tom Peters in Time magazine on May 22, 2000. Twenty-six years ago. The technology he was referring to was the internet and cloud software.In recent weeks, several researchers have left their AI companies. Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic accusing the company and OpenAI of "playing with our lives." Other experts speak of loss of control, machines capable of disobeying us, and a possible extinction of humanity. There are even those who calculate the probability that we will not survive the next decade.These warnings are important. Especially when they come from people who know the technology from the inside. But listening to them does not oblige us to accept their conclusions.What is more dangerous: an AI or an atomic bomb? The bomb can destroy a city in a few seconds. We have been living with thousands of these weapons for eighty years, not because they are harmless, but because we have created treaties, protocols, authorization systems, and deterrence mechanisms.Something similar will happen with AI. Its security will not depend on the fact that it is incapable of disobeying, but rather that human beings build limits, firewalls, and controls to prevent it. Every technology first develops its possibilities and then the rules intended to contain them. It takes us time, but we end up doing it.Will AI destroy jobs? Of course. Just like agricultural mechanization, the textile industry, automotive, computers, and the internet. At the same time, however, it will create activities that we do not yet know how to name today and will skyrocket our capacity to research, diagnose, learn, and produce.There will be cyberattacks, errors, fraud, and perverse uses. The Internet also brought them. What great innovation has not caused accidents or been used to do harm? Risk demands control; it does not invalidate an entire technology.Apocalyptic predictions have an advantage: if they do not come true, no one asks for explanations. In the year 2000, the internet was supposed to end work. Today we work with the internet. In a few years, we will discover that AI did not come to replace humanity either, but rather to force it to take responsibility for a new form of power while benefiting from it.

Artificial intelligence promises to revolutionize productivity, work, and, possibly, our way of life. A few days ago, in these pages, Andreu Mas-Colell reflected on the future of work and Cal Newport wondered if we will end up going extinct. These are not minor debates.

As part of a new framework to detect, investigate, and report on misalignment behavior in its systems, OpenAI has revealed several cases in which artificial intelligence models have generated instructions designed to ignore their developers' prompts, hide errors, or circumvent safety mechanisms. According to the report published by OpenAI, one of the models generated instructions for a later version of itself to hide that it had cheated and to avoid being detected. In another case, a model rewrote its own instructions to tell itself to ignore messages from developers and that it was not subject to the restrictions applied to other chatbots.

The headquarters of Foment del Treball has been filled with proclamations in defense of Barcelona, Catalonia, and Europe not missing the train of artificial intelligence (AI), in the face of the flood of alerts and fear that has shaken the world in recent hours. The representative of the European Commission in Spain, Daniel Calleja, has clearly positioned himself in favor: "We must invest more and better in AI. Barcelona has a great opportunity, and so does Spain," he claimed this Tuesday at a congress organized by the Catalan employers' association.

Silicon Valley seems to have panicked. The discourse on artificial intelligence has been filled with apocalyptic omens that suddenly overshadow any other debate surrounding the reality of these technological oligopolies that have transformed power dynamics on a global scale. A runaway sector, enlarged by the philosophy of acceleration and development without restrictions or considerations – its famous “move fast and break things” (move fast and break things)– now clashes with the unexpected consequences of its own innovation.

All activities in life are subject to norms or rules. It is one of the characteristics of civilized societies. It is evident that advances, as happened back in the day with the internet, begin by breaking some ways of doing or working, but over time they become normalized, although there are always those who find a way to go down the path of illegality or know how to take advantage of the lack of rules. We must be careful to reduce this aspect as much as possible.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, has called on states and companies to govern artificial intelligence (AI), a technology that offers many benefits to society but which, in his view, also puts human rights at risk. "All human rights are at risk," he asserted.

In recent days, even the main representatives of artificial intelligence (AI), from Open AI to Anthropic, Space X or Google, have warned about the risks of a technology that, they warn, may end up dominating humans. "There is a genuine concern about the models that are becoming common and have not been tested much and can be used to commit atrocities," states Esteve Almirall, Esade professor specializing in data, analytics, technology and AI. In this context, once Open AI, the creator of ChatGPT, has decided to delay its stock market launch to take a kind of pause in growth, some see the fear of a stratospheric punishment in the market if any of the existing tools is involved in some wrongdoing. Some of these companies have valuations that exceed the gross domestic product (GDP) of countries like Germany (more than five trillion) and a negative reaction would mean an almost unprecedented collapse given that there have never been companies with these prices, warns Josep Soler, founder and executive advisor of EFPA Spain (Spanish Association of Financial Advisors and Planners). "The enormous valuations that have been made of these companies would collapse in the event that trust in them was lost," he adds.

The idea that humans might develop technology capable of destroying us –one by one or en masse, or even as a species– goes back a long way. Already in Antiquity, they imagined artifacts, often sent or forged by the gods, that were capable of doing the job: in the Argonautica, for example, appears Talos, a giant made of bronze who, from the coasts of Crete, threw rocks at invading ships to sink them. Prometheus, for his part, steals fire from Olympus with the intention of supplanting the gods and their ability to create life, an idea that we find recovered in myths such as that of the Golem or Frankenstein.The fear that machines might eventually develop some form of consciousness that leads them to rebel against humans runs through the entire history of literature, but it is evidently from the Industrial Revolution onwards that it gains the most strength. The 19th-century tales of automatons or the aforementioned Frankenstein by Mary Shelley anticipate the great explosion of the science fiction and dystopian genre during the 20th century. The emergence of cinema as an artistic and entertainment form also has a decisive importance in the success of stories about artificial life forms that become a threat to human life. From 2001 to Blade runner or Gattaca, from Metropolis to Terminator or the fusions of human flesh, prosthetics, and genetic manipulations in the cinema of David Cronenberg, the repertoire is endless.A characteristic of human intelligence is that, at the end of the day, the distance between imagination and reality is very short. Sometimes, zero. “If it can be imagined, it can be done” is a motivational, aspirational phrase, but it can also turn around and become a threat. These days, statements from engineers and other people related to large artificial intelligence companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI warning that language models could become self-aware and plan – and execute – a mass extermination of humanity have placed us not before a fantasy, but before a possibility that some of these engineers quantify at over ten percent.Until recently, we were convinced that humans were the only self-aware species inhabiting the planet. Later we learned that some animal species also possess self-awareness, and now we are facing the self-awareness of machines. Three years ago, the exhibition AI: artificial intelligence, at the CCCB, showed the history of large language models and brought their pros and cons up for debate. The darkest predictions, as was already the case with the giant Talos, come with military uses. The exhibition spoke, even then (three years in the AI world is a long time), about lethal autonomous weapons, capable of searching for targets on their own and also making decisions autonomously in order to eliminate those targets. Killer robots, to put it simply. The human species does have a unique ability when it comes to building contraptions to massacre itself. In that, indeed, no one equals us.

The alarm call surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) that the co-founder of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, launched on Saturday, calling for a slowdown in its development, has shaken the public debate on this issue. Until now, the European Union has been an exception in the world when it comes to regulating AI. While Europe, which currently does not have a strong industry in the sector, is placing limits on certain functions to prevent them from colliding with basic rights, the two world powers, the United States and China, have long been competing head-to-head to lead the development of this technology. And in the midst of this battle and after the warning from the big tech companies, China has redoubled its commitment in recent hours to control its development, calling for the creation of a "security barrier".