“I would like a development based on social interests”

2025/06/01 Galarraga Aiestaran, Ana - Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Berdintasuna
• Elkarrizketak
• Softwarea

What has surprised, disturbed or impacted you the most since you started working?

I am a computer scientist and I have been working here for many years. I’ve been a teacher since 1995, and I started researching a little earlier, first in robotics, and then I moved on to artificial intelligence or machine learning. What has surprised me the most is the change that has taken place since then. In the end, we are talking about the same paradigm, but it has nothing to do with it; the ways of doing it also have nothing to do with it. At the first session of the Basque Informaticians, our theme was software in Basque, because there was hardly anything in this field and it was necessary if we wanted to talk about Basque in the digital world. Then came the Internet, and the topics were the presence of the Basque language on the Internet and many others, but always related to the topics that have been on the streak worldwide.

I have experienced these initial changes naturally, but now what has come with great language models and creative systems is on a different level and is happening at a different speed. I do research in artificial intelligence and I see that all this is coming: on the one hand, because we have machines with more and more capacity and with it we have a lot of data, but on the other hand, because we use a lot of resources to squeeze all of them out. And that worries me. Right now, I’m not worried about whether AI systems will become autonomous and things like that, but about how many resources they consume and what impact they have. That's what I'm worried about.

What revolution or discovery would you like to witness?

In relation to the above, I would like, on the one hand, a revolution and, on the other hand, some discoveries or something. And the revolution would be that the development of artificial intelligence goes hand in hand with independent researchers. Because now it goes hand in hand with the big companies, and they act in their own interests, they dictate the direction, and the rest of us have almost nothing to say. I would like a development based on social interests, beyond economic interests.

And the discovery, I don't know where it might come from. I do not know whether quantum computing will come hand in hand or whether the opposite will happen, but I would like a fortunate finding to make it possible to solve the environmental problem I mentioned earlier. That is, designing powerful algorithms, but using much less resources, and requiring less data. Maybe I'm asking for miracles, but since it's free to ask...