Davos, Switzerland, Jan 16 (EFE).- Spain is playing a leading role in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), Google’s director for global affairs told Efe in an interview on Tuesday.
Google’s Cyber Security Engineering Center (GSEC) in Malaga and coding and research work being done in Madrid and Barcelona, as well as the country’s stint as European Council president which ended at the end of last year, have placed Spain at the forefront of the emerging sector, Kent Walker said.
“Spain and its prime minister Pedro Sánchez have been leaders in terms of AI, the AI sandbox in Spain, and, of course, the Spanish presidency (of the European Union) that led to the passage of the AI act (agreed last December)”, Walker said.
The sandbox is a regulatory mechanism that aims to bring “competent authorities close to companies that develop AI to define best practices that will guide the implementation of the future European Commission’s AI Regulation”, according to the Commission.
In the interview, which was held on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Google executive also highlighted the company’s presence in Madrid, Barcelona and Malaga, where it recently announced a commitment of 10 million dollars to train students in cybersecurity in Europe.
A study published on Tuesday by Google and Ipsos highlights that 62% of Spaniards believe that society as a whole will benefit from AI, with significant changes in employment, while 91% believe it will help improve some jobs and sectors.
Walker, who on Wednesday is expected to hold a meeting with Sánchez in Davos, said that the technology was poised to change “everything” about our lives.
“I have never seen more excitement than I have in the last year about the potential of this new technology as a tool for science. We talk about AI changing everything, from the everyday to the extraordinary.”
In this sense, Google hopes to be able to showcase its advances in its user tools that will “make things easier for people in their work, as well as for scientists and doctors,” he said.z
Walker believes that, despite the huge competition with other tech giants, Google has “many years of experience in understanding how to work with AI and because it has already been built into so many of our products, we have a running start in thinking about the next generation of tools and how to further improve them,” reinforcing values such as transparency, security and privacy.
He thinks that AI will also be very important in tackling cybercrime: “We believe that AI will ultimately be a benefit for cybersecurity. While in the short term it helps attackers come up with new ways of finding vulnerabilities, in the long term it helps us identify vulnerabilities in our systems,” he stressed.x
Regarding geo-political leadership in this field, he believes that the race for AI is “an open competition (…) that will hopefully benefit the world. We are seeing great developments in America, but also in Europe and in China,” he said. EFE
