The UIC Barcelona Faculty of Humanities held a new edition of its Cross-disciplinary Workshop titled “Artificial Intelligence and Ethics” on Monday, 23 January. The workshop was attended by experts in different areas, such as Carme Torras, mathematician and specialist in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) at the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics (IRI), CSIC-UPC, who presented her project on assistance robots for people with disabilities

Carme Torras spoke about the danger of leaving everything in the hands of AI, referring to the affective aspect: “We have created robots that can help people with disabilities, but we have to stop and think about the ethical aspect: if I have a robot that keeps me company, I may no longer want to receive visits, or if I know that my family member is well cared for by a robot, I may stop going to visit them,” Torras said, prompting the discussion with the students present.

During the workshop, experts from UIC Barcelona also participated. Lecturer Magda Bosch spoke about “artificial friendship.” Wendy R. Simons, also from the Faculty of Humanities, exposed some of the limits of our current democracy when it comes to AI:“Technology by nature is disruptive, ground breaking and is also never-ending/it is also constantly disruptive, ground breaking. Our legal system is very limited for this new technology,” the lecturer and researcher stated.

Also participating in the workshop were Gabriel Fernández, director of the UIC Barcelona Observatory of Artificial Intelligence and New Technologies (OIANT), with his presentation “The ethics of AI: a comprehensive approach”; Alberto T. Estévez, lecturer for the UIC Barcelona School of Architecture, who presented his latest book , AI to matter-reality [De la inteligencia artificial a la realidad material],” co-authored with Yomna K. Abdallahin which the designs made with artificial intelligence are a reflection their research on biomaterials.

The workshop was opened by the dean of the Faculty of Humanities , Judith Urbano, who thanked all the attendees for their participation. She stressed that as a university, it is important to continue working, discussing and researching a topic such as artificial intelligence that is so current and ever present in our lives.