President Javier Milei has plans to show his nation, which has one of many lowest charges of Synthetic Intelligence (AI) use on the continent, right into a “world energy” within the area.
There’s, nonetheless, some option to go.
Argentina is uniquely positioned to grow to be a world AI hub, Milei argues, citing plentiful low cost electrical energy capability and a extremely expert workforce.
“We now have every thing, every thing, to grow to be an AI powerhouse,” the La Libertad Avanza chief mentioned not too long ago.
“We now have the human sources. You haven’t any thought what number of children are coding right here.” he mentioned in an interview with the Neura outlet.
Argentina’s President additionally argues that the nation has the dependable power required by information centres.
“[For the data centres]… you want energy and also you want chilly climate. Within the South we might do one thing phenomenal: massive swathes of land, chilly climate [for the machines to consume less[ and human capital.”
To turn his vision into reality, the self-described “anarcho-capitalist” leader is counting on deregulation to attract foreign capital. The country needs such investment; it has been battling bleak poverty levels and chronic inflation.
Milei met with tech bosses like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk during recent visits to the Untied States, portraying Argentina to potential investors as “practically the last truly liberal country in the world,” said Alexander Ditzend, president of Argentina’s AI Society.
To Milei, the recipe is deregulation and opening up to foreign capital, just like in other sectors of the economy.
He managed to pass a law through Congress in June dubbed ‘RIGI,’ an investment incentive scheme for large investments.
The law offers tax, customs and exchange-control benefits over 30 years for investments exceeding US$200 million.
In June they also announced with great fanfare the creation of an “Artificial Intelligence Unit Applied to Security.”
Among other cybersurveillance tasks, this unit would deploy algorithms to analyse historic data on criminality in order to predict future crimes and help prevent them.
While all of these steps establish Milei’s drive toward success, it is important to note that Argentina is lagging behind in AI use and adoption.
‘Algorithmic bias’
A study in July by Randstad, a Netherlands-based human resources firm, found that barely 13 percent of Argentines use AI regularly in their work, half the Latin American average of 26 percent and almost a third less than North America and Asia.
A report by The Conference Board, a non-profit business think tank based in New York, found last year that just over one in 10 Argentine companies used AI in their operations – half the global average.
“Argentina needs it (AI) if it wants to be more competitive and not be left behind,” said Tomás Porchetto, an Argentine living in the US and founder of Constana, an AI-based platform for information technology teaching.
The country has a long way to go.
While some fear it may be too late for Argentina to catch up, others worry it may go overboard in its embrace of AI technology.
Last month, the Buenos Aires City government announced it would develop an AI-based system intended to prevent crimes using predictions based on analysis of historical data.
Having said that, Argentina –the third-largest economy in Latin America – “needs AI so as not to lag behind,” said Porchetto.
Others are mistrustful of the “predictive analysis” in terms of criminality.
Amnesty International Argentina fears that the “algorithmic bias” will lead to “selective discrimination” due to over-surveillance of people or neighbourhoods considered by AI to be “potentially prone to crime.”
Such a system could “increase inequality” in an already fractured society, and cause “self-censorship… by people who know, or have a well-founded suspicion of being under surveillance,” the NGO’s Argentina director Mariela Belski warned.
by Arnaud Fischer, AFP
