Editorial

In 1997, artificial intelligence burst onto the scene with news that made the front pages of newspapers. It was reported that the DEEP BLUE robot had defeated the world chess champion Gary Kasparov. This event shook up the way technology was understood and incidentally, it reminded us that chess was the favorite medium to test artificial intelligence. Today, the power of that robot is surpassed by smartphones designed for use on a daily basis [1].

More than two years after the start (and declaration) of the COVID-19 pandemic, its domino effect has not stopped and outbreaks of new variants emerge with certain periodicity. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze and summarize [2-4].

At the closing of this editorial, the pandemic has caused 515 million infections and more than 6 million people have died worldwide. To date, no intelligent software has been able to give us the date of the end of the pandemic. The outbreaks in countries like China and the upward curves in England collapsing the health system, show us a SARS-Cov-2 that is still highly active (with the sub variant omicron BA.2.12.1). It could not be otherwise since, in addition to its great capacity to mutate and produce more contagious versions, there are still many populations around the world with a low percentage of vaccinated people (or people who have not completed the entire vaccination program). This, in turn, further favors the transmission and spread of the virus. There is also a lack of reliable information from many places. The latter is a paradox since never before has there been a time with so much access to information and data [5].

Data and More Data

In our current society dominated by information and data – The Infocracy – as the philosopher Byung Chul Han says, it is difficult to deal with the veracity of the facts, their feasibility, the truth of what is said and what comes to be the Aristotelian truth. There are groups who from different trenches such as the anti-system, the anti-vaccine, or disseminators of fake news, try to seize power. The power of data. Whether it is true or not does not matter to them; they only care about getting the data to control, to chain to the digital cavern, that dark cavern in which a fatuous flame flickers.

We seek truthful data. Today, the oracle of Delphi no longer exists, but there has been great advance in artificial intelligence (exponential advance they say). There is no doubt about its contribution in the fight against COVID-19. And in what way? I can mention some examples: classified and real databases; computational epidemiological models, predictive models of hospital occupation, artificial intelligence in advanced equipment that performs radiological examinations to “see” lungs infected with Coronavirus, contrasting false negatives to serological tests. And to add a “holistic” twist, that team of radiologists or other specialists came to see their patient by the best route to the hospital (route provided by an application on their phone that has Artificial Intelligence) [6-9].

With the advance in technology today, where something new is discovered every day, it is not utopian to think of a date for the end of the pandemic.

Although the end could have been sooner perhaps.

In 2003, after the appearance of SARS (the first), a consortium of Texas laboratories worked on a possible vaccine. If it had been developed and; considering that the genome of SARS 1 is 80% the same as SARS COV 2 (or COVID-19), it would have been a very powerful ally (if not to give an end date, at least to limit its effects). There is no need to recall the crazy and desperate race that this pandemic brought about to produce a vaccine in the year 2020, since the coronavirus found (as it almost always does) humanity completely unprepared and well, at that time, in 2003, nobody wanted to finance the idea of producing a vaccine. Today, many must be secretly regretting that decision. SARS COV 2 has generated much more damage than its predecessors, SARS 1, Avian Flu, Swine Flu and MERS in 2012 [9].

Those are irrefutable facts. The numbers speak for themselves.

If it were a chessboard, artificial intelligence will help us checkmate the coronavirus; and the post-pandemic world will erect it as a new God or the new Oracle. No longer the serpent God of the ancients, but the God of information, of data… the one who will guide our behavior and our relationships will it be so?

Ray Kurzweil director of engineering at Google affirms: Artificial intelligence will be dominant and the future belongs to it-and his adds-it simply must be welcomed. But, will human beings be able to coexist with AI? Or at least be able to balance and classify the overwhelming amount of data and not develop or foster superstitions? Superstitions such as: if you click on certain tabs or wear certain clothes, the algorithms will favor you; or if you wake up at a certain time you are doing the right thing.  In short, a medley of artifices. The human brain must be strong to resist temptations and refined to create formulas, formulas that consider details, that look back on what failed in the past, and add a number of precise instructions to reach the goal, and that in the end, create a good algorithm for what is face-to-face and digital (a mixed post-pandemic world?).

In 2022, there have been almost no more quarantines but problems are far from over. More waves of waiting lists in public health are coming. Diseases were left untreated in order to attend the urgent needs of the pandemic. In addition, the lists will further increase due to the neurological sequelae and worsening quality of life in patients who fell ill with COVID-19 (see prospective study published in The Lancet Respiratory in the United Kingdom on April 23, 2022). To make matters worse, now we must add the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with the consequence of death and destruction and forced migration of millions of Ukrainians thus creating new human and health problems as well. Concerning the latter, I would like to say that hopefully one day soon, AI will generate an algorithm that inactivates any weapon or war machine if the targets are human.

The post-pandemic challenge will be that new links will have to be remade or created, hand in hand, of course, with artificial intelligence. For those nascent links, there will be new data classifications; algorithms available to deploy whether on a game board, trading desk, or in the reconstruction of a city. And if to the sum of all the correct data we add ethics, it will not matter if we continue to lose at chess with the machines [10,11].

References

1. Gorka Olive. Professor de farmacia país vasco. Google Academic.
2. Spudich S, Avindra N. Consecuencias en el Sistema nerviosos del COVID. Rev Science. 2022;375:6579
3. La Intelligence Artificial detect COVID con una Radiography. La vanguardia.com. Ramón Peco Madrid. 2022.
4. Evans RA, Leavy OC, Richarson M. Group collaborative PHOSP-COVID. The Lancet: studio prospective sober COVID-19 Prolonged. 2022.
5. Ubieto JR. El mundo pos-COVID: Entre la presencia y lo virtual. Ned Ediciones. 2021.
6. Infocracia-Byung Chul Han. Taurus editorial. 2022.
7. Ray Kurzweil. Director de ingeniería de google. Página Web Resilente Digital. Sociedad Tecnológica. 2021.
8. Diamond J. Upheaval: how nations cope with crisis and change. Penguin UK. 2019.
9. Manson M. Todo está j* dido: Un libro sobre la esperanza. Roca Editorial. 2019.
10. Algoritmos Para Vivir- E-books resumen de la ciencia informática de las decisiones humanas. Readtrepreneur Publishing. 2020.
11. Hopkins J. Johns Hopkins coronavirus resource center. COVID-19 Case Tracker. 2020.