Born in Granada to a Spanish mother and Jordanian father. When he was five, his family moved to Amman, but he continued to come to Spain every summer: "What I remember most from my childhood are the walks with my grandparents through the streets of Granada," says engineer Omar Hatamleh (55 years old).
He says that as a child, studying bored him, but he ended up becoming a recognized global expert in artificial intelligence (AI), a field on which he advises the United Nations and NASA, which has appointed him Chief of Artificial Intelligence at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, USA.
While much of his work involves harnessing what this technology offers us to devise new applications, Hatamleh is equally dedicated to promoting its benefits as he is to warning about the "dark side" of AI and the "unprecedented ethical, privacy, and security dilemmas it poses."
He addresses these issues in detail in This Time is Different. When Intelligence Transcends Humanity (Deusto), the book that goes on sale this Tuesday in Spain. "We have been working and progressing in AI for many decades, since the 1950s," he reviews during a video conference from Washington. "But what is different is that since November 2022, with the arrival of ChatGPT, that capability is not only in the hands of people with advanced and complex technical knowledge; now those capabilities are in the hands of anyone, and this has been a drastic change. It will be increasingly easier for anyone to do more complicated things with AI, using voice, videos, photos, and texts with a single program, instead of using several as we have to do now."
This engineer predicts "incredible changes in everything," even though he believes we are still "at the beginning" of this technological revolution. If we compare the advancement of AI with a person's development, we would still be "a baby crawling, about to walk." "There is still a lot to advance," he emphasizes.
The next phase will be achieving General Artificial Intelligence (GAI), which is a more advanced artificial intelligence than the generative AI we have experienced so far. "The AI we have now is excellent in a specific topic or task, for example, writing articles or finding patterns, but they are linear things. The GAI will do several things at once, like humans, it will be able to solve problems at another level, more complicated, it will have long-term memory and will have much more creativity, more reasoning capacity than current systems, and will be an expert in cross-cutting areas, not just in one area."
Hatamleh believes that by the end of this decade, we should reach that second phase, that is, moving from AI to GAI. "But it will be gradual," he points out. "There will be a transition stage and there will be debate, with people saying that it has already been achieved and others saying it has not, because there are many phases that must be met for there to be consensus in affirming that we have reached GAI. When we reach it, things will change completely."
And it will force us to change as well. The Albert Einstein quote that opens his book -"The measure of intelligence is the ability to change"- encapsulates what he considers essential to adapt to what is coming.
This ability to change, he emphasizes, will affect all aspects of our lives, from personal relationships to work through education. In fact, he believes that the days when traditional skills were relied upon to open doors to success are behind us. "There are statistics that say between 60 and 70% of the jobs that will exist in the next 10 years do not yet exist. That is why when I am asked, 'What can I study?' I respond that the most important thing is not the specific studies you do, but acquiring basic things that can give you an advantage in the next two decades."
Thus, he recommends "to stop talking about IQ and add adaptability quotient and emotional quotient; abilities such as critical thinking and exponential thinking are essential to adapt to change, as well as continuous learning. This is what will give you an advantage. The only constant will be change, changing roles, specialties, jobs...". And besides "continuously learning," it will also be necessary to "unlearn."
He states that the emergence of AI will have a great impact on employment and will replace many jobs, even those that require creative or intellectual tasks that we usually think only people can do. "The more creative the profession, the longer it will take to replace. Now it is said: 'AI cannot take your job yet, but people who know how to handle AI can.' I agree. But I would put an expiration date: when we reach GAI, it will change. Now it helps in medicine, engineering, architecture, law, or finance to do the work better and faster, but eventually we will reach a level where the AI system can perform those professions much faster and more efficiently."
Specifically, he believes that "the emergence of humanoid robots, combined with super-advanced AI systems, will change the way we work significantly, replacing many intellectual but also manual jobs because they will be able to work in factories, agriculture, or construction. It's a matter of time," he argues.
In practice, Hatamleh continues, this will mean that "these systems will replace many manual jobs that currently depend on immigration." One of the consequences will be that "less labor will be needed, and this will have geopolitical repercussions. Because it will not only affect countries like Spain, where few children are born and they depend heavily on migration to fill job positions and keep the economy moving forward. The countries of origin of those workers will be greatly affected because they often depend heavily on the remittances they send."
These transformations, he reflects, will force us to rethink the entire society: "If many jobs are taken over by humanoid robots, what will the economy of the future be like? What income will people have? There will be many good things and benefits, but there are many things that need to be addressed and solutions that make sense in the face of all these changes."
On the other hand, society will have to adapt to us living longer, as one of the positive aspects he highlights of AI is how it is "drastically changing"