AI, who sets the limits? That is the question on the cover of the September issue of Comunicações, the magazine of the Portuguese Association for the Development of Communications (APDC). Inside, an extended interview with Inês Lynce, President of INESC-ID’s Board of Directors and Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico.

“Destroying trust is very easy, and building it is very hard.” For Inês Lynce, that is the most serious risk AI poses. She questions the concentration of power in a handful of tech companies, considers industry self-regulation as unrealistic, and stresses the importance of keeping humans in control.

The researcher also discusses SAIL – Sustainable Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a €27.2 million project led by INESC-ID with European and national funding, in partnership with the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). “Having a project of this quality and scale for six years is very appealing,” she says. “It’s once in a lifetime, so we have to make the most of it.”

The interview goes on to cover her path into computer engineering, how she became the first woman to lead INESC-ID in 2020, and the impact of AI on young people entering the job market.

Read the full interview in the September issue of Comunicações (in PT).

Learn more about SAIL.

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Image: © APDC / Comunicações