“Do you ever question Waze when driving?” asked the host of RTP’s Sociedade Civil.
AI is changing our lives: the way we think, our ethics, and our culture. To help reflect and shed light on these pressing issues, INESC-ID researchers Joana Campos* and Helena Moniz**, alongside Luís Moniz Pereira from Nova University, were invited to the recently aired episode on Critical Thinking in the Age of AI. 

Joana brought attention to how the rapid rise of generative AI is reshaping society, including cognitive abilities such as memory and creativity; and how we need to actively decide which human capabilities we want to preserve, protect, and strengthen as these technologies evolve. 

Helena emphasised another important dimension: the cultural and linguistic biases embedded in the digital ecosystem, currently dominated by the Anglo-Saxon culture, and the importance of AI platforms that reflect different cultures, languages and contexts. 

Both researchers warned about the ethical implications of AI, the impact on democracies, and the urgent need for broad AI literacy. “The objective is not to turn everyone into a programmer, but that people know how to use it — because it is here,” says Joana. 

 Watch the full episode on RTP’s Sociedade Civil (in PT) here. 

*Joana Campos is an INESC-ID researcher in the Artificial Intelligence for People and Society scientific area (AIPS) and Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, working at the intersection of AI, human–computer interaction and the computational modelling of cognition and emotion.

**Helena Moniz is an INESC-ID researcher in the Human Language Technologies (HLT) scientific area and Professor at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon. She is President of the European Association for Machine Translation, and Chair of the Ethics Committee of the Center for Responsible AI.

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Image: © RTP / Sociedade Civil