Vice President of the Romanian Academy: We can benefit from artificial intelligence

The Vice President of the Romanian Academy, Professor Mircea Dumitru, stated in Târgu Mureş that artificial intelligence should not be seen as an adversary of human intelligence, but as a potential ally, provided that people know how to adapt and use it responsibly. The statements were made during the conference "Human intelligence vs. artificial intelligence: on speed and abductive reasoning (in medicine)”, held at the "George Emil Palade” University of Medicine, Pharmacy, Sciences and Technology in Târgu Mureş, as part of the annual event "George Simu - Memorial Lecture”.

Mircea Dumitru emphasized that the antagonistic formulation in the title of the conference does not reflect his own vision of the relationship between the two types of intelligence.

"I do not envisage an opposition between human intelligence and artificial intelligence, but rather a new alliance. I believe that we, humans, will benefit from artificial intelligence, if we know how to adapt and use it well for our purposes," said the vice-president of the Romanian Academy. He specified that human intelligence - biological, cultural and historical - must preserve its identity, just like artificial intelligence, built through algorithms and programs developed by humans.

The academician drew attention to the fact that artificial intelligence has already penetrated numerous branches of medicine and that some of them could be profoundly transformed in the coming years. "Some medical fields will be completely reconfigured, will be absorbed by this new technology and will look completely different from what we know today," said Mircea Dumitru, emphasizing, however, the need to preserve the specificity of human medical reasoning. He also raised the issue of the unprecedented speed with which artificial intelligence processes information and with which research results quickly reach practice and everyday life. "The question remains to what extent we will be able to adapt to this astonishing speed, not only of processing information, but also of transforming research into consumer goods,” he added.

The conference took place within the "George Simu - Memorial Lecture” event, organized annually on the occasion of the UMFST Târgu Mureş Days, in memory of Professor George Simu, the founder of the pathological anatomy discipline at the university.