Report about the documentary seen in the class:

How Artificial Intelligence is changing our society, by DW Documentaries.

The title of the video is ‘How Artificial Intelligence is changing our society’, a quite appropriate title since several
social-related points were raised.

Between revolutionizing biomechanics, managing social media, and more ‘cliché’ stuff like autonomous
intelligent weapons, AI could easily be considered as a new turn to our relation with machines and how we, as
humans, are seeing them.
The documentary begins with asking a young girl about the way she looks at Artificial Intelligence. It is an
important point since we have a quite biased view about AI, especially because of sci-fi films, we tend to rely AI
with things like robot killer, humanoids, cyborgs, etc. But in true AI is way more than that.
A first example is given by interviewing an MIT engineer and professor who built his own bionic leg empowered
by the advances in AI, at a point where he said that when in possession of his bionic leg he doesn’t consider
himself as disable, and go further than that saying that he can upgrade his body through upgrading his bionic leg.
AI is already widely used in social media while ‘choosing’ the kind of content to feed us with, and hence
influencing people, but not necessarily in a good way. The problem is with the economical model of big media
companies, they tend to focus on maximizing profit, and to do that they need to get people to engage more with
their contents, goal that they achieve with AI programmed in such a way social media apps recommend to people
the content that sels the most and this at the expense of quality. In many cases these particular contents chosen
by the algorithms is misleading and spread hate. Fake news can have a tremendous effect on people like the
Japanese example given in the video about the effectiveness of the vaccine.
Artificial Intelligence is doing very good in the military area. Autonomous arms receive each year dozens of $ in
research and development, it plays and it is called to play a game changing role in modern war and conflict. It is
not about heating a target without being commanded by humans, it is about taking decision to kill, and that raises
important ethics problematics.
There is a common imaginary about how the future will be, inter-connected, full of different type of gadget,
between drones and cameras in every corner. All these high-tech objects would generate tremendous amount of
data that will feed out artificial intelligence algorithms, in order to make them more effective. We may think that we
are just at the beginning of AI and we are still far from seeing real effects on the society, but that’s definitely not
true, AI is already everywhere, we, by the way, begin to speak about the AI generation as we used in early 1990
to use the world internet generation to design the kids raised at the time where internet was at its beginning, that
gives a certain idea about how AI is revolutionary.