The Effect of the Age of AI

In class today, we watched a documentary by Frontline PBS titled In the Age of AI. This film discussed many different perspectives of the AI debate and what the possible pros and cons that are associated with using AI. 

The main thing that frightened me about this film was China's use of AI in observing their population and what they are using this information for. China has created a social credit system that is powered by AI and it assigns something like a credit score to every citizen. However, this score takes into inconsideration EVERYTHING you do throughout the day, all the time. Depending on if your score is high or low, you get corresponding benefits or punishments. This use of AI and facial recognition is very dystopian and a massive breach of your privacy.

This film did not only speak of the cons of AI but also of the copious amount of benefits AI brings along with it. The biggest Pro in my opinion was the fact that AI makes far fewer errors than humans do and they can react accurately to situations many thousands of times faster than a human could. This technology would be great for self-driving cars because if you can remove the least accurate thing in a car, the human control, it can potentially save thousands of lives from road accidents.

AI can be great for national security because it can be programmed to search for abnormalities online or passively watch machines and remove human error completely out of a situation. Also, as discussed early, these machines can react so much faster than a human ever could.

AI can both add protection from identity theft and add another tool to these thieves' arsenal. An AI is used to gather info and data-mine would be super-efficient at stealing information making identity theft far easier. However, on the other hand, AI could be programmed to search for spending abnormalities or location abnormalities and notify you that your identity has been compromised far sooner than you could have figured out yourself.

If you are interested in watching the entire documentary yourself, you can find it on youtube through this URL: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=5dZ_lvDgevk&ab_channel=FRONTLINEPBS%7COfficial

or you can click the video below.