Next on Nova: 'A.I. Revolution'
If you haven't been following the "AI conversation," a new documentary will provide a good opportunity to catch up.
Nova will premiere "A.I. Revolution" on PBS this Wednesday, March 27, at 9 p.m. EDT.
“The conversation around A.I. in our world is changing rapidly every day,” says correspondent Miles O’Brien in the release issued by GBH, which we all knew as WGBH until they deleted the "W" in 2020 in a re-branding move.
”’A.I. Revolution’” aims to show people what this new technology is capable of, as well as some of the concerns that emerge when you are creating something that has the power to perceive things far beyond the scope of our own understanding of the world.”
“There’s been a lot of media coverage of people’s fears of A.I. and the idea that it could one day turn against us,” said NOVA Co-Executive Producer Julia Cort. “At the same time, many scientists we’ve talked to are excited and optimistic, convinced that A.I. will help us build a substantially better, healthier future. We hope this film will provide audiences with a deeper understanding of the technology, so they can make informed decisions about the best path forward.”
We'll see correspondent Miles O'Brien get fitted with a new AI-empowered prosthetic arm. And we'll see UC Berkeley computer science Hany Farid on the rise of A.I.-generated deep fake videos featuring false impersonations of any individual. professor on the rise of A.I.-generated deep fake videos. We’ll watch him create two deep fake videos of O'Brien -- one that with total realism shows him speaking words he never spoke and another that places Miles’s face on the title character in the Terminator series.
In our March 10 service at UU Saratoga, we talked about the proliferation of deep fakes we’re certain to see when OpenAI concludes its “red-teaming” of Sora and decides it’s ready to introduce to the public.
Among the experts O'Brien interviews is A.I. pioneer Yoshua Bengio who has shifted his research to focus exclusively on threats posed to humankind by AI.
Also, Mustafa Suleyman, who describe strategies his team at DeepMind used to prepare their software to defeat the world's reigning champion in the Chinese board game, Go.
Suleyman is the author of The Coming Wave, in which he warns that we're approaching a critical threshold where the integration of AI in our daily lives, alongside advancements in quantum computing, synthetic biology, and more, will change everything.
"This wave promises immense prosperity but also threatens the very foundation of global order, challenging the nation-state system and posing existential dilemmas between achieving unprecedented advancements and facing the risk of overbearing surveillance and loss of control," he writes.
If unregulated, AI and synthetic biology will allow bad actors to unleash massive cyberattacks, engineered pandemics, and tidal waves of misinformation. Among steps Suleyman advocates to ensure that developers build appropriate controls into their technologies: regular audits, international cooperation to harmonize laws and programs, and slowing the pace of technological change that would buy time for regulators and governments to catch up.
