What Does Artificial Intelligence Think About?

RT (2024)

Film Review

https://en.rtdoc.tv/episodes/1398-what-does-artificial-intelligence-think-about-rtd

Aimed at dispelling fears of AI, this film begins by reviewing Russian uses of AI, which date back to the 1960s. First used by the military to launch rockets, Russians also use it to manage traffic congestion (by timing stoplights), to run machinery in numerous industries, (in combination with facial recognition) to deduct metro fares from people’s bank accounts and identify unauthorized strangers in schools, to improve pilot performance, to perform automated radiology assessments, to run robots that can neatly suture wounds, and to predict brain disease in children.

According AI scientists interviewed in the film, the technology employs artificial “neural networks” to enable computers to reproduce simple brain activities. After loading a few basic algorithms, AI engineers expose AI applications with multiple paired problem/solutions to teach them to teach them to produce correct answers on their own.

After superficially addressing common fears that AI will make people stupid, take over their jobs and create an über class of technicians who will use AI control us, it makes a number of assertions about tasks AI can perform better (more accurately) than human beings:

• flying airplanes
• reading xrays
• making neater sutures (ie driving a robot that makes neater sutures).
• processing bank transactions
• teaching kids (I strongly dispute this, given decades of neurophysiological research documenting the role of positive relationships in effective learning)
• copywriting (which I also dispute after reading all the shoddy writing ChatGPT spits out)

The filmmakers predict that soon AI will replace junior accountants and stock keepers, as well as producing video and audio content. At present China is experimenting with using TV presenters with AI-created personalities.

The film cites the WEF figures that AI will put 85 million people out of work by 2035 and force them to retrain or be pensioned off on a government-controlled Universal Basic Income.

It also references a 5-month Hollywood screenwriters strike in 2023 over protections against AI taking their jobs. They went back to work after the studios agreed that no living screenwriters would be used to train AI and that AI wouldn’t be used in writing “treatments.”*

The film also includes a section on AI being used in China’s 800 million security cameras to run China’s social credit system. This is pure propaganda. The main use of “social credit” in China is by private businesses to analyze credit worthiness. A few small towns have rolled out “social credit” systems monitoring antisocial behavior (such as jaywalking) but no social credit system has ever been adopted nationwide – or even province-wide – in China.**

US, China and Russia are roughly equal in their AI development. There is always a risk people will use it for nefarious purposes (ie to enslave people), but as the filmmakers point out, all it takes to bring down an AI system is “a janitor with a wet mop.”

*A film treatment is a summary of a film or television show. It should communicate all of the essential scenes, themes, and tone of the project to entice or pitch to buyers and producers into reading, developing, or even purchasing your idea.

**See https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/22/1063605/china-announced-a-new-social-credit-law-what-does-it-mean/