Post #10

 Post #10 

Living in the age of AI

    Frontline's In the Age of AI is an amazing piece of investigative journalism, both inspiring and unsettling. Being an MPE major, I was particularly blown away by sheer production effort that went into creating a timely, hour-long, visually rich documentary dissecting such a massive subject within weeks. But apart from the technical competence, the content itself was stimulating and provoking.

    The second hour of the documentary delves into the double-edged nature of Artificial Intelligence. On the positive side, the potential rewards are immense. AI is already helping doctors diagnose disease with greater accuracy, making supply chains more efficient, and even combat climate change by processing enormous amounts of information. All these advances could change human life in a radical way, making everything from transportation to education more effective and personalized.

    But the dark side is chilling. One of the most powerful things to me was the way the AI is being used to conduct wholesale surveillance, particularly in China. The idea that social scoring and facial recognition systems can track all the steps a person makes is profoundly dehumanizing. It raises extremely urgent questions about privacy how much of our private data really is under our control, and who does it belong to?

    Another concern the documentary raised is national security. AI is not just clever assistants or better Google searches it's also about cyber warfare, deepfakes, and even deadly autonomous weapons. As countries compete to outdo each other in an AI race, the risk of abuse becomes a higher likelihood. That race could become a new kind of arms race, one that is unregulated or morally defined.

    Online security and identity theft are on the increase as well. The more advanced AI technology gets, the more advanced the cybercriminals get. Identity theft is not just stolen credit card information anymore it can be performed using deepfake videos, AI-assisted phishing attacks with AI-synthesized messages, and AI-assisted manipulation of the public narrative. That was a truly terrifying take-home point for me.

    All this being said, I appreciated the even tone of the documentary. It didn't paint AI as either completely good or evil it portrayed the technology itself as being neutral. The question is what we do with it, how we build and command it. We're only in the first chapters of this era of AI, and the choices we're making today will shape the world for decades to come.

    My biggest question mark is: Who decides where AI leads? And how do we ensure that the people making those decisions are acting for the good of humanity?