Arte currently offers on arte.tv the Norwegian documentary “iHuman – Artificial Intelligence and Us”, by Tonje Hessen Schei. It raises the question of the replacement of humanity by artificial intelligence by taking the measure of the influence of algorithms on our lives and gives the floor to many researchers, sociologists, human rights lawyers, scientists or investigative journalists, supporters or not of artificial intelligence and its omnipotence.

Presentation of the documentary: “The creation of an artificial intelligence would be the greatest event in the history of mankind. But it could also be the last,” said Stephen Hawking. The famous cosmologist had predicted the infinite growth of computer science but shared with some pioneers the fear that it would become uncontrollable. Today, AI promises to help cure diseases, cope with climate change or fight poverty. But it also threatens to insidiously influence our behaviour, to undermine the very idea of privacy or to help dictatorships gain power. With algorithmic surveillance, our identity can now be reduced to… data.

The AI will soon be overwhelmed. Today we speak of a General Artificial Intelligence (GIA), capable of adapting and learning on its own, which would equal or even surpass human capabilities. Enough to attract firms that trade in digital data (the famous Gafam). The documentary takes stock of the current state of AI by giving the floor to those who debate it (sociologists, human rights lawyers, scientists or investigative journalists) but also to those who invent it, such as Jürgen Schmidhuber and Ilya Sutskever, two great researchers and initiators, with an ambivalent stance: aware of the omnipotence of their creation but determined to continue their work.

Documentary by Tonje Hessen Schei (Norway, 2019, 1h36mn)

Translated from Replay : “iHuman – L’intelligence artificielle et nous” de Tonje Hessen Schei