iHUMAN: The Time is Coming

Photo courtesy of IDFA: iHUMAN

This timely documentary explores the moral implications of a world that is seeing one of the greatest leaps in human progress which is also considered by some to be perhaps one of the most dangerous events in human history. Either way you look at it, humanity is rapidly moving forward into a brave new world where artificial intelligence may be our saving grace or our demise. 

Norwegian female filmmaker Tonje Hessen Schei brings many questions to the table in this provocative film. She explores areas such as China's social credit system and the affect on the Muslim population in a particular region of China to Trump's social media campaign launched by Cambridge Analytica, to facial recognition software and down the rabbit hole of Deepfake, where deep learning and artificial intelligence can create new images and videos featuring real people such as celebrities to generate fake news and information and make it look deceptively real. 

GILLES SABRIE/THE NEW YORK TIM​ES/REDUX

The film explores the rise and application of mass surveillance technology in China and its use on vulnerable populations such as Turkic Muslims which appear to be specifically targeted by the Chinese government and China's controversial political re-education campaigns in Xinjiang for Muslim citizens who don't fall in line with the government's agenda for its citizens. 

The film also introduces us to Elon Musk's brainchild OpenAI, a research facility in San Francisco dedicated to researching and developing AI that will be beneficial to all humanity. The mission statement on the website says, "our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The OpenAI  Charter describes the principles that guide us as we execute our mission." 

In the film we meet Jack Poulson, a whistleblower from Google who discusses the frightening implications of Google's secret Project Dragonfly, a collaborative effort that Google launched to work with the Chinese government and provide a censored engine that could have wide moral and social implications for human freedom and accessibility of information. Poulson, who resigned from his position at Google, said that the tech giant neglected to respond to human rights organizations about the project. 

The film opens up interesting moral and existential questions about what it means to be a human and whether or not our definition of humanity will be re-defined by the autonomous machines of the coming future. 

From iHUMAN