If there’s one thing that has been consistently a topic of conversation for the past few years — even as the world has been ravaged by a pandemic, wars, and economic collapses — it’s whether artificial intelligence, or AI, will take over our lives, our jobs, and our instincts.
AI is everywhere, literally and figuratively. Even social media applications that you might be using on a daily basis, like WhatsApp, have AI tools to help you look up things on the internet. For everything you search on Google, the first thing to pop up is a summary of articles on the subject, under a section called ‘AI Overview’, that the search-engine and tech giant introduced in May this year. The AI culture wars has been an exhaustively long debate on social media all of this year.
But more recently, Vikramaditya Motwane’s screenlife thriller, CTRL on Netflix starring Ananya Panday and Vihaan Samat, reignited the discussion around how harmful AI can be and how much it can invade our privacy and control our lives — if we aren’t conscious and cautious enough.
However, Motwane isn’t the first to bring this pertinent discussion to your screen. Over the years, many films, books, and podcasts have warned us adequately about the perils of artificial intelligence.
Books: Released in March of this year, Ben Angel’s The Wolf Is at the Door could work as a starting point for anyone who wants to learn about how AI is essentially reshaping our entire lives, online and offline. While the book’s main focus is on the job market and the economy, it also goes on to detail the threats that AI poses.
Another interesting book you can pick up is Joy Buolamwini’s Unmasking AI: My Mission To Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines. Buolamwini’s book exposes the many biases that AI tools have — from being discriminatory towards certain races and genders, to promoting exclusion in tech spaces.
Sinan Aral’s The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health-and How We Must Adapt is another book that takes a deep dive in the world of social media and how technology today is more polarising than we ever thought
it’d be. The author discusses how the social network today has consequences in every field possible – be it elections, our health, the business world, or even our kids.
Films: Would you believe that a 1999 Hollywood science-fiction film actually warned us of the perils of AI? The Matrix, made by Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski and starring Keanu Reeves, envisioned a simulated reality where artificial intelligence machines seek to suppress their creators. Though the world of the film is a clear exaggeration because of the genre, the messaging is still relevant — AI is useful, but you have to be cautious.
The 2020 American docu-drama The Social Dilemma is another film that grabbed a lot of eyeballs, and was a wake-up call for people about their online behaviour. While the film’s premise was based on how social media giants use our data to get us addicted to their platforms, it revealed just how much digital surveillance we are constantly under. The blatant invasion of our privacy, along with AI tools that these companies have at hand, is a money-minting business for them at our expense.
Interestingly, some part of Steven Spielberg’s 2002 thriller Minority Report has already come true. The film, based in 2054, where technology is being used to predict and prevent crimes talked of a world where the concept of privacy does not exist, where your eyes are being scanned and your every movement tracked wherever you go. We took it as sci-fi, but doesn’t it sound all too familiar now?
Podcasts: Digital strategist Jordan Wilson’s Everyday AI podcast is a guide for growing your business by using AI to your advantage. In daily episodes, the host talks about everything from chatbots to data streaming to AI’s impact on the workforce.
Tech journalist Paris Marx’s Tech Won’t Save Us is a weekly podcast that “examines how technological development is constrained by capitalist imperatives,” its website reads. The podcast dissects how technology and AI is being misused in powerful hands, and how separating it from politics has consequences that will have to be borne by all.
Produced by The New York Times and hosted by Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, Hard Fork is another podcast that delves into what AI has in store for us, what tech is already doing to us, and why we need to pay more attention to it than we are at the moment.
