In the Age of AI (full documentary) | FRONTLINE

13:54

“China is the best place for AI implementation today, because of the vast amount of data that’s available in China. China has a lot more users than any other country, three to four times more than the U.S. There are 50 times more mobile payments than the U.S. There are ten times more food deliveries, which serve as data to learn more about user behavior than the U.S. 300 times more shared bicycle rides, and each shared bicycle ride has all kinds of sensors submitting data up to the cloud. We’re talking about maybe ten times more data than the U.S., and AI is basically run on data and fueled by data. The more data, the better the AI works, more importantly than how brilliant the researcher is working on the problem. So, in the age of AI, where data is the new oil, China is the new Saudi Arabia.”

1:48:22

“So if one has to say who’s ahead, I would say today, China is quickly catching up. China actually began its big push in AI only two and a half years ago, when the AlphaGo-Lee Sedol match became the Sputnik moment.”

Since this is created for the non-thinking Western population (Orwellian proles), we need to scare them with China trying to achieve AI at the beginning of the video. Our Western population doesn’t think, so we don’t have to worry about them connecting the inconsistency of saying we should be scared of China AI at the beginning of the video and at the end admitting China is catching up. In other words, scrambling to catch up to the West in the AI department. China has a lot of data and our INTERNATIONAL CORPORATION HAVE INTERNATIONAL DATA SO FROM WHOLE WORLD.

What they forget to mention is that for people who are aware of what is happening in the world, remember one man called Snowden. People may not remember, but what Snowden basically proved is that the CIA and NSA, under program PRISM, recorded everything that was happening on the internet, which in other words was a HUGE AMOUNT OF DATA. I am sure they feed all that data to their AI.

25:28

“There are many aspects of the world which we can’t explain with words. And that part of our knowledge is actually probably the majority of it. So, like, the stuff we can communicate verbally is the tip of the iceberg. And so to get at the bottom of the iceberg, the solution was, the computers have to acquire that knowledge by themselves from data, from examples. Just like children learn, most not from their teachers, but from interacting with the world, and playing around, and trying things and seeing what works and what doesn’t work.”

“This is an early demonstration. DeepMind In 2013, DeepMind scientists set a machine-learning program on the Atari video game Breakout. The computer was only told the goal– to win the game. After 100 games, it learned to use the bat at the bottom to hit the ball and break the bricks at the top. After 300, it could do that better than a human player. After 500 games, it came up with a creative way to win the game– by digging a tunnel on the side and sending the ball around the top to break many bricks with one hit. That was deep learning. That’s the AI program based on learning, really, that has been so successful in the last few years and has… It wasn’t clear ten years ago that it would work, but it has completely changed the map and is now used in almost every sector of society.”

48:28

So, over the history of many tech inventions, most are small things. Only maybe three are at the magnitude of the AI revolution– the steam engine, electricity, and the computer revolution. I’d say everything else is too small. And the reason I think it might be something brand-new is that AI is fundamentally replacing our cognitive process in doing a job in its significant entirety, and it can do it dramatically better.”

And finally Shoshana Zuboff, which in videos of her I posted:

Surveillance Capitalism “…they have been engineered to be indecipherable to be undetectable to create ignorance in a vast group of all of us that they call users. Our ignorance is their bliss”

In this video, she describes the wonderfully untold story of Google. I was a huge fan of Google with their motto “Don’t be evil” but when they changed it and I found out the truth about them, I started to hate them.

1:09:09

“So, famously, industrial capitalism claimed nature. Innocent rivers, and meadows, and forests, and so forth, for the market dynamic to be reborn as real estate, as land that could be sold and purchased. Industrial capitalism claimed work for the market dynamic to be reborn as labor that could be sold and purchased. Now, here comes surveillance capitalism, following this pattern, but with a dark and startling twist. What surveillance capitalism claims is private, human experience. Private, human experience is claimed as a free source of raw material, fabricated into predictions of human behavior. And it turns out that there are a lot of businesses that really want to know what we will do now, soon, and later.”

1:13:25

it turns out that whenever we search or browse, we’re leaving behind traces– digital traces– of our behavior. And those traces, back in these days, were called digital exhaust.”

“They realized how valuable this data could be by applying machine learning algorithms to predict users’ interests.”

“What happened was, they decided to turn to those data logs in a systematic way, and to begin to use these surplus data as a way to come up with fine-grained predictions of what a user would click on, what kind of ad a user would click on. And inside Google, they started seeing these revenues pile up at a startling rate. They realized that they had to keep it secret. They didn’t want anyone to know how much money they were making, or how they were making it. Because users had no idea that this extra-behavioral data that told so much about them, you know, was just out there, and now it was being used to predict their future.”

“And it was only when Google went public in 2004 that the numbers were released. And it’s at that point that we learn that between the year 2000 and the year 2004, Google’s revenue line increased by 3,590%.”

1:18:13

“In 2010, Facebook experimented with AI’s predictive powers in what they called a ‘social contagion’ experiment. They wanted to see if, through online messaging, they could influence real-world behavior. The aim was to get more people to the polls in the 2010 midterm elections.”

“They offered 61 million users an ‘I voted’ button together with faces of friends who had voted. A subset of users received just the button. In the end, they claimed to have nudged 340,000 people to vote. They would conduct other ‘massive contagion’ experiments. Among them, one showing that by adjusting their feeds, they could make users happy or sad.”

“When they went to write up these findings, they boasted about two things. One was, ‘Oh, my goodness. Now we know that we can use cues in the online environment to change real-world behavior. That’s big news.’ The second thing that they understood, and they celebrated, was that, ‘We can do this in a way that bypasses the users’ awareness.’”

Of course, since it’s Western propaganda, they had to talk about the Uyghurs. Anyway, this was recorded before the AI renaissance that took place in the last two and a half years with the LLM revolution. Since then, there have been huge achievements in AI. People don’t understand that, but people who work on AI know that. That’s why in the last post i quoted:

“I talked with Hinton over the weekend. He said that he became more bullish as he watched the progress happening within OpenAI. The more bullish he became about superintelligence coming soon, the more he started to think about the existential threats of AI. He started to ally himself with the existential risk doomer camp within the company to hammer home that point.”

You can see it also by Nvidia stocks. People who understand what is happening are investing in Nvidia since their services and hardware fuel AIs like, for example, OpenAI.