iHuman
Project Maven was a confidential undertaking between the U.S Department of Defense and tech giant, Google. The project saw Google heading up the artificial intelligence branch of DOD, working on a way to integrate AI into the practise of drone strikes. The fact that Google, a company who made its billions through Internet-related services, had decided to secretly go into the business of war, resulted in a huge backlash, especially with their own employees. It is one prodigious example of how the technology behind AI is controlled by a small percentage of companies, and this is one story that iHuman explores.
Norwegian director, Tonje Hessen Schei, has crafted a documentary film that explores the purpose of AI, but also seeks answers as to how it can be controlled and utilised. Schei doesn’t serve as an on-screen host but instead relies on interviews to delve into the concept behind the technology. The conceptualisation of AI is easily broken down by some of the world’s leading experts and scientists, including computer scientist, Jürgen Schmidhuber and OpenAI’s Ilya Sutskever. They break it down into layman’s terms by explaining how prominent AI already is in our everyday lives.
Some examples are familiar. In a way, iHuman feels like a matured version of Netflix’s recent offering, The Social Dilemma. Lots of similar points are covered across both documentaries, but iHuman goes further and explores how technology could advance. The documentary also offers up potential examples of how the future could incorporate AI, the concept of predictive policing being one such topic.
Predictive policing is the use of data and statistics run through an algorithm which determines the best place to deploy police officers. This is a common routine used in the United States, already. However, Schei shines a light on its potential future use by examining how predictive policing was, and is, being used in Xinjiang – a small district in China. Citizens of Xinjiang who have the suspected potential to cause dissent are taken unethically to political re-education camps in what is a terrifying example of the reach of a surveillance state. The increasingly familiar politicised use of technology and AI is one of the documentary’s more intriguing elements, with it also briefly touching on the elections of Trump and Bolsonaro.
The information here is often enough to raise an eyebrow. However, the form in which it is presented lacks. iHuman is an interesting documentary, but an often unstimulating one. Most of what is shown on screen is simply swathes of beautifully shot landscape and, with the parallels of what is being talked about overlapping these images. it struggles to draw together the point.
iHuman attempts to seek an unbiased opinion on the future of artificial technology and how it will affect the world. What is promising is that many of the minds and scientists working on furthering this technology seem to be in it for the good of humankind. However, the film’s ultimate message is clear: the same technology could be used to create a dictatorship-led dystopia that would result in a bleak and unwanted future.