How to create a new world?

We have to think of a new world. Planet Earth as we know it, with its ways of doing things, its labor system, its educational system, its way of dealing with health, and so many other things, has its days numbered.

I do not want, with this first paragraph, to alarm those on the other side. In fact, personally, what I have just written does not scare me as much as it excites me. And that is why I want to ask you, human, to try for a moment to remove our obvious pro-status quo bias to think about the world we live in.

Humans of the 21st century will probably be remembered in the history books of the future as those who had the difficult task of learning to live with computational intelligence. Or simply as poor fools. Human beings tend to be quite arrogant and unfair to our ancestors. Looking back, we tend to believe that everything was obvious and evident, and that those who did not realize what had to happen or what was already happening were naive, at best.

To those humans of the future but also to those of the present I want to say that today we have the incredible, but at the same time challenging task of think of new structures to organize our society while we are on top of a vehicle that is moving at 200 km/h and has no plans to stop anytime soon. We must change in motion.

In the last year, together with Augusto Salvatto and the team of Clarin Audiovisualwe were trying to lay the groundwork for a documentary about artificial intelligence. How naive! How can you document something that moves much faster than us?

In these 12 months of work we visited hospitals that perform surgery with robots and startups that work with technologies that are difficult to measure. We interviewed two dozen experts in education, the world of work, communication, technology. Technicians, disseminators, teachers, researchers. And all this with a warehouse where paper newspapers are printed in the south of the City of Buenos Aires as the operations bunker. You will be able to see it with your own eyes on the website of Clarion or whatever tool you use to watch videos at the time you find yourself in. That’s the reality of the 21st century: the combination of two worlds that will probably coexist for much longer. One is the world we know. A world that, although we know it already has large deficits to manage the present, is what is certain. What already exists.

But there is also another world: the one that is being built before our eyes. The world of invisible robots that cannot be distinguished from humans. The world of images and videos created synthetically with artificial intelligence. The world of terrifyingly predictive medicine. The world of screens… That world scares us and excites us. It worries us and occupies us. It both attracts us and repels us. But, as the Chinese say when they curse: I hope you live in interesting times. I hope so.

One of the questions we asked all interviewees systematically was What would you say to someone who might be watching this in 200 or 300 years? It was the only one that made most people doubt. You will see. It is very difficult for us humans to imagine the future. But what we can do in the present is change our perspective by asking ourselves more complex questions: Are our needs satisfied? Would we like to have better quality health? Would we like better nutrition levels? How can we make education take a leap forward in quality? Can we improve our institutions?

Partly because of all this is why we decided to work on this documentary. To tell the humans of the present what is happening and what is coming. But fundamentally to tell the humans of the future the dilemmas we have when thinking about the world they will inhabit. To ask them to be kind when judging us. To understand why we do what we do and think what we think. To warn them that what happens to us will also happen to you.

Each chapter of the documentary will address a question that we ask ourselves in this interesting and turbulent present:

Are robots going to replace us?

How are we going to educate ourselves in times of AI?

Will there be hospitals and doctors in the healthcare of the future?

Are machines going to rule us?

What are the risks of incorporating artificial intelligence into our lives?

I hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed making it.