“Since his appearance on earth, human beings have dreamed of creating and living other lives. Finally, that dream is close. The capabilities of our brain are being replicated by computers. Today humanity has an alter ego.” With a postulate between science fiction and current events, this Tuesday begins a journey in three chapters through the present and the future of the most talked about, but also most unknown, topic of the current conversation: artificial intelligence.
The RTVE journalist Almudena Ariza and the reporter and YouTuber Carles Tamayo put on white and red suits to fully immerse themselves in the subject with the greatest experts on the planet, she from the utopian point of view; him, from the dystopian. The Cobi from Barcelona’92 who smiles from Tamayo’s shirt marks the first contrast of the documentary series Alter ego. The invisible intelligence, which begins its journey on the RTVE Play platform. The two presenters speak to the camera from a scenario created with the artificial intelligence that they will analyze. The aesthetics of this documentary series are, almost, another character.
The RTVE Play team had been mulling over the idea of designing a documentary that would address new technological challenges for months, and the emergence of ChatGPT into everyone’s lives provided them with the key they were looking for. “I use it myself to cook, I ask personal questions, it helps me translate texts,” admits Beatriz Pérez de Vargas, creator, director and executive producer of Alter ego. The invisible intelligence, “once the surprise effect had passed, I began to delve deeper into articles by different eminences and priests of AI, some quite catastrophic, and I decided to address all these points of view.”
Almudena Ariza, eternal correspondent now back in Spain, was also no stranger to artificial intelligence. She even, she says, has taken some training courses on the subject. “It is a fascinating topic but I admit that it generated some fear and concern in me, so I chose the bright, optimistic path,” she says. After filming, she has a clearer vision of the matter: “My journey has been hopeful, as long as some regulatory requirements are met, such as that the technology is always controlled by people.”
Tamayo’s path, on the other hand, is much less rosy, and focuses mainly on who will dominate the machine: “It is a potential risk for humanity, but all the paths to a great world pass through there,” sums up the general sentiment. Nick Bostrom, Swedish philosopher at the University of Oxford. “There is a race to take control of AI, and whoever masters AI will dominate the world,” adds telecommunications engineer Nuria Oliver.
“Technology, like life itself, is neither black nor white. Grays abound,” Pérez de Vargas emphasizes, “so the goal is for the viewer to draw their own conclusions, but it is essential that we begin to be informed and demand policies that they defend us as citizens.” In addition to two scenarios, more and less hopeful, the documentary divides the reflection into three chapters: the present time, the future of work in five years and the geopolitical outcome in a decade.
“We are not aware of the number of interests that exist around artificial intelligence, but we do have one certainty: it is something that we, human beings, have created,” says the director, “we have time to generate ethical algorithms that produce a greater global well-being. We are responsible for its use and its implementation and we are all, not just a select few.