Director
Professor Jim Al-Khalili looks at how we have created machines that can simulate, augment, and even outperform the human mind - and why we shouldn't let this spook us. He reveals the story of the pursuit of AI, the emergence of machine learning and the recent breakthroughs brought about by artificial neural networks. He shows how AI is not only changing our world but also challenging our very ideas of intelligence and consciousness. Along the way, we'll investigate spam filters, meet a cutting-edge chatbot, look at why a few altered pixels makes a computer think it's looking at a trombone rather than a dog and talk to Demis Hassabis, who heads DeepMind and whose stated mission is to 'solve intelligence, and then use that to solve everything else'. Stephen Hawking remarked 'AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilisation. Or the worst'. Jim argues that AI is a potent new tool that should enhance our lives, not replace us.
Researcher
The film presents compelling evidence that Altlantis wasn't so far away after all, but what it omits is just as compelling. Although Plato’s account of Atlantian masonry, consisting of red, white and black stones, was a visually perfect match for the modern walls of the Minoan excavation site favored by the film, and his account of a sea made impassable by small islands of mud could, in fact, be a description of the rafts of pumice left by the catastrophic eruption of an ancient volcano there, little mention is made of Plato's specific account of where Atlantis was or the common root that links Atlantis to the Atlantic ocean. Also omitted is Plato's chronology placing the sinking of Atlantis in the same time frame as the end of the last ice age which caused the inundation of huge expanses of once fertile lands. Is "Atlantis: The Evidence" a thinly disguised example of Eurocentrism in the media? Watch Discovery: Atlantis for a more comprehensive view on an age-old debate.
