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SocietyGlobal issues

Artificial intelligence and human identity

September 23, 2023

Creativity. Emotions. Artificial intelligence is pushing further and further into primal human domains. The existential question arises: What actually makes us what we are, when the uniqueness of the human being is challenged?

https://p.dw.com/p/4WioE

For millennia, we humans saw ourselves as the pinnacle of creation, because only we could create art, talk to each other, play chess, throw bombs, vacuum the apartment and so on. But artificial intelligence and robots are increasingly making our apparent uniqueness pale in significance. What, if anything, makes humans unique? Can a computer be creative? And what does it mean for our society when we can no longer tell if we are communicating with a human being or with an artificial intelligence? After all, algorithms can determine our consumer behavior, write volumes of love poems, diagnose cancer, control weapons systems in war and drive cars. Filmmaker Volker Strübing explores the relationship between humans and robots. Together with his AI named Thekla, he focuses on core values: What does the simulation of empathy or love mean? Why do we question the validity of a work of art, the moment we learn it was created by a machine? The documentary "I Compute, Therefore I Am" examines which areas we are willing to leave to an AI - and which we feel should belong exclusively to humans.

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