Learning the Unknown and How It Can Liberate Us
BY BRIAN OH
The life of a filmmaker hustling in New York City has recently taken me to where I’ve least expected it: working for a technology company as a videographer surrounded by experts in science.
I was born into a family of science — both my father and brother are scientists—but I was not born with the brain or the patience to grasp the world of science. No matter how many times they tried to explain to me what they did — and they tried many, many times around the dinner table with both scientific and simple terms—I could never answer the question, “What does your father do?” The best answer I could give was: “battery stuff.”
So when I was invited to join a production team in Pittsburgh as a cameraman to cover a story on Artificial Intelligence, called Libratus, I felt hesitant. I didn’t know what to expect. I was told a brilliant creation would be playing Texas Hold’em against four professional poker players, and that one of my main duties would be filming interviews with the scientists who created Libratus.
For days, I sat down and listened to their never-ending knowledge about AI. At first, I had to snap out of the illusion of an overlapping image of them and my two scientist family members. But to my surprise, I was able to pick up their language and decipher it little by little: in short, Libratus’ algorithm was built so that it could adapt to every single hand its opponents played — of course, without ever knowing what cards they held — betting on the best possible option to win each game. At length, it’s in the video we made, which is below, but what struck me about all of this is the possibility of broader applications: while Libratus was playing poker, he was designed with a level of adaptability that, if applied to other issues in human life, such as negotiations or medical researches, it could provide invaluable resources in finding solutions.
To be clear, I hadn’t turned into an AI advocate or expert after one gig, but learning about something that I wouldn’t have tried voluntarily taught me more valuable lessons than the knowledge itself.
I realized that my ignorance and the negative prejudice I harbored had created a sort of xenophobia towards this new high-tech being.
Through this realization, I understood something else: It wasn’t so much that I didn’t understand what my father and brother did, but that I had an unwillingness to be in a vulnerable situation. I had stayed away from AI with unease. In effect, it was a blind reflex caused by a lack of knowledge. But approaching, experiencing, and learning about the pseudo-beings firsthand helped me dissect this psychology of fear and, eventually, overcome it.
Fear of the unknown is a natural human instinct. To protect ourselves, we often choose to avoid the circumstances. There is no debate that the promises of AI’s are widely unpredictable, and that is terrifying. AI technology requires morally sound judgments on how we adapt it to our lives. This is why being informed is crucial: We need to protect ourselves from the risk of these technologies being misused. And I don’t mean by the scientists who are inventing them, but by the people with the money behind the scenes.
In our monopolistic economic system, only a few big corporations have access to these technologies, and they have swiftly started a competitive race in adapting themto their business models. But how much are we, the everyday consumer, able to gauge the morality of how corporations are using AI? Are we in safe hands? Whether we like it or not, an AI-driven world is going to happen sooner than we think. How to prepare and adapt is up to us.
Brian Oh was born in Illinois, USA, raised in South Korea and spent time living in Germany as a teenager. Dropping out of college in South Korea, he moved to Chicago to pursue his film studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Soon after graduating from the school, he moved to New York City and has worked on several short films, documentary, music videos and multi-media projects and shown his works to several screenings, exhibitions and public press. Influenced by his nomadic childhood, his work is personal with an emphasis on the psychological process of an artist and elements of the subconscious duality and origin. Currently, he is developing a few personal film projects, while working as a videographer/editor for a wide range of clientele.
