The documentary "Intelligent Age" | Questions about the future of the world and mankind

At a time when ChatGPT is stirring up discussions, people are paying unprecedented attention to artificial intelligence. The advent of an era of powerful intelligence is a curse or a blessing for mankind? When there was a lot of disagreement, some panicked, others eagerly embraced. Where do people go and where do they find authoritative answers? This is the question of our time that concerns the whole world and everyone. Recently, the large-scale documentary "Intelligent Era" broadcast by CCTV gave a timely and authoritative answer: the origin of "intelligence", scientific and technological innovation, impact on people, urban evolution, technological risks, future opportunities... The documentary progresses step by step and deepens, leading the audience to start the exploration and ideological journey of artificial intelligence.

Demonstrate cultural confidence with a "global perspective"

The most distinctive feature of "Intelligent Age" is that the work has a "global vision", always based on the global context, absorbing the views of the world's top experts, and promoting open dialogue in the field of cutting-edge science and technology. The work stands at the height of the future well-being of all mankind, searching for the latest technological development trends and absorbing and analyzing the most typical cases. "Intelligent Age" gathers the views of more than 100 top experts in related fields from different countries and regions around the world, shows the development trend of intelligent technology in the world, and opens up the international vision of cognitive intelligence technology for the audience.

On the one hand, Smart Times continues to track the development of cutting-edge technology. The main creative team goes deep into Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan and other regions and countries, and does its best to present advanced cases at home and abroad. In City Vision, London's Recycling Eye combines a visual identity system with a robotic arm to reduce the operating costs of waste disposal by 60%. Shanghai's fully automated metro system has increased the speed of Line 10 by 13.4% and reduced the average turnback time by 60 seconds. The daily application of practical cases of artificial intelligence at home and abroad has brought the mysterious "artificial intelligence" into the public's life. On the other hand, "Intelligent Era" creates an open communication space with multiple perspectives, and the experts interviewed by the program team constitute a "ceiling" lineup in the international field of artificial intelligence, including academicians, professors from world-class universities, experts from global high-end technology companies, scientific advisors to the movie "The Wandering Earth", and Zhihu Big V. These experts collided their views from different dimensions, forming a "discussion" field, which also triggered the interaction and thinking of the audience. The global vision and open structure of "Intelligent Era" reflect the vision pattern and cultural confidence of the national mainstream media "thinking of the world".

Examine the development of science and technology from a "humanistic perspective"

"Intelligent Age" not only looks back at history but also looks at the present, connects the historical context of the development of intelligent technology, outlines the development picture of artificial intelligence technology, and builds a complete and systematic narrative time and space. While explaining intelligent technology scientifically, objectively and in detail, the work always adheres to the core concept of "people are the scale of technology", faces the public's deep anxiety about hidden dangers and potential dangers of technology, and depicts the civilizational prospect of "human-machine collaboration" in the era of intelligent media.

Starting from tracing the origin of "intelligence", "Intelligent Age" adheres to the original intention of "understanding science and technology from the perspective of history and forward-looking development from the perspective of science and technology", retracing the course of successive scientific and technological revolutions to promote the progress of human history, and unveiling the mystery and essential characteristics of "intelligence". The "dowry list" engraved on the Chinese Miao song stick retains the mystery of information recording and transmission to promote the evolution of intelligence; In 1971, Intel Corporation introduced the world's first microprocessor, which ushered in a series of far-reaching technological innovations; The 2016 human-machine Go game held in Seoul, South Korea refreshed people's cognition of artificial intelligence... "Intelligent Era" takes the audience through the history, reality and future of intelligent technology, always running through a core concept: science and technology should be people-oriented.

The whole film of "Intelligent Age" always asks implicitly: What has technology changed and what has it brought to mankind? When machines have "people" and "wisdom", can and how should humans face and respond? For example, Michael Wooldrich, chair of the computer science department at the University of Oxford, argues that computer programs help doctors identify human lesions in images, giving doctors more time to "understand and make emotional connections with patients," so many of the jobs of "doctors" are impossible to replace by AI. In addition, the in-depth discussion of privacy leakage and other issues in "Intelligent Era" is also based on the thinking of the main position of "people". The documentary does not simply give a conclusion, but leads the audience to think about the development of "people" themselves in the intelligent era.

Optimize the communication effect with "skill integration"

The difficulty of creating documentaries on the theme of science and technology lies in not only popularizing professional knowledge to the audience, but also seeking breakthroughs in audiovisual language and opening up a unique path in terms of fun. "Intelligent Era" takes into account both technical and artistic aspects of production, embodies a "sense of technology" in visual symbols and creates a "sense of network" in the commentary tone, and has won praise from the audience with a different audio-visual experience.

The "sense of technology" of "Intelligent Era" not only runs through the content of the program, but also shows the meticulous carving of the details of the picture. In "AI Breakthrough", Charles Babbage's autobiography, retold by AI, uses artificial intelligence speech synthesis technology to reproduce the voice of the inventor 150 years ago, vividly showing the "ability" of artificial intelligence technology to reproduce history. For another example, the subtitles such as the location in the film and the introduction of the interview characters are in the form of "computer string generation", which is both novel and unique and in line with the tonality of the work, which shows the ingenuity of the main creative team's grasp of the details. The documentary also incorporates cartoon comics, hand-drawn images and other picture elements, making the original boring and rigid scientific and technological content display, principle analysis, etc. vivid, so that the hardcore logic of artificial intelligence technology is close to the audience's life, creating a professional, interesting and story-based audio-visual experience.

In the media communication ecology, "Intelligent Era" has carried out targeted optimization processing in the content structure, and its 50-minute whole film is composed of three to four minute short films in series, each episode is not only a whole that closely follows the theme and has internal logic, but also facilitates accurate distribution in the form of a single short video on other new media platforms, reflecting the "intelligent communication" of the "intelligent era". It is thanks to this that "Intelligent Era" continues to exert force on the small screen while being broadcast on the large TV screen, attracting round after round of attention. As of early June, the Weibo-related topics of "Intelligent Era" have been read more than 300 million, the main topic "Documentary Intelligent Era" has been read more than 150 million, and "When did you realize that artificial intelligence has intervened in life" has landed on the Weibo news list. The interactive communication of large screens and small screens has continuously fermented the topic of the "intelligent era" and continued to expand the communication effect.

Since CCTV broadcast the 10-episode documentary "Internet Era" in 2014, "Intelligent Era" was launched in time after 9 years, which is an active response to the changes of the times driven by technology. In particular, "Intelligent Era" is guided by national scientific research institutions to ensure the authority and accuracy of cutting-edge knowledge in professional fields, and with the help of vivid images, the public is both "understandable" and full of interest, realizing the public science popularization of in-depth cooperation between media people and professionals. "Intelligent Era" embodies the core concept of "thought + art + technology" of CCTV, and fully demonstrates that the media can not only provide entertainment, but also climb the peak of ideas. "Intelligent Age" answers the "questions of the times, the world, and mankind" from the perspective of "the era watcher", which is undoubtedly a self-challenge of the TV media, reflecting the mission of the media to lead the mind, and has a benchmarking significance beyond the work itself.

Author|Gu Yaqi: Professor of Chinese Minmin University and Deputy Dean of the School of Arts