Dataland: The evolution of artificial intelligence and big data

Filmmaker: Blaise Piguet

Loyalty cards, medical records, geolocation, biometric passports. Our digital traces speak volumes about our habits.

The large volume of data recorded during each of our visits to the internet represents a great opportunity for personalisation, but the information we distil is also widely used for commercial purposes and can be used by governments as an invasive tool.

Dataland illustrates the different facets of big data and artificial intelligence being unleashed by the world’s most prolific data scientists. The film goes to Dublin where artificial intelligence is becoming an increasing influence on community life; to Finland where citizens transmit their DNA to improve public health and predictive medicine; and finally to China where facial recognition is routinely used by the state to track the movement, habits and private lives of common people.

But we are just scratching the surface of AI’s capabilities. This film explores a number of different issues and provides us with a basic understanding of how it works and where it might lead.