SHOW
Deus Ex Machina
Artificial intelligence. Digitalisation. Machine learning. Groan. So many buzzwords, so much disinformation, so much fake PR. Let's demystify them.
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More about the show
This Red Button EDU programme aims to illustrate the paradox of this literary term in everyday life and in relation to the technologies we’re most exposed to. AI is often seen as a magical silver bullet that will conjure solutions out of thin air and solve your problems, whether they lie in industry, healthcare, education, bureaucracy, or anywhere in between. But that’s not how it works. Due to overzealous investors, hyped media coverage, and the misleading anthropomorphic term ‘Artificial intelligence’, this set of statistical and analytical tools is set up to fail under current conditions because expectations are so poorly set. We’re not dealing with killer robots, black-box algorithms, sexist computers, or immoral machines. Instead, we have at our fingertips one of the most powerful analytical and data processing tools humanity has ever discovered. If we don’t use this blessing wisely, we’re doomed to remain stuck in a repetitive, stagnant dark age with no chance of surviving repeated crises like those of 2020. The status quo simply isn’t working, and AI can change that. Why isn’t it working? What’s preventing the technological revolution from becoming a reality for everyone, beyond the startup and tech elite of the metropolis?
AI is our future. AI is the next evolutionary stage. AI can truly help, and we can guide every single step of it. It’s not the Deus Ex Machina we so fear.
This content is being produced exclusively in English with Czech subtitles, in partnership with prg.ai.
Who will guide you through the show?
Sara Polak
Sara Polak spent almost a decade in the UK, first studying Archaeology and Cognitive Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford and then working in various technological startups, ranging from AI for museums and galleries to full scale digitalisation of global politics, working on approximately 50 high profile campaigns. Since 2019 she’s blissfully back in the Czech republic, where she has worked in exploring ways in which machine learning can help Industry 4.0, and since 2020 has become a ‘popularisator’ of AI, trying to push education, multidisciplinarity, and demystification of the technology wherever she goes. She does this primarily through prg.ai, and is also involved in the pAIoneers creative project as a part of Paralelni Polis.
She applies this ‘AI popularisation mantra’ for startups as a part of Startup Disrupt, and tries to push overall popularisation of science as a part of Science To Go. Sara fundamentally believes that technology, especially ‘AI’ is the key to creating a new socioeconomic system and imperative to fundamentally changing the way the individual and the state interact. Sara is a big fan of decentralisation, grassroots entrepreneurialism, and freedom through technology. She manifests this passion as a director of the czech.global project, which connects all Czechs in the world on one online platform, and has the ambition to create the first cloud nation in the world to demonstrate that this new system is truly possible. Sara loves her country, innovation, free multidisciplinary thinking, and finding connections and patterns in the beautiful chaos out there, and hopes to share the AI optimism she has with you through this Red Button EDU programme.