Parents' Guide to

Do You Trust This Computer?

By Jeffrey Anderson, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 13+

Docu about machines taking over has scares, not solutions.

Movie NR 2018 78 minutes
Do You Trust This Computer? Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

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age 14+

Based on 3 parent reviews

TCEdu
TCEdu Parent of 6 and 12-year-old
February 25, 2023
age 18+

Misinforms and creates fear that will set kids back

Skepticism of AI is very healthy. But the "experts" in this are way outside the mainstream when it comes to expertise about AI. (Just google them and see for yourself how they are viewed by their peers.) It's a real shame because society should be better educated about this important topic, but this goes in the wrong direction. I rated it 18+ because I think this confuses kids more than it teaches. AI is a technology that will be a big part of their lives. They deserve better edu than this.
eroark
eroark Adult
August 31, 2018
age 12+

AI will eventually destroy the world

Do You Trust This Computer? is a spell binding documentary telling the tale of the rise of AI and what it could do to the human race and industries. As they state in the documentary, for every 1 job that a robot takes, it is replacing three human workers. How in the long run are people going to make a living to pay the things that they are needing on a daily basis to live? In a short while by going through more and more with AI, there is going to be robots running everything that we do now on a daily basis. We are honestly moving too fast in the world in order to sustain this change, as one day it will come back to haunt us in ways that we are not seeing or wanting to see at the moment.

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What's the Story?

In DO YOU TRUST THIS COMPUTER? experts discuss the wide-ranging impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and the possible downsides to its meteoric rise. Google, for example, no longer simply provides search results; it catalogs each user's searches and guesses their preferences. Today, computers are used in war and in medicine, and computers have even beaten humans at complicated games like chess and Go. The film discusses AI's involvement in Facebook and "fake news" feeds and its possible role in elections. One interviewee warns that AI could become something like an immortal dictator, from under which we can never escape. Another says that we're a slave to the technology "because we can't go back."

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say: (3):
Kids say: Not yet rated

This documentary covers a wide array of examples of the potentially scary downside of artificial intelligence, none particularly in depth but with enough ingenuity to cause alarm. Director Chris Paine (Who Killed the Electric Car?) jumps back and forth between an array of experts, including Elon Musk, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times technology journalist John Markoff, and filmmaker Jonathan Nolan (Memento, Westworld, etc.), capturing moments of both wonder and horror. Robots do incredible things, but they quickly surpass what they were intended to do. Do You Trust This Computer?'s picture occasionally twitches and glitches out to illustrate how scary these things are.

For example: A machine that helps a doctor with routine surgeries seems amazing ... until the doctor admits that he can't remember how to do the surgery himself. And a lifelike robot seems amazing ... until it suddenly seems creepy. To underline its point, the movie includes a wealth of footage from movies that have warned us about computers taking over the world, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Terminator 2, The Matrix, and Ex Machina. It's all quite frightening, almost gleefully so, but the movie doesn't offer solutions to balance out the fear, nor does it offer any kind of positive upswing. If you see this film and the machines do eventually take over, your only satisfaction will be a spirited "I told you so."

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about Do You Trust This Computer?'s use of violence. How do the news images and movie clips heighten the tension of the movie's message?

  • Do you agree with the movie? Do you believe that computers will eventually take over? Did watching make you more concerned about your privacy?

  • Did the movie scare you? What's the appeal of "doom and gloom" documentaries?

  • What, if anything, does the movie recommend doing about the situation it describes? What do you think you can do?

Movie Details

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