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NOVA Wonders: Can We Build A Brain? 1x53

Artificially intelligent machines are taking over—influencing our everyday lives in profound and often invisible ways. They can read handwriting, interpret emotions, play games and even act as personal assistants. They are in our phones, our cars, our doctors’ offices, our banks, our web searches…. The list goes on and is rapidly growing ever longer. But how does today’s A.I. actually work and is it truly intelligent? And for that matter, what is intelligence? The world’s brightest computer programmers are trying to build brighter machines by reverse-engineering the brain and by inventing completely new kinds of computers, with exponentially greater speed and processing power. NOVA Wonders looks at how far we’ve come and where machines are headed as their software becomes ever more…cerebral. If we place more and more of our lives under the control of these artificial brains, what are we putting at risk?

See the other episodes in Season 1 here: “What Are Animals Saying?”; “What’s Living In You?”; “Are We Alone?”; “Can We Make Life?”; “What’s The Universe Made Of?