
In the Age of AI
FRONTLINE examines how artificial intelligence is reshaping work, privacy, and global power. The film opens on Foxconn's Chinese factories, where robots are replacing assembly-line workers, then follows displaced laborers in Youngstown, Ohio, trying to retrain for jobs that may not exist. Interviews with AI researchers, tech executives, and policymakers lay out how machine learning systems already sort job applicants, set prison sentences, and target advertising, often without the people affected understanding why. In China, the cameras show a surveillance state built on facial recognition and social-credit scoring, presented by officials as a tool for order and by critics as a template for control. Silicon Valley engineers describe the same techniques used to keep users scrolling and voters targeted with disinformation. The film tracks the US-China competition to dominate AI research as a race with few agreed rules, and closes on the open question of who sets limits on a technology already running ahead of the laws meant to govern it.