
Will Artificial Intelligence Save Us or Kill Us?
In Japan, Professor Yoshiyuki Sankai runs Cyberdyne, a company building AI-driven exoskeletons that help stroke victims and the elderly walk again. He talks on camera about a future where AI develops into a benevolent species living alongside humans. The film then cuts to Silicon Valley, where the mood is far less optimistic. Gabriel Mukobi, a Stanford computer science graduate student, is part of a small research community warning that unchecked AI development could end in human extinction, and the film follows his work trying to push safety research against an industry racing to ship products first. DW's Us & Them format sets these two positions against each other without picking a side, using interviews, lab footage, and demonstrations of the exoskeletons in action to ground the abstract debate about existential risk in something you can actually watch working. The result is a compact look at the gap between AI's practical medical benefits today and the darker predictions circulating among the people building it.