🤖🎬 J.Lo's AI thriller, 'Atlas,' is an important Up Wing film. Really.

Millions of Netflix subscribers have been exposed to a couple of insightful, pro-progress ideas about artificial intelligence

Jennifer Lopez as “Atlas Shepherd,” inside her AI-enabled mecha suit, in Atlas

Atlas, the new sci-fi action film on Netflix starring Jennifer Lopez, isn’t going to win any Emmys or Oscars or whatever awards they give for streamers. Over at Rotten Tomatoes, only 19 percent of film critics have given Atlas a positive review so far, and just 46 percent of regular moviegoers rate it 3.5 stars or higher out of five. 

But let’s be real: I doubt anyone deciding to chill to a story of J.Lo as an elite counterterrorism analyst who teams up with an artificially intelligent mech-suit to hunt down an evil AI robot and stop it from destroying humanity was expecting, you know, Dune-quality cinema. I watched Atlas over the weekend and — considered purely as entertainment for a sci-fi geek like myself — it was fine, kept my attention, whatever. (There will be spoilers in this essay, but, honestly, probably nothing you can’t figure out from the trailer. You’ve been warned.)

That said, I think Atlas is surprisingly important. Since being released on May 24, Atlas has been the most popular Netflix film in the US and many countries around the world with more than 60 million views in its first two weeks of availability. This means millions of regular people have been exposed to two really important pro-progress, Up Wing ideas about AI (and technology more broadly) that our popular culture, especially Hollywood, rarely acknowledges.