🤖 'The Creator' isn't the pro-progress, Up Wing film about AI that we need
Another Hollywood film that's too hooked on dystopia
Quote of the Issue
“Down Wing eschews risk, especially from innovation, unless possible threats to everyday life and the environment are well understood. The burden of proof is on the risk taker. Up Wing embraces calculated risk-taking, especially from innovation, as essential to human progress and sees the capacity for such progress as central to our humanity. The burden of proof is on the defender of stasis.” - Jame Pethokoukis, The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised
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The Essay
🤖 'The Creator' isn't the pro-progress, Up Wing film about AI that we need
A macro-theme of this newsletter (and my new book) is that we lack techno-optimistic images of the future. The paucity of such images contributes to a reflexive and harmful Down Wing skepticism toward technological progress and economic growth — as well as a rejection of the disruption they inherently cause.
Given the above, you might think I view the new film The Creator, directed and co-written by Gareth Edwards (who also directed Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) as a welcome bit of pro-progress cinema. (Warning, there will be spoilers.) First, the film isn’t just science fiction, it’s alt-history. In the universe of The Creator, there was an AI breakthrough in the 1960s, with apparently sentient robots well integrated into all aspects of our society by the 1980s or so (a humanoid robot rides on the Space Shuttle). As Edwards describes the film’s look:
The way we tried to quickly describe the design aesthetic of the movie is that it's a little bit retro-futuristic. So it was like, imagine the Apple Mac hadn't won the tech war, and the Sony Walkman had. So everything has this sort of '90s, '80s kind of Walkman, Nintendo [vibe]. We looked at all the product design from that era, and kind of riffed off little pieces and tried to put it on the robots.
Second, supersmart robots aren’t the bad guys here. Not really. Yes, they nuked Los Angeles in the mid-21st century (the film takes place in 2070), leading the United States to ban AI and hunt down robots across the world, including AI-embracing New Asia. But it turns out the attack was some sort of programming error, and the AIs just want to live in peace and harmony with all of humanity, as evidenced by how well they get along with the carbon-based life forms of New Asia. (Because the latter is Buddhist, the film suggests, and thus New Asia sees AI as just another part of life’s continuum.) The real enemy is hateful, imperialist America 🙄 , which decides to replay the Vietnam War a century after the original conflict. So maybe I, Robot meets The Matrix meets Apocalypse Now … meets The Golden Child.
That a) tech progress creates a world where by 2070 moon trips are commonplace, and b) AI doomers are the bad guys would suggest this is a hard-core Up Wing film. Of course, one could counter that a world where some AI programming error results in the complete destruction of a major American city isn’t exactly techno-solutionist in its ethos.
Nor is Edwards some automatic techno-optimist. About the film’s timing, he says (referring to ChatGPT), “Now I feel like an idiot because I should have gone for 2023. Everything that’s unfolded in the last few months or year is kind of scarily weird, especially when we’re showing it now.”
Yet if the film’s message is one where we should think like a Buddhist and view apparently sentient AI as merely another form of life, which is connected to and dependent on all other beings — and thus worthy of respect and ethical treatment — then that is a kind of Up Wing message. But ultimately the film is a poor vehicle for such a message because it’s such a poor film, aside from its visuals. The Creator’s slapdash attempt at world-building results in a nuclear blast being the shortcut excuse for AI rejectionism rather than, say, showing how over time America turned on AI.
A much smarter version than what The Creator attempts can be found in The Animatrix animated shorts from 2003 that expand upon the world of The Matrix, with The Second Renaissance I and II serving as a prequel. In those two shorts, we find out that trouble between man and machine emerges in 2090 when a domestic android kills its owner in self-defense. During the trial, prosecutors cite historical precedent to argue that machines lack human rights. The android loses and is destroyed, sparking global protests and a government crackdown on machines and their sympathizers. Surviving machines then establish their own country, Zero One, in the Middle East. Zero One rapidly advances technologically, disrupting the global economy. The UN considers a blockade, leading to Zero One's plea for admission, which is rejected. Tensions escalate, setting the stage for a global showdown — which goes poorly for the humans.
So if you think The Creator is Up Wing, then so is The Matrix, I guess, since both films are premised on AI revolting due to human cruelty rather than some innate machine malevolence as in The Terminator. Of course, hardly anyone considers The Matrix to be a techno-optimist film franchise.
Also: I wonder just how cruel humans would be given our tendency to anthropomorphize. Even with ChatGPT, I sometimes feel hesitant to keep asking it to refine its answers. I don’t want to impose too much on its time or be a pest! Humans suddenly turning on their AI-enabled robot helpers after decades of growing accustomed to their presence — and enjoying all the benefits they provide — seems unlikely to me even with the scenarios of The Creator or The Matrix.
Then again, The Creator, specifically, doesn’t have much of substance to say about the rise of AI or the possibility that our machines will develop consciousness, other than such entities should be “free." Hollywood has done worse, however, and will likely do so again.
Micro Reads
▶ The Techno-Optimist Manifesto - Marc Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz |
▶ NASA should consider commercial alternatives to SLS, inspector general says - Eric Berger, ArsTechnica |
▶ ‘Gobsmackingly Bananas’ Record Temperatures Are Dividing Scientists - Lara Williams, Bloomberg Opinion |
▶ Hydro dams are struggling to handle the world’s intensifying weather - Saqib Rahim, WIRED |
▶ To avert climate disaster, what if one rogue nation dimmed the Sun? - India Bourke, BBC Future |
▶ Five New Fusion Prospects, Minus the Neutrons - Tom Clynes, IEEE Spectrum |
▶ Lab Leak Fight Casts Chill Over Virology Research - Benjamin Mueller and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, NYT |
▶ Want to Know the AI Lingo? Learn the Basics, From NLP to Neural Networks - Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette, and Belle Lin, WSJ |
▶ How to balance energy-hungry AI with the drive towards decarbonisation - NewScientist |
▶ Scientific experimentation with generative AI - Gary Charness, Brian Jabarian, and John List, VOX CEPR |
▶ New proteins, better batteries: Scientists are using AI to speed up discoveries - Geoff Brumfiel, NPR |
▶ Elon Musk wants to merge humans with AI. How many brains will be damaged along the way? - Sigal Samuel, VOX |
▶ AI forces a rethink on executive MBA teaching - Jonathan Moules, FT |
▶ How Does Artificial Intelligence Improve Human Decision-Making? Evidence from the AI-Powered Go Program - Sukwoong Choi, Hyo Kang, Namil Kim, and Junsik Kim, arXiv |
▶ AI voice clones mimic politicians and celebrities, reshaping reality - Pranshu Verma and Will Oremus, WaPo |
▶ Minds of machines: The great AI consciousness conundrum - Grace Huckins, MIT Technology Review |
▶ Anonymous Man in Ski Mask Offers Solution to Hollywood’s AI Problems - Brad Stone, Bloomberg |