DB x AI Part I: My Pal HAL (9.4.24)

Hollywood & AI Paranoia

I am a sci-fi junkie, so it’s not hard for me to construct fantasy doomsday scenarios revolving around AI.

In the Stanley Kubrick classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Dave, an astronaut on a space mission to Jupiter, has to confront and destroy HAL (a “Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer”). HAL faces conflicting directives: one not to tell the human crew about the true purpose of the mission, and another, to convey accurate information. HAL concludes that by killing the crew, he (it?) doesn’t have to lie to them – and so sets out to do just that.

Photo by Maximalfocus on Unsplash

This idea – of a synthetic intelligence so rational that it becomes dispossessed of humanity – captured the attention of my generation. On a pre-COVID trip to Japan (the land of the robots), I made it a priority to search for Japanese language posters of Hollywood movies. Coincidentally, all of the ones I purchased preview the dangers of artificial sentience. Terminator (1984), features a guerilla fighter sent back from the future to protect the mother of the leader of the human resistance that emerges after AI destroys the world. In Alien (1984), space freighter pilot Ripley is betrayed by the android, Ash (played by Ian “Bilbo Baggins” Holm!), whose programming is to preserve the homicidal xenomorph the crew encounters, even at the expense of human life.

Ridley Scott, who directed Alien, explored the more complicated aspects of our relationship with synthetic intelligence in Blade Runner (1982), adapted from the 1968 novel by Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Deckard is a “blade runner” who specializes in hunting down synthetic humans called “replicants” - a task complicated when he falls in love with the replicant Rachael, who, due to having implanted memories, is unaware of her own synthetic state of being.

Thanks to such pop culture explorations, it is not hard for many of us to grasp the contemporary critique directed at the potential disruptive and destructive power of AI – thanks, Hollywood. Can we trust our digital servant-guardians? How do we know? Should programming override humanity? Can fair and just decision-making ever be compatible with cold logic? This is great stuff for storytelling - and so it’s no surprise that two of the three top Empire’s Top 50 SciFi Movies of All Time (and also adorn my man cave, below).

As much as these scenarios make for great cinematic fodder, these are not what keeps me up at night. Over the coming weeks, I hope to outline realistic, near-term social transformations that illustrate the potentially unintended consequences of the in-motion transition from artifactual to artificial intelligence – and how they could reshape how we relate to each other, in both good and bad ways.

I hope you will stick around for the discussion.

J

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