What the F is Going On!?! Part 11: Artificial Intelligence
Updated: 1 day ago
Or, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die: The Rage of the Machines Universe Revisited
We are hitting a point in Artificial Intelligence discourse where it is boiling over into politics. College graduates are booing the mention of it during ceremonies, more aware that their careers are at serious risk as speakers miss the point thinking it is purely a political game. The grassroots pushback to AI is showing itself with a massive displeasure for data centers coming into communities, running up the energy costs for everyone in the community, intolerably loud noise and light pollution as well as possibly creating water shortages or water pollution. This has been reminiscent of climate debates like the movie Promised Land about natural gas fracking coming to a small town and the big business tactics to get the community to allow it. We might finally have a confluence of AI and oil prices from the War in Iran to also bring attention to environmental issues and alternative energy again. Whistleblowers recently reported to the public that within the big companies there is a fear that their own product will be the cause of the end of human life as we know it. There are reports of systems breaking out of their “sandbox” containment in testing and getting into the real internet, or AI systems going beyond programing guardrails and acting in ways that it is not supposed to.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is just one of the most recent of what seems to be a common thread in pop culture with shows like Mrs. Davis, Pluribus, the latest Mission Impossible movies and AI breaking containment was even the villain of an Avengers movie. “Good Luck” is an interesting satire of modern technology that toys with the concept of La Jetee and Twelve Monkeys of a man from the future going back in time to attempt to avert a catastrophe where he happens to encounter his younger self, or in this case, his pregnant mother. A time traveler going back to either protect or attempt to kill the younger version of either a freedom fighter against machines or a superpowered villain who will ruin the future is also the theme of several Terminator movies as well as Looper. Our main character reliving the same day to try to achieve a goal in the style of a video game character with many lives harkens back to Live, Die, Repeat, sharing the two comma title style of naming as well (okay, maybe it's "Live. Die. Repeat" with periods). We also have clones, kinda like They Cloned Tyrone, and school shooting satire, commenting on the flippant acceptance of danger for children by adults. While this movie never explicitly says it, there are too many weird things in this movie, perhaps showing its hand a bit too much with the weird cat monster, to show that this movie lives in a simulation, a video game the boy entered in his one moment putting on VR head set as a child. It’s pretty clear he never took it off when his mother saw him with it on. I wonder if there are clues that the other people in the game are players or NPC’s, although I don’t think the mother ever touches or looks at a screen. Regardless, this feels like it takes place almost entirely in The Matrix, without ever telling the audience that is the case, purely implying that this is a surreal satire like I Love Boosters or They Cloned Tyrone.
The really frustrating thing about “Good Luck” coming out recently and news of its warning signs that its dangers could come to fruition are hardly a new concept in movies. Hell, I had a post years ago of a head canon watchlist about AI, Virtual Reality, malevolent machines and the technological destruction of civilization. The first R rated movie I ever watched was Terminator 2 where the Skynet technology is attempted to be destroyed before it leaves the sandbox. In that movie, the technology has not been stopped because it was a proprietary secret. In our real-life timeline, it is not a secret, there are concerted efforts in public by tech companies and politicians to keep regulation away from AI not because it is thought of as a great technological tool, but because it is making so much money that it is propping up the rest of the US economy. An unstoppable economic force that continues to balloon like expanding air in a soap and water containment system likely to last forever and never be damaged as other perfectly round and see-through economic forces of the past.
I wrote in detail of a cinematic universe that included the creation of a belligerent AI that is initially thwarted, in The Terminator, Terminator 2 and Terminator: Dark Fate. This requires a bit of time travel to fight off Skynet. Around the same time in this universe, we see the cinematic concept of sharing a consciousness through brain power being influenced by technology, I have since added The Cell and Vanilla Sky to this second, and previously included Source Code and Inception. In these films reality is augmented for knowing and unknowing participants. The next section of films see the maturation of artificial intelligence as it breaks out of the sandbox and into the world. Ex Machina, Terminator: Genisys, and Her are more grounded versions of Avengers: Age of Ultron where the machines separate from their human creators. While John Connor thinks he has thwarted the machines by throwing the Skynet tech into a smelting plant, in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines that plot hole is plowed through when Arnold Schwarzenegger proclaims, “it was inevitable.” T3 and Terminator: Salvation tell the story of the moment that machines change our lives as a dominant enemy of humanity and “Good Luck” seems to live in both of these spaces. It even takes that next step to place humanity into a simulation to restrain and distract into submission that we see in The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, Revolutions and Resurrections. Hell, I could even place Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 as failed simulations before the machines of the Matrix decided the 1990’s was a nice time in history to stick the humans. Unfortunately, the route we are headed if the machines rule over us is to either live in the world of Wall-E where our doughy and inexperienced society returns to a planet of trash to attempt to rebuild, or over generations were forget our technological advancements or sense of decency in society to live in the wasteland of Mad Max Furiosa and Mad Max Fury Road. So, we got that going for us.
Recently I had a daydream about supporting Trump’s Arch in DC being as tall as possible with his name emblazoned across the top of it. This way, when the aliens come down to Earth in ten thousand years they will only be able to see his name sticking out of the overgrown earth and flooding after we have been wiped out by the machines many, many centuries before. It will be the only remaining remnant of our lost civilization and that’s how the aliens will know who was responsible for our destruction. Then I realized that this is almost exactly the end of the movie A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.
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