When the movie concluded someone sitting behind me quoted the lines from a David Cronenberg film, “Be afraid, be very afraid.” This documentary begins its investigation, not with the beginning of the computer revolutions of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, but with the beginning of the “scientific” exploration of “intelligence” in the late 1800s and early 1900s and its association with Eugenics. 

Previously I have held the belief that if there is fault in a thing, don’t blame the thing, but look at the persons behind the thing, the creators of the thing to understand why it is the way it is. I held technology, especially the early personal computers and software that I was most familiar with, as being “neutral,” and “just tools” in whatever endeavor I was engaged in. I held that no technology was intrinsically “evil.” And if there is some evil in the mix, look at how it’s implemented. Alas, those were in the days before the algorithm took control, in a quaint time when engineers would create a thing because it was cool and fellow engineers would be amazed at their creativity and engineering. I think that there are still instances where some technology comes to the fore because it does something cool and is “better” than its competitors. Sadly, the technology most often in the headlines is no longer just a tool, but primarily a means for the rich to get richer and overwhelm users with their point-of-view and philosophies, shouting down all other voices except their own. 

Also, while we’re on the subject, let’s not confuse a computer program that can simulate human communication styles with there being an actual conscious, self-aware entity answering ones questions. There is no there there. It’s a sophisticated chat-bot interacting with a prompt and attempting, with an authoritative “voice,” to find the most likely string of words that should approximate a human response. But there is no virtual “person” on the other end of the screen answering ones questions. 

Recently I was listening to the TED Radio Hour and Notre Dame Philosophy Professor Meghan Sullivan talked about her experiences working with San Francisco Bay Area tech companies on bringing ethics into their A.I. projects and she commented off-hand that some day in the future philosophers and thinkers are going to ponder on why companies developing these A.I. tools decided to give their bots human personalities when it could just as well get the job done if it were more like “checking a card catalogue in a library” (now that’s old school). Here’s the whole talk (the AI discussion begins at 28:00). Enjoy.     

[Movie viewed on 2026-05-21 at Cinema 21]

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Tags: 2026 movies, A.I., movie reflection, the evils of A.I., video Fridays

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