Another day, another warning about artificial intelligence (AI), and this one lands with the same reassuring effect as a plane fuselage ripping off mid-flight. Alex Holmes and Lina Zilinskaite's documentary Chasing Utopia delivers a concentrated stream of AI concerns in its 83-minute runtime. Beginning with familiar criticisms—such as putting the world out of work and handing power to tech barons—the film quickly escalates. By the time it discusses current efforts to create computers out of human brain cells, potentially integrable into our own craniums, and implies this might be a good thing, it becomes ironically difficult to process all the information.
At the centre of this Cassandra-like warning is Mo Gawdat, former chief business officer at Google X, now a touring cautionary voice trying to get the world to listen about the perils of AI. Once overseeing advanced projects for the tech giant, his biggest moonshot now lies ahead: to introduce a moral dimension into a tech race that increasingly resembles the frenzied season finale of late capitalism. Gawdat talks about feeling parental pride in watching Google's AI-driven robotic arms learn to grasp objects, as children do. He believes that humanity's capacity for benevolence is exactly the training resource needed by neural networks to prevent the technology from ushering in catastrophe.
The parental angle is deeply personal for Gawdat: he quit Google after the tragic death of his son following a botched appendix operation. This gives him an evangelical urgency when addressing AI's current human shortcomings. He highlights how AI enables digital narcissism through hyper-optimised social media and porn, facilitates mass surveillance and automated warfare, and evolves on an exponential growth curve that may soon escape human control. Geoffrey Hinton, a prominent figure in AI, contributes his own warnings. The tech bros—of course not interviewed here—appear unconcerned. The uncanny-valley affect of Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman suggests that alien superintelligence has been 3D-printing human avatars for some time.
Given how quickly AI has been shackled to the basest human impulses, Gawdat is frustratingly less specific about what enlightened AI would look like. His proposal to suffuse neural network training data with examples of human positivity and altruism seems almost laughably naive. Yet perhaps it is not so airy-fairy; empathy may need to encompass digital entities that, for practical purposes, will be cognisant and sentient. A top Bhutanese lama agrees with Gawdat that the current agenda of “containing” AI and ensuring it “serves” humanity contains too many old oppressive tendencies. It is hard to know how seriously to take someone proposing the same answer as Ghostbusters II—positive vibes to banish negative ectoplasm. But blockbuster times need blockbuster thinking, and the interviewees here supply plenty. Chasing Utopia is released in UK cinemas on 15 May.
