A new documentary predicts that artificial intelligence will be responsible for the next global financial crash, but its director insists that people, not technology, will be to blame. In Ghost in the Machine, filmmaker Valerie Veatch argues that the real dangers of AI are already unfolding, driven by the humans behind the software rather than any hypothetical superintelligence.
“AI is dangerous, but not in the way people think,” Veatch said. “The real dangers are playing out now, and they’re nothing to do with technology - they’re being driven by the people behind it.” The film, which features interviews with dozens of scientists, researchers, and philosophers, concludes that the idea of AI thinking for itself is science fiction. “The reality is that people are behind software and they are using it for their own ends,” she added.
Financial Bubble and Spending Spree
The documentary highlights a dangerous spending bubble, exploited workers, environmental damage, and a concerning impact on children’s education. Veatch warned that “the people driving it are not accountable.” This year, US senator Elizabeth Warren said the scale of AI investment had “striking parallels” to the 2008 financial crash.
Four tech giants - Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft - plan to spend a combined $725 billion (£543.22 billion) on capital expenditure in 2026, up 77% on last year, much of it driven by the AI boom. Nikkei Asia estimates that five major tech firms - Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle - hold about $1.65 trillion (£1.23 trillion) in off-balance-sheet obligations tied to AI, including data centre leases and chip supply contracts, on top of about $1.35 trillion (£1.01 trillion) of debt on their balance sheets.
Veatch warned of the consequences for ordinary investors: “Ultimately, it’s the banks - those folks profit from the hype and a lot of retail investors lose their money. These funds that are meant to be safe places for retirement will be gutted because of this. There’s no good outcome here.”
Hidden Human and Environmental Costs
The film also exposes the workforce behind chatbots, following workers in Nairobi. According to a 2023 Time investigation, Kenyan workers employed by an outsourcing firm for an AI research and deployment company earned between $1.32 (99p) and $2 (£1.49) an hour for sifting through graphic text, including descriptions of child sexual abuse and self harm, so the material could be filtered out of an AI chatbot’s training data.
“The great sadness is that those communities are targeted for daily work,” Veatch said. “With no training, often the work becomes harmful and there’s no infrastructure or labour rules, labour laws to protect this kind of work. When I started making the film, I didn’t have a clear understanding of the scale of what we’re talking about. Now I do.”
The documentary also points to environmental damage, particularly water use. Veatch noted that England has faced serious drought, yet AI data centres claim they recycle water without disclosing how much they actually use. “We [Great Britain] are not an energy rich island. We’re not a resource rich island,” she said. Calling the use of resources “greedy,” she warned that once farmland and nature give way to data centres, it’s gone forever. “You can’t have a tourism industry, but you do have this data centre that does not enrich anybody,” she added.
Research by the environmental thinktank Verdant estimates that planned UK data centres will create around 10,400 direct jobs - about a quarter of the more than 40,000 new jobs by 2035 forecast by industry body TechUK. But Veatch said: “By the time all of that plays out, the politicians who put these things in place will be gone. The companies will have sold, sold, sold. So even the companies who created the data centres will be gone. And they will leave us with nothing.”
Impact on Education and a Call to Action
The film’s roots are personal for Veatch, inspired by a boy in her daughter’s class who said he didn’t need to learn maths because AI would do it. “That actually was this deep catalyst for this project, because I was like, ‘there’s a misunderstanding of what we’re even talking about here,’” she said. A study of 405 pupils, aged 14 and 15, across seven English secondary schools, published in November 2025, found note-taking beat AI chatbots for comprehension and memory when measured three days later - even though more pupils said they preferred the chatbot to taking notes.
Veatch warned about tech companies approaching schools with offers of money in exchange for adopting their products. “They will approach school systems and say, ‘put in our product and we’ll give you a couple hundred thousand dollars.’ For a school, that’s amazing. They can make a football pitch, whatever they want. But the cost to our children in the long-term is not worth it.”
Despite her criticisms, Veatch said she is not anti-tech: “I think that there’s wonderful ways that we can implement technology that actually works for our social goals, that will help us reduce our carbon emissions.” She believes ordinary people can push back: “We, as people, can decide we do not need this technology. We can refuse the active use 100%. We refuse normalising it within our realm, within whatever your realm is.”
“It promotes this intensely dehumanising idea that your craft, your talent, your imagination, is not valuable and not unique. And that’s the thing I hate most about this technology. If you’re a journalist, if you’re a teacher, if you’re a writer, if you’re a filmmaker, we can push back on the intrusion of these technologies and also the idea that comes along with it - the idea that machines can think. Because they can’t.”
Ghost in the Machine is available on Amazon Prime Video from November 13.
