Rise of the Machines

When I released the movie short I made with AI, a sweet little monologue film in which a young woman who performs as a French-style mime artist and steps out from behind her mime persona by removing her whiteface and talking to an unseen young man who is deliriously smitten by her, on YouTube, I responded to detractors of AI - specifically, creative AI, which many people believe is a contradiction in terms - that my eleven-minute film was not going to end the world.

But it might, it turns out, play an infinitesimal part in it.

AI entrepreneur Dario Amodei said over the weekend - a weekend during which we marked the silver anniversary of 9/11 - that, if developed too fast and not handled properly, artificial intelligence could destroy humanity.  By "destroy humanity," Amodei didn't necessarily mean the proliferation of environmentally catastrophic data centers like the one above.  He meant that AI could possibly launch nuclear missiles, instigate bioterrorist attacks, and, considering we just marked 25 years after the World Trade Center towers were blown to kingdom come, possibly hijack planes and fly them into buildings.  It would be like the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where HAL kills one of the astronauts after he tries to stop HAL from hijacking the mission, albeit on a mass scale.  I might add that Stanley Kubrick's 1968 classic movie takes place in the same year that the World Trade Center towers were destroyed.

One person assessed Amodei's warning and dismissed the risk of ending humanity - Donald Trump.  That could be because he's eighty years old and doesn't care what happens after he's gone, though it probably has more to do with the fact that his two older sons are heavily invested in AI companies.  Trump isn't the only one in charge who pooh-poohs AI's risks.  House Speaker Mike Johnson, the most powerful elected Republican outside the executive branch and the man in line for the Presidency in case Trump suddenly drops dead and Vance is subsequently lynched by a panicked mob, has concurred with Trump that the government should take a laissez-faire approach to AI, which means he's fine with AI destroying humankind.  After all, he is a fundamentalist Christian who believes the end of the world is at hand anyway.

Oh yeah, did I happen to mention that Amodei says that, theoretically, AI could wipe out humanity within a decade?   I did the math, and it turns out that if that happens according to schedule,  I might not get to live past eighty, like my mother did.  I more likely only make it to 68, like my father did.  Gee, thanks a lot, thanks a bloody lot.  And Trump may live to be ninety - but just barely. 

Meanwhile . . . I've started a sequel to my movie short, as I hinted at the end of the short that my lady mime character Thelma and the unseen young man she meets in the park would become a couple.  The sequel will involve Thelma and her new boyfriend Jim talking to friends on the phone about their new beau.  I'm taking my time with it, so I have no idea when it will be ready.  I don't have a clip to show you as a sneak preview, but I do have a picture of these two attractive people as a couple.

(Aside: If you've seen my original short, you'll perceive that Thelma has more or less picked Jim up, which is pretty much the only way a white man could ever end up with a black female street performer as a girlfriend.)

I have a storyline for my attractive interracial pair that will ultimately span over five short films, and I am promising right now that there won't be a sixth.  I don't want to press my luck, both with my story and with AI.     

And contrary to popular wisdom, creative AI doesn't have to be bad.  For one thing, it enables me to be a filmmaker, something I could never have been without it.  And I should note that Paul McCartney used AI to complete a Beatles track based on a John Lennon demo that had originally been intended for Anthology 3 but was left off due to technical problems that mid-nineties technology could not have solved.  So, no, I don't think the five films I ultimately create will end the world.   Especially when I hope to have them done before AI gets so out of hand that even MAGA will support regulation.  But since I don't drink, smoke, use drugs or eat beef (at least not for awhile, thanks to chemically treated Argentine steaks), I sort of think I can make it to my one hundredth birthday, but that's not going to happen if the human race is wiped out before then.  Oh, and by the way, the gleaming futuristic world of leisure and art run by intelligently and empathetically programmed computers imagined in Donald Fagen's 1982 hit song "I.G.Y. (What a Beautiful World)" wasn't meant to be optimistic or hopeful.  Fagen was being ironic.  

Here are Dario Amodei's thoughtful observations on the matter of artificial intelligence from his own Web site.