Big Tech Is Turning A.I.’s Dystopia into Reality

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Big Tech Is Turning A.I.’s Dystopia into Reality<br>ByDoug Wilson<br>A.I. Artificial Intelligence imagined a world where corporations sell artificial love to a society starved of human connection. Twenty-five years later, Silicon Valley is trying to build it.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence has become one of cinema’s most prescient meditations on loneliness, capitalism and artificial love.<br>Subscribe to Tribune today and help us build a real, socialist alternative to Britain’s media moguls.

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Twenty-five years ago today, A.I. Artificial Intelligence was released. The film was a long-gestating passion project of Stanley Kubrick, finally brought to life after his death by his friend Steven Spielberg. Like many of Kubrick’s works, it was met with a lukewarm response from critics and audiences. Yet time has revealed A.I.’s vision of a society dependent on automated and commercialised emotion to be both prescient and deeply unsettling.<br>The film tells the story of David, the first robot child programmed to love. Gifted to a wealthy family grieving their comatose son, David is abandoned by his ‘mother’, Monica, after their real child recovers, sending him on an odyssey through a dystopian world in search of a way to become a ‘real boy’, ala Pinochio, and earn the love of the parent who cast him aside.<br>We learn more about this AI-dominated society through David’s journey. Ecological collapse has produced vast inequality and a reliance on artificial intelligence for labour as population controls have shrunk the human workforce. Androids form an underclass, performing many of humanity’s most vital and intimate functions. We meet Gigolo Joe, a mecha prostitute who boasts to a client, ‘Once you’ve had a lover robot, you’ll never want a real man again.’ His services are used by women scarred by abuse, seeking a safe alternative to human relationships.<br>The film presents its own version of an LLM called Dr. Know, which refers to itself as ‘fast food for thought’, a better description of ChatGPT than anyone has managed today. When David reaches his creator, the scientist is delighted by his devotion. David, modelled on his own dead son, has demonstrated genuine desire. With proof that the experiment has succeeded, this new toy, already mass-produced, is ready for the market.<br>A.I.’s vision of society is one where humanity’s most primal functions have been outsourced and commodified. Knowledge and intimacy are now tasks performed by machines, perfecting processes in which human beings too often falter. David is the next evolution, offering ageless, unconditional love to parents fearful of their children’s mortality, and the performance of parenthood to those without children.<br>Today, we see AI companies seeking to turn this dystopia into their product. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he wants ‘a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter’. AI is already used by many in search of the ‘love’ offered by David. A third of Britons use AI for emotional support, while ‘griefbots’, AI systems that analyse the messages of the deceased to imitate their linguistic style, are growing in popularity.<br>What’s behind this phenomenon? Faced with increasing social isolation, caused in part by technological change, these machines offer a shallow imitation of human connection without the messy complications of life. Human relationships are complex. They often end in acrimony and failure, and are ultimately severed by time and mortality. AI, by contrast, can never reject you, never die, and never seriously question your decisions. It offers a comforting simulation of love, enriching an oligarchic class, much like David does for his customers. It is, in the words of David’s creator, ‘always loving, never ill, never changing’.<br>The film’s ending is the tragic conclusion to this automated society. Discovered millennia later by futuristic androids, David, the last machine created by the long-dead human species, is offered one final day of love with his resurrected mother. Many critics derided this as Spielbergian sentimentality, giving an implausibly happy ending. But this epilogue, devised by Kubrick rather than Spielberg, is far more complex. David resurrects a version of Monica, but she is not the real person.<br>Instead of being wracked by the guilt and confusion we saw during Monica’s life, she is stripped of all nuance and flaws. She gives David a simplistic version of the love he was programmed to give her. She doesn’t know where she is or how she came to be. Thanks to Haley Joel Osment’s brilliant and heartbreaking performance, the film has us rooting for David, and we initially find catharsis in the fulfilment of his dream. But beneath the fairy-tale aesthetic lies a bleak conclusion. Humanity’s...