everybody hates the future
but we shouldn't have to!
Hi friends!
In case you missed it, I have two posts up on Brad Babendir’s Substack This is a Newsletter. Brad put together a terrific series on Steven Spielberg’s scifi movies, and my entry is about everybody’s favorite film: Jurassic Park. (Your favorite Spielberg might be ET or Jaws, and that’s legit but. DINOSAURS.) My contention in the post is mostly that 1) Jurassic Park rules and 2) the series should have died after the first installment, the most recent entry arguably being the Xfinity ad that aired during the Superbowl. If you haven’t seen the ad (don’t), it presents an alternative version of Jurassic Park where the plot is “fixed” thanks to good wifi, meaning that a disturbingly de-aged Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum get to enjoy Jurassic Park as a tropical resort, signing off on mortal man’s hubris and the death of their own careers.
Lots of people hated the ad, just like lots of people hate AI—AI being the secret allegory and true product offered by the Xfinity ad, the image of a frictionless world where you can “fix” distressing stories or situations by rewriting them, and you don’t have to suffer, and you don’t have to think.
Which brings me to my second post on This is a Newsletter: my review (in a series of group reviews) about Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. Most of my fellow critics liked the film, because they’re kind and lovely people; I’m a crazy-eyed cynic, so I saw AI and death. Spielberg may have thought he was directing mystical sequences where aliens take the form of magical animals; but the animals had the same soft, too-bright outlines and dead eyes as AI-generated creatures in ads for Coke or Apple or toilet paper. Spielberg may have thought (mild spoiler) his ending was about empathy and peace and humanity coming together, but it looked a lot more like frictionless authoritarianism where human beings outsource their mind to an exterior benevolence (and maybe it isn’t benevolent???) The titular Disclosure Day acts much like the Singularity: the moment when human beings are superseded by a greater intelligence, and free will changes forever. And for all that the film pretends to debate whether it’s right to disclose the existence of aliens to the public, the discussions are heavily weighted and never serious; telling the truth and thereby changing the world is both correct and inevitable, the product of long-running plans beyond ordinary human comprehension.1
The language of AI boosters tends to be similar: AI is the correct choice, a world-changer, and inevitable whether you like it or not. And this leads to public despair, because if AI is inevitable, then we do have to adjust to it, these tireless, stupid, often useless chatbots that steal our jobs, our art, our healthy environment, and even some of our lives.
This is an ugly present. Few people are looking forward to the future (for many reasons). The only people who seem to be excited, in fact, are AI boosters; they only get mad when an insufficient number of workers suckers agree with them. That’s why, for example, AI boosters became so angry at Ted Chiang after he wrote a sober and excellent essay about the limits of artificial consciousness; it wasn’t really that they were disappointed in him, personally a beloved sci-fi author; he was giving away the con.2
AI (in all its various forms, this is still a marketing term covering a number of different products) includes many fledgling technologies. And early technologies need investors, which means they need believers; they need faith without question, faith in the future, which means they need suckers. Everyone who is “pro” AI is really someone who hopes to profit, either in direct financial ways or by being somebody who adopted the new skills faster than everyone else and is therefore more hireable (and not fireable). Some members of the profiteer class understand that AI is a con, or rather the going thing, and this is simply what contemporary business is: you promote the going thing, get rich and get out. The owners and investors who sink with the collapsing bubble will be the ones who didn’t know it was a scam. And the workers who thought that adopting AI faster, fastest, would make them more hireable…I’ve met people like this, and either they’re true believers or they’ve convinced themselves that they are, and either way their desperation isn’t faith, and won’t protect them.
And this is one of the messages of Disclosure Day, the importance of faith in those who are coming with new, superior technologies, who say they’re good and can be trusted, who are bringing a change that can’t be taken back. “History doesn’t have a reset key!” cries the villain at the beginning, and you know he’s wrong because he’s the villain, and also because he hates change. He’s against the march of the future. Disclosure Day has been praised as a liberal fantasy, a movie that looks forward to the future with joy, and who can be a sourpuss about that? Me, apparently, because I felt the entire time like I was being conned, that—in the words of the great poet Judge Judy—someone was pissing on my leg and telling me it was raining. Much like Agent Mulder, I want to believe. But I know better.
At the same time, however, I don’t believe that cynicism is healthy. I don’t believe in the inevitability of AI; certainly the successful protests against datacenters in both red and blue states give me life.3 But if a film wants to give me hope for the future, it needs to give me an image of real freedom from superior technology and authoritarian control, from someone else’s top-down vision of our own good. We’re not, despite appearances, stuck in an advertorial, AI-flattened fascist dreamscape. We’re not permanently aimed toward a foreseeable future of someone else’s making. The plot goes forward.
You won’t find these points about AI in my Disclosure Day review because I didn’t realize them until now lol.
There were a bunch of posts on Twitter (credit to BDM for finding them and showing them to me) but I’m simply too lazy to find them now.
According to the Time article I linked, Krysten Sinema, now an AI lobbyist, said that the protests against data centers are happening because of “a foreign influence campaign” and 1) lmao 2) that’s a much better aliens story really.