The future, Conan? - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

Not infrequently, including on this very week, Citizen founder Keith Roulston finds inspiration in media of the past, be it an older book or movie. He’s known to reflect on the stories of the past and their striking resemblances to the world of today. There is fertile ground in this pursuit as so many of the darker and unenlightened chapters of history seem doomed to repeat themselves.

 

I had a similar experience this week, but not looking to the past so much, but how a few movies from our current generation have done amazing work in predicting the future. It also had me thinking about how I interfaced with them when I first saw them and how, as time has gone on, their flights of fancy and stories of whimsical, far-fetched futures have worked to kind of meet reality in the middle.

 

First, I suppose, we’ll talk about One Battle After Another, the presumptive Best Picture winner at Sunday night’s Academy Awards. 

 

The film - spoiler alert - is based on a 1990 book about left-wing revolutionaries grappling with the realization that they didn’t change the world. The rightward surge in the political landscape feels like defeat in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s America and they have to face the reality of the world they’re leaving for their children. Sound familiar at all?

 

The film diverges heavily from the book - using it as more of a trampoline than the bible - in that it deals with secret, elite societies, not so subtle white supremacy, military overreach (under the guise of illegal immigration and narco-terrorism) and comic American military leaders who treat others as less-than and view initiated combat like a video game. (One of the film’s combat missions is dubbed “Operation Boot Heel” - a laugh line that’s actually less stupid than Operation Epic Fury.)

 

Unreal foresight by my man Anderson and, as I said to someone the other day, if this film had come out before this past year of Trump, I would have thought it idiotic and far-fetched. Needless to say, I don’t think those things now.

 

But the one that really got to me was when I convinced Jess to watch Her with me. Spike Jonze’s 2013 movie is almost 15 years old now and has proven to be shockingly predictive of humanity’s embracing of artificial intelligence. 

 

In it, Joaquin Phoenix’s Theodore slowly but surely turns his back on his friends, girlfriend and others as he connects and eventually falls in love with an A.I. operating system, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. “They” fall in love as the system knows so much about Theodore (how could it not?) to the point that they try to consummate their love via a volunteer sex surrogate in a tremendously awkward scene.

 

Jonze is another favourite of mine - he’s only made four movies in the last 25 years and they are all incredible - but I remember at once respecting the movie and its artistry but, again, finding it to be almost science fiction, but set in the real world. A person falling in love with an operating system? That’s a sentence I would really struggle to explain to a grandparent.

 

And yet, here we are. Parents of Tumbler Ridge victims are suing Open AI (its ChatGPT was used by the shooter, but the company contacted no one), alleging that ChatGPT knew of risks that users would become “psychologically and socially dependent” on it. “‘I felt pure, unconditional love’: the people who marry their A.I. chatbots,” reads Stuart Heritage’s Guardian headline from last year. Also last summer, Sam Apple accompanied three people who attended a couples retreat with their A.I. chatbots for Wired.

 

This feels like my generation’s Roulston experience and it paints a bleak picture.