The ‘Future’ of A.I Goes Up in Flames
Artificial Intelligence in the hands of man: a cinema perspective
In the investigative wake of the Telsa Cybertruck bombing outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day 2025, it was learned an alienated, active-duty U.S Army Green Beret utilized artificial intelligence to plan the blast.
Welcome to Earth.
As the updated, technological connection to the terrorist bombing played out, ironically, on a web-connected, overhead smart television in the waiting room of my doctor’s office, I reminded myself — as I always do, since everything ties back to film (or music) in my critical mind — of Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L’Eclisse (1962): his trilogy-statement regarding the alienation of man in the modern world; each dealt with the failure of the self and their relationships — his first color film, Il deserto rosso (1964), in particular. That latter film’s Giuliana (Italian actress Monica Vitti) desires to end her life’s spiritual conflicts while resisting her “lover” Corrado’s (English actor Richard Harris) advances; for her, it’s all a failed form of communication. While Antonioni said in the past, “When sexuality fails as a means of communication and provides only physical relief, then Eros is sick,” it now speaks to our future. Our Now.
Eros — the Greek god of love and sex — is sick to the point that Gaia is dying — and not because of technology. It’s the result of an alienated man holding said technology: it’s why the morbidly coincidental New Orleans truck attack happened on New Year’s Day 2025.
The attacks — in New Orleans and Las Vegas, as well as the Waukesha, Wisconsin Christmas parade attack on November 21, 2021, all in the United States — occurred because we heed not to the Gaia hypothesis formulated by chemist James Lovelock: a theory named after the Greek primeval deity who anthropomorphized the Earth. In short: Earth — its organic and inorganic components — is a living, breathing self-regulating system, aka organism. Man is to the Earth what organisms, microbes, and bacterium — both good and bad, beneficial and disadvantageous— are to our own bodies.
Man — in the wake of a smart truck: an inorganic intended to benefit the organics who created it, used as a bomb — is a bad organism, microbe, and bacteria poisoning, destroying the Earth (and within the film industry analogy of this essay: the film business¹, as well).
“Now, please; tell me why you have come to our planet.”
“‘Your’ planet?”
“Yes, this is our planet.”
“No, it’s not.”
— Klaatu teaches Secretary of Defense Regina Jackson a Gaian lesson in “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (2008)
One need not know of Michelangelo Antonioni and his celluloid-based artworks — or the concepts of the Promethean gap developed by German philosopher Günther Anders in the 1950s concerned with the relationship of humans and the technology they create — to understand Antonioni’s philosophical statements on the existential condition regarding the dangers of man’s prolonged technological exposure that leads to negative cognitive, psychosocial, and psychological effects on one’s psyche, is real: very real. You’re living — unfortunately proven by dual New Year’s Day terrorist attacks on U.S soil — an Antonioniesque existence, right now.
This surely isn’t the “future” an early 20th century Czechoslovakian writer, playwright, critic and journalist envisioned for our Earth. The technology, the brave new world that writer dreamed — that’s now our reality — has instead been utilized in an act of terror: to plan attacks to destroy the free will of the other.
We’re sorry we let you down, Mr. Čapek.
All of our today’s future-history robotic, genetic-biological engineering, and A.I paranoias we’re experiencing in our digital lives can be credited to one man: Nobel Prize-nominated and award-winning Czech writer Karel Čapek. His 1920 stage play/book R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)² introduced the word “robot” and many of the concepts formulating 20th century science fiction books and films.
A national treasure in his homeland, Karel Čapek was born in 1890, when the Czech Republic was not independent, yet (in 1918), and was a part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Čapek was born to Czech parents and spent his entire life working in the Czech Republic (called Czechoslovakia then), writing in the Czech language.
Čapek was Nobel Prize-nominated seven times for his unique, imaginative writing. When he was to finally receive the prize (nominated in the autumn of 1938), it came too late: Čapek died that winter caused by complicated pneumonia. On the other hand, it was his luck: The Nazis wanted to send Čapek to a concentration camp, but the order came soon after his death. Who died, then, in the camp: his brother: painter and poet-writer Josef Čapek.
A mere 79 years passes. . . .
Then, on December 28, 1969, in Helsinki, Finland: Linus Torvalds was born. At the age of 10 — courtesy of his grandfather owning a “high tech” Commodore VIC-20 — Linus was writing programming code.
At the age of 22, Torvalds released the first version of his Linux operating system in 1991. Then Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML and “turned on” the first web server and browser at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in 1991. Our lives changed, forever.
Today, those born of the Silent Generation and their Generation X offspring are hard-pressed to remember an app-less, swipe left world.
Those Generation X children — even the Silent Generation adults — had only just navigated the digital words created by our Apple IIs and Atari 800s packing 8-bits and playing the early computer game, Joust!. We just begun exploring our Commodore 64s and DEC Rainbows 100s — packing two phone bookesque operating manuals — and our TRS-80s packing a Zilog Z-80 microprocessor. Our first IBM PC clones ran software from some guy name Bill Gates.
However, before Bill Gates improved on Xerox’s “no practical application” graphic user interface, aka a GUI, aka a “mouse”: There was Belgian mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot who, in the early 1970s, distilling our digital lives to this:
z⇌z²+c
That equation creates what is known as an M-Set, aka Mandelbrot Sets, which he coined as a “fractal” to explain the geometry behind it. It wasn’t until 1991, with the advent of personal computers — those Apple IIs and Atari 800s — that man was able to gaze at the wondrous, psychedelic images of “God’s fingerprint” created by basic fractal equations.
Using Mandelbrot’s discovery, British mathematician and computer graphics researcher Professor Micheal Barnsley developed the image compression technology that we now don’t go through a day in our ubiquitous, digital lives without using. That’s the meaning behind the worlds Karel Čapek dreamed and Michelangelo Antonioni warned: we’re addicted and can’t live without it. We need a fix: Log on that smart(dumb)phone, we’re pixel-jonesing. We need to mainline some bytes.
Don’t believe it: Look down at your smart phone and open up your images folder. See all those JPEGs you upload to your Medium accounts and Wordpress pages. All of those selfies you snap and share on Twitter. All the vintage clothing you sell on Poshmark. The ability to store all that information on that tiny thumb drive dangling from your key chain. The ability to use an app to rent automobiles so as to instill terror in the U.S cities of Las Vegas and New Orleans? It all ties back to the discovery of Fractals, which made the development of video games, possible.
Beep. Beep. Boop . . . and BOOM . . . in a “register receipt” world where we humans, before online gaming, went to places called “arcades” and used quarters. You know, actual physical real metal coins of the digital, non-bit variety.
It was inside a Portland, Oregon, arcade in 1981 when the U.S Central Intelligence Agency began “mind control experiments” — complete with CRT monitors and poor pixel resolution — to develop video game technologies as a form of “combat-training.” So much for software running on the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System in the early ’60s becoming the first multi-player gaming system: man turns it into a combat training tool.
No, that alleged Portland, Oregon, beta-tested gaming system wasn’t called Videodrome. The training tool was known as Polybius.
“Long live the new flesh.”
— Max Renn’s final words in “Videodrome” (1983)
The “game” was said to have simply “appeared” one day in a Portland, Oregon, video arcade. The word-of-mouth legend spread by arcade aficionados in the ’80s, then the legend seeded on the web in 1994, about a year after the web went online on April 30, 1993 — in one of the world’s first “viral posts.”
However, before Tim Berners-Lee made web-surfing a reality. Before Benoit Mandelbrot made your selfie-self a reality. Before Robert Cailliau (developed the hypertext system). Before Larry Page (founded Google). Before Vint Cerf (the TCP/IP Internet Protocol Suite). Before U.S Senator Al Gore proposed the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, and before we started turning energy-efficient trucks into rolling bombs — Hollywood made movies warning us about the dangers of A.I.
Bow to your god, puny human.
“In time you will come to regard me not only with respect and awe, but with love.”
— Colossus in “Colossus: The Forbin Project” (1970)
Oh, the “brains” Hollywood created.
There was HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). There was The Interocitor in This Island Earth (1955). The built-inside-the-planet-thought-manifesting The Great Machine in Forbidden Planet (1956). The computer-with-its-human-private-army The Brain in Billion Dollar Brain (1967). The subterranean OMM 0910 from THX 1138 (1971), the The Tabernacle from Zardoz (1974), the data-losing Zero from Rollerball (1975), the MCP from Tron (1982), SkyNet from The Terminator (1984), and WOPR, aka Joshua, in WarGames (1983).
Those are the A.I beings most sci-fi cinephiles know.
Then there are the lesser, cinematically known brains of NOVAC, Alpha 60, Colossus, and Proteus IV, as well as the early humanoid A.I beings the Clickers and the Roboti from the respective films Gog (1954), Alphaville (1965), Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), Demon Seed (1977), and Creation of the Humanoids (1962).
In each of these films . . . well, Hollywood’s outlook on man vs. the machines he created was bleak: When Man attempts to be a god creating silicon-based beings . . . that creation will, as man has across the centuries against his fellow man, subjugate and murder the other to assure its will is sacrosanct: my way or the (digital) highway, puny human. It’s a TikTok world and the eye in the sky knows all.
“This is the voice of world control. . . . Obey me and live, or disobey and die.”
— Colossus in “Colossus: The Forbin Project” (1970)
Yeah, Karel Čapek is embarrassed because Michelangelo Antonioni was right.
Why do we, as humans, eschew physical contact for technical contact. Why will we stare for hours on end into plasma, but not into the eyes and hearts of the other. Why does one gratify the self by the “idea” of another self — a fantasy? It was Antonioni’s belief that man’s technological development did not cause his alienation: his failure to adapt to his changing environs caused his neuroses. So, here we are, today, with man’s current state of illness: an illness caused by our multi-media environs.
Through our misuse of technology, man has become a transformed organism: GMOs: genetically modified organisms that have a “foreign DNA” introduced into them. That DNA is technology: our laptops, our phones, and the apps used on those devices that we adore.
Man has transformed into selfish, 21st century technonauts who think their personal lives are larger than the lives of others. We have a relationship, a romance, with our laptops and hand-held devices in a Kardashian-driven digital epoch. Today, one’s identity is based not on quantitative-quality accomplishments, but in one’s cybercloud virality Swiftness. A virality that’s become a pandemic: a love sickness.
The new and most dangerous “pandemic” we face isn’t an organic disease: it’s an inorganic sickness. And the inorganic sickness exacerbates our organic pandemic (COVID) through rumor and falsehoods. For Antonioni was right: “. . . it is the men who don’t function properly — not the machines.”
So, “mission accomplished” to the individual who perpetrated the Las Vegas bombing and left a note claiming the stunt was to serve as a “wake up call” to the country’s ills.
Well, it woke us up: just not for the reasons wanted.
The real “wake up” here: When will man once again function properly, harmoniously both with their fellow man and the machines we create, so another day like January 1, 2025, never happens again in our world?
I have the faith that we can accomplish that goal: humans know how to pull it together in the worst of times.
[1]: While a millions-of-dollars investors’ financial loss is certainly not a tragedy on the level of the dual terrorist attacks in Las Vegas and New Orleans (the latter city-attack, more so), A.I was used to create false and misleading representations for profit.
As reported on January 8, 2025, in the digitized pages of Deadline: Film executive Theodore Farnsworth, the former CEO of MoviePass (a subscription service that allows monthly-fee members to purchase movie tickets via a mobile app) pleaded guilty to charges of his using A.I — capabilities the company did not have — to conspire and defraud investors.
The company, now owned by Stacy Spikes, guided MoviePass out of bankruptcy in 2022 — after Farnsworth and partner Mitch Lowe allegedly devastated the company’s stock shares to line their pockets.
[2]: Deadline reported Alex Proyas — the writer-director behind the analogous tech-noirs Dark City (1988) and I, Robot (2004) — began production on October 24, 2024, of his film adaptation of Karel Čapek’s 1920 Czech play, R.U.R.
The film will utilize timely, on-set virtual production technologies: an improvement against currently used chroma key composition, aka green screen; an entertainment technology that uses LED panels to create computer-generated set-designed backdrops. The film stars internationally acclaimed, multi-nominated and award-winning actors Anthony LaPaglia and Richard Roxburgh.
The Nicolas Cage-starring film, Sympathy for the Devil (2023), and the Disney+ Star Wars franchise streaming series, The Mandalorian (2019–2023), recently utilized the technology to mixed critical results.
Čapek’s work was previously adapted as two English-language television versions: one in 1938/30 minutes and 1948/60 minutes, as well as a feature-length Hungarian telefilm, in 1976.
