Director Nick Holt (“Responsible Child”) gives us plenty to worry about in his ominous documentary “AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About.” But the scariest takeaway may not actually be the artificial intelligence, so much as the humans who’ve created and disseminated it.
Holt presents a murderer’s row of founding fathers: scientists, programmers, and entrepreneurs who have changed their minds about the possibilities, or dangers, of AI in dramatic ways over the years.
We begin with 78-year-old Geoffrey Hinton, a mild-mannered Nobel Prize winner who spends his days communing with nature. Which is charming, until he admits that as the architect of deep learning, “my main mission now is to warn people how dangerous” this “apex intelligence” could be. “Maybe the wisest decision in 1946,” he muses in his understated British accent, “would have been don’t develop H-bombs.”
On we go to Demis Hassabis, introduced in old footage as an adorable, chess-playing 9-year-old, and then a young entrepreneur visibly thrilled when he sees his program play, and win, a game of Pong. Today, he’s the CEO of Google DeepMind, who considers computers “almost a magical extension” of our brains.
Guess who’s next? Yep, our old pal Elon, who—whoops—started out calling AI “our biggest existential threat.” Not only that, says the future founder of xAI, “with artificial intelligence, we are literally summoning the demon.”
And then we see OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman telling a congressional panel that “My worst fears are that we cause significant harm to the world. If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.”
How wrong? Well, as Hinton puts it, after we watch a once-futuristic clip of “2001: A Space Odyssey”‘s HAL, “How many examples do you know of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things?”
You may or may not be aware that Sam Bankman-Fried, one of the earliest investors in Anthropic, which brought us Claude, is currently in jail. Or that Musk recently and very publicly sued Altman and OpenAI (and lost). But at this point, it may or may not actually matter.
Something that becomes unnervingly evident, as we watch all these men discuss the work they’ve unleashed upon the world, is that our future is in their hands. “I think I’m disconnected from the reality of life for most people,” says Altman, “and trying to really internalize what the impact on people AI is going to have, I probably feel that less than other people would.”
Holt, a quadruple BAFTA nominee, is not playing. He’s determined to get our attention through one single, tightly-focused strategy. He spends almost no time on the potential positives of AI, referring only glancingly, for example, to medical benefits. He also doesn’t focus much on the specifics of what’s coming next; the movie is not a catalogue of pros and cons so much as a vibrating entity of freeform anxiety. That’s not a knock on his efforts: his intention is to create a clear warning of present danger, and he has undeniably succeeded.
“Geoffrey, do you think we’re all fucked?” he asks Hinton towards the end, by which point any sane viewer will have mentally rewritten the subtitle of this film. “Well, it depends,” the soft-spoken Godfather of AI responds. “We might be. I really don’t know. When I’m feeling slightly depressed, I think people are toast.”
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