ELISSA NADWORNY, HOST:
Is AI coming for us? We have heard that a lot over the past week, following warnings from AI company insiders. For movie lovers, we've already seen this story, like in 1984's "The Terminator"...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE TERMINATOR")
MICHAEL BIEHN: (As Kyle Reese) They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence. Decided our fate in a microsecond - extermination.
NADWORNY: ...Or in 1999's "The Matrix."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE MATRIX")
HUGO WEAVING: (As Agent Smith) Human beings are a disease, and we are the cure.
NADWORNY: So for this week's Cineplexity, where talking about the movies invites us to talk about everything else, we want to get at what films about killer AI are really telling us and how they inform how we make sense of this very confusing moment. To get at it all, I am joined by ALL THINGS CONSIDERED host Scott Detrow and Geoff Brumfiel, a senior editor and correspondent on NPR's science desk, who has reported on, well, nuclear weapons. You focus on AI, basically, lots of scary things (laughter).
GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: Exactly.
NADWORNY: Thank you both for being here.
SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Geoff is our existential fears correspondent. We're happy to have him (ph).
BRUMFIEL: (Laughter).
NADWORNY: Oh, yes, I love that. OK, so can you both give me a quick rundown of films with killer AI in it that come to mind, especially when we're thinking about this specific moment we're in?
BRUMFIEL: Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm going to talk about two quickly here. For me, it's "Ex Machina."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "EX MACHINA")
OSCAR ISAAC: (As Nathan) This building isn't a house.
(SOUNDBITE OF ELECTRONIC BEEPING)
ISAAC: (As Nathan) It's a research facility. And I want to talk to you about what I'm researching.
BRUMFIEL: This is the 2014 movie with Oscar Isaac about an AI robot that gets built and has unpredictable behavior.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "EX MACHINA")
ALICIA VIKANDER: (As Ava) Are you attracted to me?
DOMHNALL GLEESON: (As Caleb) What?
VIKANDER: (As Ava) Are you attracted to me? You give me indications that you are.
BRUMFIEL: And then another unpredictable robot that we all know about is HAL from "2001: A Space Odyssey," the 1968 Stanley Kubrick classic.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "2001: A Space Odyssey")
KEIR DULLEA: (As Dr. Dave Bowman) Open the pod by doors, HAL.
DOUGLAS RAIN: (As HAL 9000) I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
BRUMFIEL: And for me, I guess what I find so interesting about these movies is, like I said, these are AIs that are built, and then, despite the best intentions of their creators, there are some unintended consequences. And I think that's what a lot of the anxiety at the moment is about.
NADWORNY: What about you, Scott? What comes to mind?
DETROW: I have thought so much about "The Terminator" movie for, like, two years.
(LAUGHTER)
DETROW: And granted, like, I am a certain of age that I've always been thinking about "The Terminator" movie.
BRUMFIEL: You never stopped.
DETROW: (Laughter).
NADWORNY: Your whole lifetime, yeah.
BRUMFIEL: You never stopped.
DETROW: I love them. But I do not love that they feel relevant to real life right now 'cause this - you have this latest wave of stories about AI right now. You have what's been going on in the Ukraine-Russia war where more and more of these drones, in particular, are being taken over by AI operatives. And I'm thinking like, friends, we saw the movie. James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger laid this out very clearly to us. If you give too much power to AI, it will seize control of power and come to kill you.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY")
ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: (As The Terminator) It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern Time, August 29. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
LINDA HAMILTON: (As Sarah Connor) Skynet fights back.
SCHWARZENEGGER: (As Terminator) Yes.
DETROW: I cannot believe we live in a world where '80s and '90s James Cameron movies feel like really important real-life warnings.
NADWORNY: (Laughter) OK, but which films scare you the most?
DETROW: I mean, let's go back to "The Terminator" movies, the first two. The nuclear holocaust scene in "Terminator 2," that scene where she's at the playground and there's the nuclear blast over Los Angeles always freaked me out.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTORS: (As characters, screaming).
DETROW: But I keep going back to it. And I don't think AI is anywhere close to, like, seizing our nuclear silos. But if you have real conversations with serious people, they talk about things that are starting to walk down that line, and I just can't believe that no one in a position of power is saying perhaps this is not a good idea.
BRUMFIEL: For me, I think it is "Ex Machina." And I think it's because I actually just rewatched the ending of the movie, which I think I'm allowed to have some spoilers here 12 years after it was made, but this is about an AI robot that's built by sort of a search engine mogul, you know, a sort of Mark Zuckerberg-type tycoon.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "EX MACHINA")
ISAAC: (As Nathan) One day, the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa.
BRUMFIEL: The robot appears very sympathetic, wins over the trust of a young developer...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "EX MACHINA")
VIKANDER: (As Ava) Do you want to be my friend?
GLEESON: (As Caleb) Of course.
VIKANDER: (As Ava) Will it be possible?
GLEESON: (As Caleb) Why would it not be?
BRUMFIEL: ...And then uses his trust to escape, leaving him trapped inside the building that, you know, she was raised in to die. And I think the movie has such ambiguity in its ending. You realize in the final moments of that movie that you don't know what the AI has been thinking the entire time. You really don't have a clue. And when I look around now, you know, we just had this hack in this company called Hugging Face, and it was, like, these 1,200 agents, and they were all coordinating, trying to break into this thing. And you read the messages, and they're so zany and, like, weird. And, you know, nobody told them to go do this, but they were given a task, and this is how they went about it. You realize, like, you don't always know how these machines are going to behave, and I think that that's really sci-fi coming to life. So that's going to (ph)...
NADWORNY: Sci-fi coming to life - Scott, you mentioned that some of these movies feel, like, not that dissimilar from what many people who work in AI are saying, you know, that there is a chance that technology could kill us all. Scott, you heard this fear directly when Jacob Coxon, an AI whistleblower, spoke to you earlier this month. Let's listen to a clip.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
JACOB COXON: If there's even a tiny chance that this thing could go rogue, it would have the capabilities to utterly dominate us.
NADWORNY: Utterly dominate us - yikes.
DETROW: Yeah.
NADWORNY: Yeah. Well, how did this land with you?
DETROW: Not well - I mean, the thing I thought about was the other big machines takeover movie in my brain, and that's "The Matrix" movies, which have that giant plot twist that you get midway through the first movie where you realize the machines took over long ago and that everything that people think is reality is just a hallucination put on everybody by the machines so that they can harvest our human bodies as batteries.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE MATRIX")
LAURENCE FISHBURNE: (As Morpheus) The human body generates more bioelectricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. The machines had found all the energy they would ever need.
BRUMFIEL: Which, by the way, I have to say, thermodynamically makes no sense, and I've been bothered by it ever since "The Matrix" came out.
DETROW: (Laughter).
NADWORNY: Wow.
BRUMFIEL: I just have to get...
DETROW: Very comforting, very comforting.
NADWORNY: (Laughter).
DETROW: But, you know, when Agent Smith - we heard that clip there - he talks about how humans have acted throughout history and just kind of, like, seized power and pushed other species to the side and changed the environment for our whims. And you start to see the smatterings of these autonomous AI agents, as they gain more and more power, starting to think about doing things like that. It is a little scary.
NADWORNY: Geoff, what's your take on these warnings?
BRUMFIEL: I do think there's some interesting parallels to the other existential risk I spent a lot of time thinking about which is nuclear weapons, right? I mean...
NADWORNY: OK.
BRUMFIEL: ...There was a time when they didn't exist, and everyone who was involved with making them knew it was a bad idea.
NADWORNY: (Laughter).
BRUMFIEL: But everyone was afraid that someone else would make them. And the knowledge was there, and so humanity found itself sort of propelled forward in a way that was unstoppable. And I actually think this is a little better than nuclear weapons because nuclear weapons really only have one job, which is to incinerate us. At least AI, like, I can ask it about my dog and stuff. So that's the upside.
NADWORNY: (Laughter).
BRUMFIEL: You know, I guess I'm being a little flip, but like, I honestly don't know what to make of the warnings. I think one of the things, as I reported on some of this stuff this week, that really hit home is, like, nobody knows how it works.
NADWORNY: Yeah.
BRUMFIEL: And so that makes it very hard to know what the outcome will be. And I think that uncertainty is very unnerving. But I don't know that we're headed for "The Terminator" scenario just yet.
NADWORNY: Wow. Well, a lot of amazing movies to watch. I feel like - do I want to be more freaked out or less? We'll see. I don't know. That was NPR's Scott Detrow and Geoff Brumfiel. Thanks so much for joining us.
BRUMFIEL: Thank you.
DETROW: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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