Ghost in the Sell: Hollywood’s Mischievous Vision of AI – Scientific American

Watch enough science fiction movies and youll probably come to the conclusion that humans are living on borrowed time. Whether its HAL 9000s murderous meltdown in 2001: A Space Odyssey or Skynets sadistic self-preservation tactics in the Terminator franchise, artificial intelligence usually comes off as a well-intentioned attempt to serve humanity thatthrough some overlooked technical flawends up trying to extinguish it.

The latest dystopian prophecy arrives Friday with the release of Ghost in the Shell, one of a few major releases this year to feature AI prominently in its plot. The filmbased on the 1995 anime movie and Kodansha Comics manga series of the same nametells the story of a special ops humancyborg hybrid known as the Major (Scarlett Johansson). She leads an elite crime-fighting task force whose main mission is to protect a company that makes AI robots. Ghost depicts a technologically advanced society in which a persons brainincluding the Majorsis susceptible to hacking, and ones consciousness can be copied into a new body. Over time the Major begins to question whether her memories are real or were implanted by someone else.

Hollywoods vision of AI is often entertaining, generally pessimistic and rarely realistic. With that in mind, Scientific American asked several prominent real-world AI researchers which movies, if any, have come closest to hitting the mark over the years.

[An edited transcript of the interviews follows.]

Selmer Bringsjord, director of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institutes Rensselaer AI and Reasoning Laboratory

Year after year I keep holding out hope that someone will make a film to compete with the predictive power ofBlade Runner, but it never happens. The point of my [1992 book] What Robots Can and Can't Be can be distilled to this stark but, by my lights, accurate claim: We are sliding inexorably toward a time when AI will supplydespite demanding tests of unmasking [like the movies VoightKampff test]creatures behaviorally indistinguishable from human persons, such as Blade Runner's replicants. People used to object to this claim by saying: No, Selmer, there isn't any point in making embodied AIs look like us, so you're wrong there. Well, not a lot of people express that objection any longer, and just as the long-term job prospects of driving for a living are dismal, the same prospectsas the Westworld television program showsare in place for the oldest profession, in which what one looks like can be regarded important by clients. This theme is more than touched upon in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which I also regard to have an almost uncanny level of predictive power. It fails as high art despite the pretensions (and reputations) of some who brought it to life, but even a cursory scan today of the world of lifelike toys, and its history, shows plainly what track we're on.

Brian David Johnson, a professor at Arizona State Universitys School for the Future of Innovation in Society

The narrative is typically that once you create something thats sentient, it rises up and kills you. I look at what movies are giving us a different narrative. One recent example is Robot and Frankthis guy gets a health care robot, and he and his robot go and rob places. Another is Herit wasnt about a robot, its about an AI thats awarebut didnt rise up and kill us. Instead it breaks up with us and moves on. Its about a person whos healed by his relationship with AI. The last Ill mention is Interstellar, in which robots with humor/honesty settings give the robot a personality. In that movie the characters are having social relationships with robots, even though they know they are robots. It shows you can have a working relationship with artificial intelligence and still be aware that its AI. Those types of movies matter because they set our mental model for how we see our future.

Daniela Rus, director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a visionary story about reprogramming the human brain, and how such a development could impact how we understand ourselves and interact with the world. The movie raises the question of what it would mean to reprogram our brains as if they were machines. Computer memory can be added, manipulated or wiped clean. Could similar things be done one day with human memory? Imagine if veterans could overcome their PTSD by forgetting battles or if abuse victims could unexperience traumas. Like any new technology, of course, it would be up to us to decide how to use it responsibly to help rather than harm. The film inspired me to think more about the nature of memory, and how unlocking its mysteries could help us better understand our own behaviors and motivations.

Yann LeCun, director of Facebook AI Research and founding director of the New York University Center for Data Science

I think one that reflects what might well happen, although not exactly, is Her. Theres no major blatant mistakes that I saw in that movie. Of course, were extremely far from having technology thats shown in the movie. We dont have truly intelligent machines, and I dont know how long it will take for us to get anywhere near that. But the idea that you would have a personal virtual assistant that you interact with, and with whom you have a relationship like a digital friendthat is something that is actually fairly realistic. Then theres a list of movies that depict all kinds of crazy stuff that theres no way in hell will happen. Thats pretty much every movie that portrays AIThe Terminator, The Matrix, all the popular ones. Ex Machinathats a beautiful film, but the AI depiction is completely wrong.

Manuela Veloso, head of Carnegie Mellon Universitys Machine Learning Department

I like Bicentennial Man and the television program Humans, without the complicated bad robots/synthetics. Robots coexist with people and are helpful. And I like Robot and Frank, except for the fact that the robot learns to rob.

Timothy Persons, chief scientist at the U.S. Government Accountability Office

I thought Steven Spielbergs A.I. Artificial Intelligence in 2001 was powerfulnot in the sense that it portrayed a dystopic, post-apocalyptic world. The context was dystopic, but it wasnt like the machines were all out to kill us or anything like that. Particularly compelling was the idea of having the machine be able to understand what youre feeling, and you being able to have love and affection for your machine. The powerful thing that Spielberg captured was the human compassion dimension to that, even when its a machine.

Yoshua Bengio, head of the University of Montreals Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA)

2001, A Space Odyssey. Most of the recent science fiction movies about AI are not very good. Less bad than others: Her.

Andrew Moore, dean of the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science and former director of Google Pittsburgh

I like Robot and Frank, which, like all great AI movies, is really about humans. It gently portrays a world that has intelligent devices in it and looks at the mismatch between what a naive engineer would consider a useful device versus what a real user values.

Stuart Russell, director of the University of California, Berkeleys Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence

My favorite movie AI is TARS, the robot in Interstellar. TARS does exactly what humans need it to do, including sacrificing itself to save the humans. Theres no danger of confusing it with a human, and little temptation to think of it as consciouseven though the humans have a hard time letting it commit suicide. My favorite AI movie is Ex Machina. It is very effective in portraying some of the unanswered questions about consciousness in machines and our own reactions to machines, including the way those reactions are conditioned on our built-in response to the human forma really good reason not to build humanoid robots! The movie also conveys the difficulty of controlling a machine that can easily outwit you if its designed with objectives that are eventually in conflict with yours. And it does all this with a seamless, low-key narrative that operates at several levels.

Tuomas Sandholm, creator of Carnegie Mellons Libratus, the AI that recently outplayed four top poker pros

I liked Her for many reasons. It was refreshing to see an AI movie that was not about violent robots and raised many interesting AI issues in the broader public spheresuch as scalability (dating at massive scale), the realistic and sad aspect of human loneliness being filled by machines (already happening in China via chatbots) and the issues that arise as AI surpasses human intelligence. I also liked Blade Runner, a fun action movie that addressed the question of what it means to be human versus machine, and how one could tell, even about oneself.

Oren Etzioni, chief executive officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence

That is the hardest question youve asked me today because, for example, Ex Machina is fun in terms of discussing issues around the Turing test [in which a machine tries to convince an interrogator that it is human]. There are a lot of movies that Ive enjoyed, but if you ask me what movie has done a good job depicting AI, Im still waiting for that to come outif only because its easy to cast AI as the villain. Ask me the three movies in the past 20 years where AI was the good guy, and I can think of WALL-Eabout a robot thats trying to create peaceand then I draw a blank. If theres any Hollywood producers out there reading this, call me and well put together a script where AI does good things. There are very real possibilities, whether its avoiding traffic accidents or preventing medical errors. I think thered be a good script out there. At least it would be refreshing.

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Ghost in the Sell: Hollywood's Mischievous Vision of AI - Scientific American