The Dreamers Who Built AI Grew Up on Hopeful Sci-Fi. Where Are the Films That Will Inspire the Next Generation?

Project Hail Mary is a profoundly pro-progress film . It treats a civilizational-level threat—the dimming of the sun—as a problem to be solved, not merely somehow survived. I would like to think its huge box office success suggests we’ll see a run of optimistic science-fiction films in coming years. I mean, it should, right? Supposedly, nothing succeeds like success. Yet I worry we’ll instead get a dispiriting wave of films fretting about the societal impact of artificial intelligence. If they’re mostly dystopian rather than outright apocalyptic, that might count as a kind of win. Finding a pro-AI, or even just a future-optimist film, this century isn’t easy. At best, it’s a short list , one maybe topped by Her from 2013, which presents a near future where AI helps people grieve, connect, and move forward. No murderbots to be found, anywhere. The thing is, we need optimistic sci-fi, maybe now more than ever in the emerging age of AI. It serves an important cultural role by showing us futures worth building—despite any disruptive downsides—rather than merely futures to avoid. The sci-fi of the past has played an important role in creating the world of today. As I note in my 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised , many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs tell how Star Trek , in particular, inspired them to dream big. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin (as well as a better-known retailer, logistics, and cloud company), discovered the franchise as a kid, even ending his high school valedictorian speech with a nod to it: “Space: the final frontier. Meet me there.” For Elon Musk, it was reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series as a teenager. The books depict the collapse of a vast galactic civilization, and Musk has said they taught him that civilizations can rise and fall. That cyclical literary lesson helped shape his oft-stated belief that humanity should become a multiplanetary species. In the case of Demis Hassabis, a founder of Google DeepMind, the key book was Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. The novel follows a gifted child trained to help save humanity from an existential threat. As recounted in The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby, the book reinforced his sense that with great intelligence comes a great responsibility to tackle humanity’s biggest problems—a mission he later pursued through AI research. But a case can be made that the 2016 film Arrival ranks right up there with any sci-fi film, TV show, or book for its real-world impact. There’s a marvelous moment in the development of the transformer—the architecture underlying modern AI—when Google researcher Illia Polosukhin went to see the Denis Villeneuve film and had a breakthrough: Polosukhin was mulling over how to implement the self-attention mechanism [a method for weighing the relevance of every word in a text against every other word] when he went to see Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 movie Arrival . In the film, squid-like alien “heptapods” attempt to communicate with humans by painting mysterious circular inkblots. A linguist, played by Amy Adams, eventually realizes that each inkblot represents a single, unified body of text. (She then begins to see into the future, but we’ll stick with inkblots for now.) Polosukhin recognized that “self-attention” could be deployed in a similarly maximal way, probabilistically linking each word in the tree not just to other words in the sentence but also to thousands of other words throughout an entire text. Even a word that had appeared many paragraphs earlier might provide a contextual clue to what the next word meant. I think that easily beats the aesthetic of flip phones being inspired by Star Trek communicators. The post The Dreamers Who Built AI Grew Up on Hopeful Sci-Fi. Where Are the Films That Will Inspire the Next Generation? appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .