Only sticks and stones can break bones

Films about AI and technology are losing the plot when it comes to one vital factor: energy

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It's no surprise to me that the film business is so poor at dealing with IT-related material in an adult fashion. The industry's whole purpose is to entertain, and neither solid-state physics nor computational complexity theory is intrinsically entertaining (to put it mildly).

Entertainment nowadays mostly means blowing things up. The tech for doing that is no different in principle from the spear or the bow and arrow, just with more oomph, more fins and more shiny bits: the Marvel Universe shares aesthetic principles with the funfair rather than the library.

Movie people also tend to be from the artistic rather than the scientific world. They have neither the wish nor the need to understand the physical principles behind tech artefacts: they want to know what things do rather than how they do it, since that's what drives the plot.

There have been a handful of exceptions, and I'm not talking about biopics such as The Imitation Game and A Beautiful Mind. I liked Alex Garland's Ex Machina a lot, and Spike Jonze's Her quite a lot less, because these films at least tried to tackle the psychology of humans interfacing with intelligent machines. That's a subject particularly on my mind right now as moral panic about ChatGPT builds up a head of steam in the media.