Disappointed but not surprised that it was the usual nyt type scare propaganda narrative, the kind with zero self awareness and built upon a mountain of unspoken presumptions. Blaming polarization on social media, assuming that everyone would be ok with the neoliberal globalist agenda otherwise, that the cracks in the narrative haven't led to what we see now. As if the massive infrastructure of media and institutional programming had no part in division or the reaction against it.

What little content actually dealing with AI are the usual vague platitudes and speculations backed by a collage of server farm and random clip visuals, "science is cool" music video noise with very little substance. If you read through the script there wouldn't be much there.

There's the usual snippet of the "algorithmic fairness" talking head in denial as their A.I.'s inconveniently notice that diversity IS inequality. The excuse of claiming that policing would only be self reinforcing just isn't true. Just because some vocal vegans are secret meat eaters doesn't mean it is just as common the other way around, you can only reinforce what is really there.

The lack of insight is summed up by the absurdity of the cathedral holding every lever of influential power in society from education to the algorithms that run social media and the internet turning around and claiming that some facebook ads that were so influential no one can even cite an example were the cause of mass social strife. So the usual talking points of bit players like cambridge analytica and palantir are brought up when it's clear all these people have swallowed whole the story of Emmanuel Trumpenstein. There is no insight when the blind spot of all those involved is so clear.

Not all the time, but sometimes we Norwegians can become over moralizing. For example in a TV debate recently about the now famous corona virus, a health administrative painted such a grim scenario, that the debate leader had to apologize for her afterwards because the TV channel got overthrown by thousands of phones calls complaining for the apocalyptic scenario that was presented. It is not easy to be puritan and it is even more difficult to be led by one. iHuman has many qualities indeed, but in the long run it just falls short because humans are driven not only by intelligence. Intelligence is just one of the many attributes that we have. Perhaps in the future some company will develop AP Artificial Psychology, or AC Artificial Consciousness, or AR Artificial Religion, etc. for whatever purpose they may have, if any. Undoubtedly for Tonje Hessen Schei, here is a lot of stuff for even more films! My point is that what this film fails to see is that at the end it is humans that have the absolute power. Both as creators of the so called "Artificial Intelligence" and of all the robots, drones, machines, weapons, software that is supposed to lead us into termination or subjugation (in this point the film is quite unclear). And also in the end is up to each person to create her or his own future according to his own personal intelligence, psychology, consciousness or religion, among other attributes of the human mind. The negative message of the film underestimates human beings. The film takes for granted that humans are completely able to be manipulated by anything that is presented in front of them. While in reality, when I am with Facebook or other media, I am completely aware that is full of not very reliable sources, which is completely normal, like when you are having a conversation with a friend, you cannot rely on everything he or she says because it is not an academic lecture, it is a very informal way of communicating, it is relaxing and supposed to be part of the entertainment that the media can offer. We can perhaps blame the faults of this film to "exacerbating academism", what I mean is that when you are talking to a friend, you don't have a dictionary or the Encyclopedia Britannica or yet easier Wikipedia beside you to check that everything your friend says is completely accurate! That could be awkward and worse, it could end the friendship! Speaking about manipulation, this film uses itself a quite manipulative, attractive and suggestively interface that if we are not attentive and awake will lead some people to believe that AI is dangerous!

All in all the movie was ok, but there were a few things that could have been avoided. On the good side, it was interesting to see some smart people like Michal Kosinski, Jurgen Shmidhuber or Ilya Sutskever talk about the future of AI. I also have to give credit to some of the scenes, structure and visual effects of the documentary. But that's as far as the positive feedback on my side goes. As of 2020, most of the things I heard, however, were a bit outdated. To make matters worse, I couldn't help but feel that the author resorted to fear to create yet another dystopian vision of the future. The viewer is most of the time threatened with ominous music and spooky animations that are meant to evoke fear. It's too bad because it could have been a decent documentary.