Understanding AI’s ‘Ghost In The Machine” Is Vital Amid Vast Spending

(Image courtesy of Sundance Film Festival)

While most of the world’s biggest companies burn through hundreds of billions of dollars in the race to achieve general artificial intelligence, a documentary called Ghost in the Machine debuted this week at the Sundance Film Festival, questioning both AI’s dubious roots in eugenics and race “science,” its worker exploitation in slums worldwide, and the possibility that all this spending is kinda just hooey.

“It’s machine learning. The only difference now is they have massive amounts of compute,” director Valerie Veatch told me in a recent interview. “This film is pushing back on this narrative on super intelligence: that it’s going to be this AI Doomer, god-like entity, or it’s going to be this terrible thing that’s going to ruin humanity. ”

Indeed, getting more and more compute to feed the AI models is the big push these days by trillion-dollar companies, which collectively plan to spend an estimated $1.4 trillion to build dozens of U.S. data centers, despite concerns about the limits of available water and power to run all those centers, and whether the result will actually achieve what AI’s lead hypsters say will result.

Ghost, which runs nearly two hours, is organized around loosely connected “chapters” examining the deep roots, current problems, and uncertain future of AI.

The film’s first half or so traces how we got from Francis Galton’s attempts to use his cousin Charles Darwin’s new theories of evolution to justify British imperialism by measuring skulls to the U.S. eugenics movement copied so diligently by Nazi Germany to the birth of statistics, whose founding scientist Karl Pearson was both a Galton protege and a notably vile racist.

The lineage continues through efforts to measure intelligence, such as the Binet-Simon test that generated an IQ score, through to Alan Turing’s creation of early computer systems to create beyond-human intelligence. The computer industry was…

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