“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”[i]

Charles Dickens didn’t have artificial intelligence in mind when he wrote those words, but he might have.

More than a decade ago, I watched a movie about AI that was both thought-provoking and scary. It was Ex Machina.[ii] In it, a young programmer is tasked with evaluating the human qualities of an AI humanoid. But the robot goes rogue and uses the programmer to her advantage. Here is a scene from the film:

I used to consider the film science fiction. Not anymore. Granted, no one has created a humanoid as lifelike as the one depicted in the film yet, but how often have we heard in the news lately about an AI platform going rogue?

I admit I don’t understand much about AI. I know that when I search the internet, I can choose to have AI answer my questions. I use an AI program when I write to catch spelling and grammar mistakes. I recently talked to an AI agent when I ordered at the local Taco Bell. But I’m not exactly sure how AI works. It’s kind of like the “olden days” when fax machines came out. I never fully understood how a document could travel over a telephone line, but that didn’t stop me from using it.

Recently, AI has been in the news for both good and ill. I don’t fully understand what it means when an AI platform goes rogue. And what’s this race with China to build the first AI system? Isn’t AI already here?

Whenever I want to learn something, I turn to movies. To understand AI, I watched two documentaries, and what I learned was unsettling.

The first documentary I watched was The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist.[iii] Here is the trailer for the film:

An AI agent, like ChatGPT, is not programmed by a human. Instead, it is grown. It is fed raw data, and the machine learns by identifying patterns. It then uses those patterns to predict what comes next. If it guesses correctly, it receives positive reinforcement; if it guesses wrong, it receives negative reinforcement. That’s how it learns. The raw materials include just about anything you can find on the internet: books, operating manuals, articles, and essays.

Artificial intelligence (AI) differs from artificial general intelligence (AGI). An AI agent is designed to perform a specific task, such as the order-taker at Taco Bell. An AGI system is intended to think and learn like a human through observation and experience. The AI race with China is over AGI.

The Thinking Game[iv] is a documentary about the development of AGI focusing on Demis Hassabis, a co-founder of DeepMind, now part of Google. Here is the trailer for the film:

DeepMind began its quest for the ultimate AGI system by using games. It had the system watch thousands of games of the classic Atari game Pong. It didn’t program the machine to play; it just watched others play. Through observation, it learned to play the game and soon could beat any human at it. No one told the machine the rules of the game, how to score, nothing. It was only told to maximize the score. The company then moved on to other games like Breakout. It learned to play that game and even figured out the best strategy to win. Soon, it could beat any human competitor. Then it learned Go, considered one of the most complex strategic games in the world. There are more possible board configurations than atoms in the universe. Soon, the machine beat world champions.

I remember when IBM programmed a computer to play chess, and it did so well that it beat Garry Kasparov, the best chess player in the world. But Big Blue could only play chess. DeepMind’s machine learned many games simply by watching hundreds of thousands of games played by others, then playing them itself. In other words, it did so through AGI.

Here is what Demis Hassabis said about developing AGI:

“Trying to build AGI is the most exciting journey, in my opinion, that humans have ever embarked on. … My whole life’s goal is to solve artificial general intelligence. And on the way, use AGI to solve all the world’s most complex scientific problems. I think that’s bigger than the internet. I think that’s bigger than mobile. I think it’s more like the advent of electricity or fire.”

AGI developers believe that AGI could solve problems that have plagued humankind for centuries, such as food insecurity, diseases including cancer, global warming, and the search for alternative energy sources. But if AGI can learn to do good things from the raw data it consumes, it can also learn evil. Steven Hawking put it this way: “One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-manipulating human leaders, and potentially subduing us with weapons we cannot understand. So we should aim to get things right the first time, because it may be the only chance we will get.”

Tristan Harris, cofounder of the Center for Humane Technology, adds: “I think the way a lot of people hear about AI, it’s like, there’s a good AI and there’s a bad AI. And they say, ‘Well, why can’t we just not do the bad AI?’ And the problem is that they’re too inextricably linked. The problem is that we can’t separate the promise of AI from the peril of AI.”

As parents, we try to teach our children to be good; we teach them ethics and morality. Can we do the same with AGI? The “parents” of AGI have raised the alarm arguing that we need to place guardrails around these systems to prevent the peril that could come with AGI. In the recent narrative film, Mercy,[v] society has created a mercy capital court that tries criminal cases. I was impressed by how quickly and accurately the AGI court could find and analyze the facts surrounding a crime. Here is the trailer for the film:

But facts have context and nuance to be fully understood. And that is why this scene from the movie hit me hard:

What can you and I do about AGI? Actually, a lot. We get to decide how this goes. I close this post by adopting the words of the closing scene of The AI Doc: Or How I became an Apocaloptimist: “Whoever you are, you are an expert in your own industry, in your own school, in your own family, and it’s up to you how AI is used in your life. We have to come together and find the path between the promise and the peril. We can’t be pessimists or optimists. We have to become something new. AI might have more raw intelligence than our little human brains, but we’re so much more than just our intelligence. This is a problem that’s bigger than any one person. This will change the world in ways that we don’t understand. That is all true. But what we do have is agency over what we do about it. And the reality is that if we just decide it’s hopeless, then it is hopeless. But if you decide that you want to try, then you try. And that’s hard. But you know what? Big things seem impossible before they actually happen. But when they finally do happen, it’s because millions of people took millions of actions to make them happen. And so, we have to try. There’s too much at stake.”

Let’s keep AI as a tool but not let it rule.

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[i] The opening lines from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

[ii] Ex Machina:

• Production Companies: A24, Universal Pictures, and Film4
• Director: Alex Garland
• Writer: Alex Garland
• Starring: Alicia Vikander, Domhnall Gleeson, and Oscar Issac
• Release date: April 24, 2015
• Currently streaming on Hulu

[iii] The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist:

• Production Companies: Cottage M, Fishbowl Films, and Playgrounds
• Directors: Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell
• Writers: Caroline Lindy and Daniel Roher
• Starring: Daniel Roher, Sam Altman, and Daniela Amodei
• Release date: March 27, 2026
• Currently Streaming on Netflix

[iv] The Thinking Game:

• Production Companies: Across the Pond Productions and Reel as Dirt
• Director: Greg Kohs
• Writer: Greg Kohs
• Starring: Demis Hassabis, Eleanor Maguire, and Shane Legg
• Release date: February 14, 2025
• Currently streaming on Prime Video

[v] Mercy:

• Production Companies: Amazon MGM Studios, Atlas Entertainment, and Bazelevs Entertainment
• Director: Timur Bekmambetov
• Writer: Marco van Belle
• Starring: Chris Pratt, Rebecca Ferguson, and Kali Reis
• Release date: January 23, 2026
• Currently streaming on Prime Video