Although an artistic director discussed adding a “human element” during his interview in the making-of portion following the trailer for Morgan, we here at the DMS still give IBM’s Watson credit for creating the chilling companion piece to SunSpring. A truly terrifying artificial intelligence (“AI”) would probably never let on that it existed. IBM’s Watson has failed in that regard (much like Olympic Games), but if we are to believe the marketing campaign accompanying Morgan, Watson created the trailer below by analyzing the film. Aside from the visual allusions to Silence of the Lambs and musical accompaniment from the Twin Peaks Children’s Choir, the most unsettling part of this trailer is that a computer created something so manipulative.
Borderline autonomous cars are gradually seeming more like an inevitability and less like a machine that might end up making kill decisions. At the least, the US, UK, China, Israel, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, South Africa, Hamas, and Hezbollah all have armed drones that fly through the air at their disposal. It takes little imagination to read Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco and its featured planet, Quinta, with rogue autonomous defense systems as a forgone conclusion.