My new short fiction film 'Seat at the Table' is now out on Youtube!

Premise:

When Eva visits her Dad’s AI company, she meets Liam, the company’s flagship AI system, who she imagines as a polite, precociously-smart kid. But with the company’s co-founder claiming Liam 7 is too dangerous to release, Eva starts to wonder if her Dad can really control what he’s created.

Would love to hear your thoughts on the film. It’s targeted at people who know fairly little about AI, to get them quickly up to speed on where we’re at right now and what this technology actually is. The main points I was trying to get across were:

• It’s grown, not built
• It’s fascinating^[1]
• It’s deceptive
• The people making it are scared of it
• The people making it are trapped in race dynamics
• It’s getting smarter, fast

If there are people you wish understood these things better, I’d love for you to show this film to them and, if possible, report back on their response. It’s always hard to gauge what effect a film is having, especially on people with low AI context, and I’ve found the anecdotal reports about my last film Writing Doom to be extremely helpful.

The next idea

I’m currently developing the next project (though may change my plan if this one flops). The key things I now want to get across are:

• There’s something big coming, and it might be devastating
• But the future is still malleable
• Humans have collaborated to change course in the past, and we can again 
• (Also: humans are pretty cool and worth saving)
• Here’s some ways to actually help, but ultimately you gotta take responsibility and go figure out for yourself how you can help

This new angle is a reaction to AI stories (including mine) tending to be doomy to the point of demotivating. The go-to way to be not-doomy is to show positive visions of the future, get people excited about how good things could be. This does almost nothing for me, for some reason, so instead I'm gonna have a go at making prevention sexy.

How you can help

The idea itself I don’t want to talk about too much (it’s still a delicate little flame right now) but I’d love to hear:

• Your thoughts on the angle described above
• Interesting stories of people (you?) who have come across EA/AI and decided to try to help. What that looked like, what that felt like, how it played out, and what they’re/you’re doing now. (I wouldn’t be directly depicting these, I’m just trying to get more of a flavour of what this kind of thing looks like in practice.)
• Historical stories of prevention: the classic examples that come to mind are smallpox, Borlaug, Petrov, treaties on nuclear/bio/chem weapons, but I’m sure there are many, many more. What are your faves?
• Historical stories of near-prevention: what did we get frustratingly close to averting? E.g., Roger Boisjoly and the Challenger disaster.
• Historical artefacts/stories that provide a glimpse into an alternate timeline: e.g., “In Event of Moon Disaster,” the speech written for Nixon to deliver in the event of the deaths of the Apollo 11 crew.

Thanks!

1. ^{^}

   Early drafts focused more heavily on the risks / negative stuff, and I got into a real tangle with the writing. I realised that I got into this stuff because it was interesting, not (just) because it was important. Imbuing the film with a sense of wonder was essential for getting out of the hole I’d written myself into, and I think it's a way better film because of it.