Last weekend, my wife and I went to see the newest Mission: Impossible movie. It was dreadful. I fell asleep. But I also spotted something important buried in the summer blockbuster detritus.<\/p>\n
First, I should admit I\u2019m late to this party; Mission: Impossible \u2014 The Final Reckoning came out in May. But this isn\u2019t a movie review. What I want to point out is that this is the latest in a trend of movies that are warning us about the real-world dangers of the technologies we\u2019ve created.<\/p>\n
As for the film itself, I think NPR pop culture critic John Powers was right: \u201cPredictably, this new movie is overblown, inanely plotted, clotted with expository dialogue and boundlessly self-congratulatory. But, you know, it\u2019s also fun to watch.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the movie attempted one important mission which, if successful, might save us all. It is probably the biggest film budget ever committed to illustrating the corrosive effects of social media and AI.<\/p>\n
Opinion<\/p>\n
The plot was about an all-powerful AI called The Entity<\/a> bent on tearing humanity apart by stoking division and war, lying to people and nations to get them to turn on each other. We get the obvious metaphor because we already have the Entity here in the real world, we just call it Big Tech algorithms<\/a>.<\/p>\n This was not the first screenplay to address this topic \u2014 not by a long shot. Stories like Black Mirror, The Circle, Spree, Nerve and even the Will Ferrell\/Ryan Reynolds holiday musical Spirited have all warned us.<\/p>\n So has the news. On the week I saw Mission: Impossible, Elon Musk\u2019s artificial intelligence company, xAI, apologized for its Grok chatbot labeling itself the \u201cMechaHitler\u201d<\/a> and praising the idea of a new holocaust in defense of white people. And Politico reported<\/a> on discussions among leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints about how to rein in the Entity-esque social media habits of Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who sometimes angry-tweets as often as every 15 minutes, leaving one to wonder when he has time for other things like, you know, his job. If algorithms and AI can pry apart the LDS Church and a Republican senator, there\u2019s no limit to how utterly they can shred e pluribus unum.<\/p>\n The apocalyptic movies of the 1980s had villains unleashing robots to destroy us. This generation\u2019s high-tech villains are smarter; they know we\u2019ll destroy ourselves if given the right incentives. <\/p>\n But here\u2019s where Hollywood may give us hope. (Don\u2019t choke on that sentence, culture warriors.) Like it or not, Hollywood often sets the tone for our nation\u2019s values. Like every culture in history, our shared morality is shaped by the stories we tell each other.<\/p>\n Millions of people have seen Cruise harness The Entity. As of Saturday night while I was dozing on the back row, the film had grossed $193 million, according to Box Office Mojo. And millions of those watchers will absorb the warnings about digital toxicity into our cultural canon.<\/p>\n With Hollywood making morality tales about our screen-powered disunity, the market for Mike Lee-style hatemongering may start to shrink. At least, that\u2019s something to hope for.<\/p>\n If that happens, it will likely have two effects.<\/p>\n First, it will again reorganize the information ecosystem, pulling more people out of social media echo chambers and pushing them toward new platforms to stay informed. Ideally, those platforms will be news outlets with trained journalists and high standards, but, at this point, that mission seems impossible.<\/p>\n Second, it will make social media an even more toxic and false place than it already is as only the most committed extremists stay in the cesspool, sharing ever more outrageous lies that AI then amplifies.<\/p>\n The device which may turn out to be the unintentional genius of the Final Reckoning is that it casts the villain not as a media mogul or an app developer or a social media influencer, but as a disembodied robot \u2014 someone we\u2019re all allowed to hate without falling for its tricks and hating each other.<\/p>\n