“Ghost in the Machine” considers AI doomsday hype as furthering an oligarchic cabal rooted in eugenics and White supremacy

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” said former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon online last month. “This is not a marketing stunt.”

But whatever the truth about potential dangers, a documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and just made a timely debut on PBS and online posits that marketing stunts are at the very heart of “artificial intelligence,” from the term itself to its place in our daily lives. And while you probably already guessed that greed has been a factor in the hype, what about the connection to White supremacy and eugenics?

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Marketing was the motivator in the mid 1950s when computer scientist John McCarthy came up with the conception. “I invented the term ‘artificial intelligence’ […] because we had to do something when we were trying to get money for a summer study.” 

After dispensing with the common misperception that “AI” refers to any one thing (a series of talking heads tells us it’s “a collection of loosely related technologies that are being applied across many different sectors, and those all look pretty different from each other,” “everything from LLMs to predictive models to models that are used for large-scale statistics to the kinds of image-quality-enhancing algorithms that NASA, for example, uses to improve images from the Hubble”), Ghost in the Machine gets at the roots of the AI industry by going back to first principles. What, after all, is intelligence? Who defines it? Who has defined it, and how have their definitions influenced thinking, behavior, social policy, and the development and application of various technologies?

None of this is as straightforward as it seems — nor as disinterested as we might hope. “The idea that intelligence is something that could be measured and quantified is a relatively recent invention,” science writer Angela Saini tells us, that “emerged out of late 19th / early 20th-century eugenics movements.”

In case you didn’t know, eugenics is the interest in breeding ever-“better” humans. What is “better”? Well, as soon as you know that eugenics was an idea created by rich White guys in the 19th century, you know where this is going. “There is nothing either in the history of domestic animals or in that of evolution to make us doubt that a race of sane men may be formed, who shall be as much superior mentally and morally to the modern European, as the modern European is to the lowest of the Negro races,” wrote Francis Galton nine years after coining the term.

What’s that got to do with today’s AI hype? Over the course of 97 minutes, director Valerie Veatch draws an indirect but clearly discernible line between early eugenicists and Silicon Valley’s founders. (“Godfather of Silicon Valley” William Shockley, for example, openly touted a “voluntary sterilization bonus plan” that would offer participants cash as a measure towards eliminating “’dysgenics,’ [the] down-breeding retrogressive evolution.”) and posits the pervasive worship of male power within Silicon Valley (“this idea that there is kind of a special genius class of men who are going to be able to lead us, as Americans or just humanity, into the future and into a better world” and whom we therefore should reward with “all of the wealth that they generate, all of the power that they want”), along with a “romance between libertarianism and high-tech” that evokes the sort of anti-establishmentarianism that birthed early 20th-century European fascism. “And that is so much the mindset of this culture,” says journalist Paulina Borsook: “if you don’t get with our program, then you’re going to be left behind. The thing is, high-tech celebrates being this way, and it exacerbates being this way, and it’s sort of being held up as the best we can do and how we all ought to be.”

From there it’s a relatively short series of steps to get to the current, AI-crazed zeitgeist. First came the Dot-Com Era, which saw the Nasdaq spike almost 600% between 1995 and 2000. After the bubble burst, Silicon Valley found a new way to hyperinflate their fortunes: social media, where a White, male cabal — including Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk (before he was openly giving Nazi salutes) —reaped dizzying fortunes and tremendous power.

But for people like this, it’s always about getting more. “Now, they were casting about for a bubble after Web3 fell flat and the Metaverse never took off,” says journalist David Gerard. “[… T]here’s too much venture capital; there’s too much money flying around desperate for a home because we don’t tax these people until the pips rattle. They have too much money, and they use it to cause damage. And these guys are literally only interested in lottery-level returns. They desperately want returns without actually funding an economy that’s healthy. This means there’s no sane things to invest in that give returns, so they have to invest in insane things. They look for these industries that can bubble. They aren’t interested in anything normal: they want bubbles, they want irrationality, they want exuberance. They want naive suckers piling their retail dollars in so they can skin them.”

They gave cryptocurrency a try-out as the Next Big Thing, but it hasn’t quite made it on that score. So what next? Enter the AI hype machine. “With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon,” said Musk way back in 2014. “If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. […] I like to just keep an eye on what’s going on with artificial intelligence. I think there is potentially a dangerous outcome there. There have been movies about this, you know, like Terminator. There are some scary outcomes. And we should try to make sure the outcomes are good, not bad.”

Read between the lines, and the strategy is clear: we better throw tons of cash at the industry leaders to that they can develop it for good — or otherwise it will be the death of us — we should all get with the program and incorporate AI into every part of our lives In the meantime, Ghost in the Machine touches on how people of color, both here and abroad, are shouldering much of the burden for the industry’s explosive development; the Trump administration’s cozying up to the AI cabal in the effort to ensure (as he puts it) “AI models [that] don’t embrace wokeism and critical race theory and all of these terrible theories that have done so much damage to our country”; and the increasing enmeshment of the AI industry with the military.

Ghost in the Machine is one of those documentaries that bombards you with information, throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. But plenty does. Stylistically, there’s both aptness and drollness to the manner in which Veatch has crafted the film, most of which bears a prominent “NOT AI” stamp in the frame’s upper-right corner. “It became amusing to me to plaster the ‘NOT AI’ label on footage that truly at times seems untethered to reality and in these absurd moments our eye searches for the ‘NOT AI’ label and we are grounded in truth being stranger than fiction,” she says. “In today’s media landscape, it is increasingly difficult to parse what is and isn’t generated algorithmically.”

It’s also increasingly difficult to separate the hype from the facts. But as overwhelming as both film and subject are, viewing Ghost in the Machine will leave you better equipped to orient yourself to the dizzying developments of the future we’re going to inhabit. And if knowledge is power, you’ll armed not to mindlessly take part in the creation of a future with roots in some very ugly parts of our past, and in which you are increasingly ceding your agency to those with at least spiritual ties to that ugliness.

View Ghost in the Machine on YouTube or PBS.